Disclosure: At least one member of the Reflexivity Research team currently holds a position in Celestia's token (TIA) at the time of writing/publishing. See the bottom of this write-up for more disclosures.
What is Celestia?
Celestia is a blockchain project focused on solving a fundamental challenge in the modular world: data availability.
As a modular blockchain network, Celestia separates consensus and data availability from the execution layer, creating a highly flexible and scalable solution for decentralized applications (dApps) and other protocols. Celestia enables new, more efficient forms of blockchain architecture that are not constrained by the limitations of monolithic blockchains like Ethereum, where consensus, data availability, and execution are all bundled together. This modular approach offers increased scalability, security, and flexibility for developers looking to build decentralized solutions.
Celestia's innovation comes in its role as a data availability layer.
Historically, blockchains must not only process transactions but also ensure that the data associated with those transactions is available to all participants in the network. Celestia’s unique design decouples these tasks, enabling it to specialize solely in ensuring that transaction data is available to anyone who needs it without performing the computations associated with those transactions. This allows other blockchains and decentralized applications to "plug in" to Celestia for data availability, while handling their own execution and consensus, reducing congestion and boosting overall performance.
One of the primary advantages of this modular architecture is scalability. Because Celestia doesn't execute smart contracts or manage transactions directly, it can scale horizontally by increasing the number of nodes that participate in data availability verification. This is a marked contrast to traditional blockchains, which often face bottlenecks as the volume of transactions increases.
In Celestia’s system, other blockchains can use Celestia as a “data layer” to publish their data without burdening themselves with the task of ensuring its availability. This enables dApps and blockchain developers to build more efficient and scalable solutions without having to sacrifice security or decentralization.
Another key feature of Celestia is its rollup-centric design. Rollups are layer-2 solutions that bundle transactions and execute them off-chain, significantly reducing the load on the main blockchain. Celestia takes this concept to the next level by acting as the data availability layer for rollups, allowing them to operate independently of the constraints of a single layer-1 blockchain. By doing so, Celestia allows developers to deploy their own sovereign roll ups that can function as independent chains while still benefiting from the security and data availability guarantees of Celestia’s modular architecture.
Celestia's design also solves a significant challenge in blockchain governance. By decoupling execution from data availability, it allows for a higher degree of sovereignty for projects building on top of it. Developers can create custom execution environments without being constrained by the base layer’s governance or limitations. This opens up new possibilities for blockchain innovation, as different projects can build and optimize their own ecosystems without compromising on scalability or security.
Celestia is a breakthrough project in the blockchain space, offering a modular approach that allows developers to scale more efficiently, innovate more freely, and optimize for security and decentralization. By separating data availability from execution and consensus, Celestia opens the door to new, more flexible blockchain architectures and solves many of the challenges faced by traditional monolithic blockchains. Its innovative model, combined with the growing demand for scalable decentralized solutions, positions Celestia as a significant player in the future of blockchain infrastructure.
Deeper look at data availability
Celestia is designed to address one of the most critical issues in blockchain technology: data availability. As a modular data availability network, Celestia decouples the execution of transactions from the processes of consensus and data availability, creating a more scalable and efficient blockchain architecture.
The core of Celestia’s design is based on a novel solution to the data availability problem through data availability sampling (DAS), a process that allows nodes to verify that all necessary transaction data is available without requiring them to download entire blocks. This modular architecture lays the groundwork for the next generation of scalable blockchain systems, enabling developers to launch custom blockchains with ease while leveraging Celestia’s secure data availability layer.
Celestia’s data availability layer operates by ensuring that all necessary transaction data is available to participants in a trust-minimized manner, enabling blockchains built on top of Celestia to focus on execution and settlement without worrying about data availability. This is achieved through a combination of data availability sampling and Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs). DAS allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data by sampling small random portions of the block rather than downloading the entire dataset. The use of NMTs enables nodes and layers on top of Celestia to efficiently retrieve and verify only the data relevant to them, significantly reducing the computational load required for each participant in the network.
One of the more central aspects to Celestia’s data availability platform is 2D Reed-Solomon encoding, which is applied to every block of data. This encoding splits the block into shares and then extends it by adding parity data to create an extended matrix. This ensures that if a block producer attempts to withhold any part of the block, the rest of the data can be recovered by sampling a small portion of the shares. The key here is that the more light nodes that participate in sampling, the more data the network can handle without increasing the cost of verifying the entire chain. Essentially, as the network grows, it becomes more scalable and capable of handling larger block sizes.
The concept of light nodes is important when discussing Celestia’s scalability.
Unlike full nodes - which download and store entire blocks - light nodes only download block headers and perform data availability sampling. This process is extremely resource-efficient, allowing light nodes to verify the integrity and availability of large blocks with minimal bandwidth and computational power. As more light nodes join the network, the overall data availability improves, allowing the block size to increase without a corresponding increase in verification costs. This relationship between the number of light nodes and the scalability of the network is a major advantage of Celestia’s architecture.
Celestia also introduces a fraud-proof mechanism to prevent malicious block producers from creating incorrect extended data. If a block producer generates invalid extended data, light nodes can issue fraud proofs, which allow other participants to detect and reject the invalid block. This mechanism ensures that even if a small number of nodes attempt to act dishonestly, the network as a whole remains secure and reliable. Fraud proofs can be generated efficiently because Celestia’s 2D Reed-Solomon encoding allows nodes to verify the integrity of just a small portion of the data rather than the entire block.
In addition to DAS, Celestia’s use of NMTs enhances its scalability and flexibility. NMTs allow applications building on Celestia to download only the data relevant to their specific use case, such as a rollup or dApp. This means that block data can be partitioned into different namespaces, and applications only need to concern themselves with the data in their own namespace. This feature is especially useful for rollups and other execution layers that rely on Celestia for data availability but have their own distinct execution environments.
Celestia’s modular architecture allows for greater specialization at every single layer of the blockchain stack. Traditional blockchains—known as monolithic blockchains—must handle execution, consensus, and data availability in a single layer. This can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks, particularly as the network grows. In contrast, Celestia’s modular design allows it to focus exclusively on data availability and consensus, while leaving execution to other layers. This separation enables Celestia to optimize for data availability, allowing execution layers to scale independently while benefiting from the secure, scalable foundation provided by Celestia.
The underlying Proof-of-Stake blockchain that powers Celestia’s data availability layer—called the celestia-app—is built using the Cosmos SDK and a modified version of the Tendermint consensus algorithm. Celestia-core, the modified consensus layer, supports the 2D Reed-Solomon encoding scheme and replaces traditional Merkle trees with NMTs, enabling the efficient handling of large data blocks. By leveraging these modifications to the Tendermint consensus, Celestia ensures that the data availability layer remains robust, secure, and highly scalable.
Celestia compared to EigenDA
Celestia and EigenDA are two different solutions designed to address the data availability problem within the modular space.
While both serve as modular data availability layers, they differ in design philosophy, technical architecture, and ecosystem integration. Each protocol offers a unique approach to handling data availability for roll ups and other blockchain applications, but they also share a common goal: scaling decentralized applications by optimizing the way data is stored, verified, and made available to the network. Below is a detailed comparison between these two innovative DA protocols.
Celestia is built as a dedicated data availability and consensus layer for modular blockchains, decoupling these functions from the execution layer. This allows developers to build rollups and other blockchain applications that handle transaction execution while relying on Celestia for data availability. Celestia’s design emphasizes flexibility, enabling developers to use any virtual machine or execution environment. The primary focus of Celestia is to provide a trust-minimized DA layer that can scale without requiring every participant in the network to store all data—this is achieved through data availability sampling.
EigenDA, in contrast, is built on top of EigenLayer, a restaking protocol that leverages the security of Ethereum by allowing ETH holders to restake their ETH to secure external services, such as EigenDA. Unlike Celestia, which has its own consensus mechanism, EigenDA inherits the security of Ethereum by using ETH restakers to validate data availability. EigenDA’s core functionality is focused on enabling hyper scalability, where the throughput of data can scale linearly with the number of operators in the network. As a result, EigenDA can provide high-throughput DA services, particularly tailored for Ethereum rollups.
One of the key differences between Celestia and EigenDA lies in their security models. Celestia uses its own Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm to secure its network. Validators stake native tokens to participate in the consensus, ensuring that the data stored and made available is reliable. Celestia’s design leverages DAS, which allows light nodes to sample a small portion of data in a block to verify its availability without downloading the entire dataset. This makes Celestia highly secure while maintaining decentralization, as it does not rely on trusted intermediaries or external security sources.
EigenDA, on the other hand, inherits its security from Ethereum via the EigenLayer. In EigenLayer’s model, ETH holders restake their ETH to secure services like EigenDA. This allows EigenDA to leverage Ethereum’s massive economic security, backed by millions of ETH restaked in the protocol. EigenDA’s security is further bolstered by a slashing mechanism that punishes operators who misbehave or fail to properly store data. This integration with Ethereum makes EigenDA particularly attractive to rollups built on Ethereum, as they can utilize EigenDA’s services without adding new trust assumptions.
In terms of scaling, Celestia and EigenDA take different approaches to achieve high throughput. Celestia’s modular architecture is designed to scale by increasing the size of the blocks that can be processed by its data availability layer. Celestia’s goal is to scale to 1-gigabyte blocks, which would allow it to handle massive data throughput comparable to traditional Web2 systems like Visa. This scaling is made possible by DAS, which distributes the burden of verifying data availability across a large number of light nodes, allowing the network to scale as more nodes participate.
EigenDA aims to achieve scalability through its operator set, which scales linearly with the number of operators participating in the network. At launch, EigenDA offers 10 MB/s of write throughput, which is 5x higher than its nearest competitor. As more operators join the network and more ETH is restaked, EigenDA’s throughput can increase, making it an ideal solution for high-volume applications such as rollups on Ethereum. This design makes EigenDA particularly well-suited for the Ethereum ecosystem, where throughput demands are growing rapidly with the adoption of rollups and layer-2 scaling solutions.
Celestia is designed as a modular, blockchain-agnostic DA layer, making it compatible with a wide range of blockchain environments. Developers building on Celestia can deploy rollups using any execution environment, including Ethereum Virtual Machine, WASM, or other specialized VMs. This flexibility makes Celestia a versatile platform for developers looking to build sovereign rollups or scale existing blockchain ecosystems. Celestia’s DA layer can serve as the foundational infrastructure for a variety of blockchain networks, allowing for seamless interoperability and scalability across different chains.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem. It supports rollups built on frameworks like the OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit, as well as AltLayer, Conduit, Caldera, and Gelato. EigenDA’s compatibility with these rollup-as-a-service platforms allows developers to easily integrate EigenDA’s DA services into their rollups, enabling cost-effective, high-throughput, and secure DA. EigenDA’s native token staking model also provides flexibility for rollup developers to customize how data availability is verified, allowing them to use their native tokens for security if desired.
Both Celestia and EigenDA offer compelling economic models, but they approach cost and resource efficiency quite differently.
Celestia focuses more on reducing the cost of data availability by enabling light nodes to perform DAS with minimal resource consumption. This reduces the cost of operating nodes and makes it economically viable for a larger number of participants to join the network. Celestia’s design also ensures cheap transaction fees for end users by efficiently distributing data availability verification across the network.
EigenDA introduces a unique pricing model that offers on-demand and reserved bandwidth options for rollups using its DA services. EigenDA’s linear scaling of throughput with the number of operators ensures that it can offer highly competitive pricing as the network grows.
EigenDA recently introduced a 10x reduction in pricing for both on-demand and reserved bandwidth customers, making it one of the most cost-efficient DA solutions for Ethereum rollups. EigenDA also offers a free tier for developers, allowing them to get started with 1.28 KiB/s of throughput for up to 12 months, making it accessible for projects in their early stages.
Celestia’s roadmap is focused on achieving its ambitious goal of scaling to 1 GB blocks, which would place it among the most scalable DA layers in the blockchain space. Celestia’s modularity ensures that it can adapt to the evolving needs of decentralized applications, particularly as more rollups, sovereign chains, and on-chain worlds emerge. Celestia’s long-term vision is to be the foundational DA layer for a broad range of ecosystems, supporting cross-chain interactions and enabling the scalability of decentralized applications that demand high throughput and minimal latency.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is designed to be the endgame for Ethereum-native data availability. By leveraging Ethereum’s economic security and offering hyper scalability, EigenDA is positioned to become the go-to solution for rollups and L2s within the Ethereum ecosystem. EigenDA’s mission is to scale the decentralized world by making reliable, scalable, and secure DA abundant, enabling applications that were previously unthinkable due to data throughput limitations. With its recent mainnet launch and rapidly growing ecosystem of rollup partners, EigenDA is set to play a critical role in the future of Ethereum’s scalability solutions.
While Celestia and EigenDA both aim to solve the data availability problem, their approaches, target ecosystems, and technical designs set them apart. Celestia is focused on modularity, flexibility, and cross-chain integration, while EigenDA is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s ecosystem, offering unparalleled scalability and security through restaking. Both solutions will play a significant role in the future of blockchain scalability, but their distinct focuses ensure that each will serve different needs within the evolving decentralized landscape.
Exploring Celestia’s future
Celestia stands at the forefront of the evolving modular blockchain ecosystem, acting as a crucial data availability (DA) and consensus layer that addresses the scalability and efficiency challenges faced by decentralized systems. In the world of blockchain, modularity is becoming the dominant trend, as it allows blockchains to scale and operate more efficiently by decoupling key functions like execution, consensus, and data availability. Celestia’s architecture is designed to optimize DA and consensus, providing the necessary infrastructure for other layers—especially execution layers like rollups—to function independently but securely. This decoupling is essential for breaking through the bottlenecks that have historically limited the scalability of monolithic blockchains.
In a monolithic blockchain, all the major components—consensus, execution, and data availability—are tightly bundled together. This creates inefficiencies, as these systems have to perform multiple complex functions at once. For instance, blockchains like Ethereum or Solana have to manage both the execution of transactions and the storage and verification of data, leading to state bloat and limiting scalability. Celestia's role in the modular blockchain paradigm is to relieve execution layers from these burdens by offering a dedicated data availability layer. By allowing execution layers like rollups to offload data availability to Celestia, these rollups can focus purely on transaction execution, vastly improving their performance and scalability.
Celestia enables the creation of sovereign rollups, which are roll ups that operate as independent blockchains with their own governance and execution environments, but which rely on Celestia for data availability and consensus. This allows developers to launch highly customizable roll ups without being tied to the constraints of a monolithic chain. Rollups benefit from Celestia’s ability to securely scale data availability, meaning that even as the number of rollups or the volume of transactions increases, Celestia can handle the growing data load without becoming a bottleneck. This is especially crucial for high-throughput applications like DeFi platforms, on-chain games, and payments networks, which require significant data capacity to function efficiently.
Celestia’s unique advantage within the modular ecosystem lies in its use of data availability sampling, a technique that allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data without having to download the entire block. This is a game-changer for scalability. Traditional blockchains require every node to store the full dataset, but with DAS, light nodes only need to sample small portions of the data to confirm availability. This means that as more light nodes join the network, the system can handle larger blocks and more data while keeping the computational and storage costs for each individual node low. DAS not only reduces the resource requirements for nodes but also makes Celestia’s DA layer inherently scalable, ensuring that it can support a growing number of users and transactions.
The Namespaced Merkle Trees used by Celestia further enhance the modular blockchain architecture by enabling execution layers to download and verify only the data relevant to them. This means that rollups or other applications don’t need to handle irrelevant data, which minimizes overhead and boosts efficiency. NMTs essentially partition data into namespaces, allowing different applications to interact with their specific dataset while ignoring others. This optimization is particularly beneficial in environments where multiple rollups are operating simultaneously, as it reduces congestion and ensures that each application can access the data it needs quickly and efficiently.
When compared to other data availability solutions, Celestia’s modular approach offers several distinct advantages. One of its closest competitors, Avail, also focuses on providing a scalable data availability layer. Celestia’s DAS protocol gives it a competitive edge, particularly in terms of reducing node requirements and improving the scalability of light nodes. This makes Celestia’s architecture more lightweight and adaptable, particularly for developers who want to build highly efficient execution environments. Celestia’s infrastructure allows execution layers like Optimistic Rollups or ZK-Rollups to scale independently of the constraints typically imposed by monolithic blockchains, while still maintaining high levels of security and data integrity.
Celestia's role as a data availability provider means it integrates seamlessly with other layers in the modular blockchain stack. In a fully modular ecosystem, the DA layer interacts with settlement layers and execution layers to form a cohesive, yet highly scalable, blockchain architecture. By decoupling DA from consensus and execution, Celestia enhances cross-layer interoperability. For example, rollups built on top of Celestia can take advantage of lazy bridging mechanisms to transfer assets and data across different execution environments with minimal friction. This level of interoperability is crucial for enabling multi-chain ecosystems, where assets and applications are no longer confined to a single blockchain but can move freely between various environments.
Celestia’s modular design is also a boon for developers who are looking to build on a flexible, high-performance foundation. Unlike monolithic chains, where developers must work within the constraints of a single virtual machine or programming language, Celestia allows developers to use any execution framework or VM. This could include popular environments like the Ethereum Virtual Machine, but it also opens the door for more specialized systems like WASM or custom VMs that cater to specific application needs. This flexibility is a major selling point for Celestia as it enables developers to innovate without being locked into a particular ecosystem’s limitations.
The economic benefits of Celestia’s modular approach are also significant. For developers, the ability to offload consensus and data availability to Celestia reduces the overhead involved in deploying and maintaining their own infrastructure. By relying on Celestia’s DA layer, developers can focus on building execution layers and applications, knowing that their data will be securely stored and verified. This is particularly appealing for applications that need high throughput and low fees, such as DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, or gaming platforms. By reducing the resource requirements for verifying data, Celestia enables these applications to operate at scale without incurring the prohibitive costs associated with monolithic blockchains.
Celestia’s role in the modular blockchain ecosystem is transformative. By decoupling the key functions of a blockchain—specifically, consensus and data availability—from execution, Celestia provides a foundational layer that enables unprecedented levels of scalability and flexibility. Its use of DAS, NMTs, and an open, flexible architecture means that developers are no longer constrained by the limitations of monolithic chains. As a result, Celestia is a key enabler of the next generation of blockchain applications, helping to realize the full potential of decentralized technology while maintaining the security, efficiency, and scalability needed to support a global user base. As the modular ecosystem continues to evolve, Celestia’s position as a data availability provider will be central to the success of these next-generation systems.
Recent developments and next steps for Celestia
Celestia has made significant strides in its development and expansion, particularly since the launch of its Mainnet Beta last year. This milestone marked a new phase for the project, as it shifted from a development-heavy stage to actively supporting its growing ecosystem. Over the past year, the early ecosystem of Celestia has seen substantial growth, with developers deploying the first 20 rollups.
These rollups are a critical component of Celestia’s modular blockchain architecture, allowing various applications to take advantage of Celestia’s data availability layer. Currently, Celestia blobs (the data packets stored and shared on the network) represent 40% of all data published, indicating the increasing reliance on Celestia's infrastructure by its ecosystem projects.
At the same time, Celestia's core developers have been hard at work preparing for the next phase of the protocol’s evolution. The development community has held 16 public core dev calls and formed a zero-knowledge working group, reflecting a high level of collaboration across multiple teams. One of the community’s achievements has been the drafting and proposing of 24 Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs), submitted by six core development entities.
These CIPs aim to refine and upgrade Celestia’s infrastructure, ensuring it can scale effectively and remain secure as adoption continues to grow. The collaborative, more community-driven nature of Celestia’s development is a pillar of its modular architecture, and the CIPs highlight the collective effort to push the protocol forward.
Going forward, the Lemongrass upgrade is a key focus for Celestia’s core developers. Lemongrass will be the protocol’s first major upgrade and is set to introduce several important improvements to the consensus layer. A new technical roadmap has been released to guide this next phase of development, with a particular emphasis on scaling the network’s data throughput. The roadmap outlines a core objective: scaling to 1 gigabyte blocks.
This ambitious goal will increase Celestia’s data throughput, paving the way for high-performance applications, including those requiring significant data capacity, such as Visa-scale payment networks and fully on-chain games. This scaling effort is enabled by Celestia’s modular design, which allows the network to grow without the state bloat or overhead commonly associated with monolithic blockchains.
Achieving 1GB block sizes would allow Celestia to deliver a massive increase in throughput, with enough capacity to support many parallel networks operating at the scale of Visa’s transaction throughput (~24,000 transactions per second, or TPS). The increase in block size would also unlock the potential for new on-chain applications that were previously deemed unviable due to data limitations. This includes Web2-like latency for dApps, making them more user-friendly and responsive for end users. Celestia’s architecture allows developers to build applications using any virtual machine they prefer, providing the flexibility to innovate without the constraints of a single smart contract language or rollup framework. This flexibility makes Celestia a highly adaptable platform for developers looking to scale their projects.
A critical component of Celestia’s roadmap to 1GB blocks involves several technical innovations. These include the introduction of a content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, and optimization of the CometBFT block propagation system, among other upgrades. Celestia’s team is also working on internally sharding nodes and improving the data availability sampling (DAS) protocol. Together, these innovations aim to significantly increase Celestia’s capacity without requiring higher resource usage from light nodes. By focusing on DA and consensus rather than execution, Celestia can push the limits of blockchain scalability in ways that monolithic layer-1 blockchains cannot.
One of Celestia's most important goals is ensuring that blockspace is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, on any device.
This commitment to accessibility is driving the development of light nodes that can run directly in a web browser, allowing any user to verify the correctness of data in Celestia’s blockspace. An early version of this browser-based light node, developed by Eiger at Lumina.rs, is already available for users to try. This move represents a step toward the trust-minimized future that Celestia envisions, where applications built on its infrastructure are verifiable by anyone, ensuring that the decentralized ethos of blockchain is preserved.
In addition to scaling block size and improving accessibility, Celestia is also working on frictionless blockspace for both developers and end users. The team is focused on enhancing the developer experience for rollup builders, providing tools and frameworks to make it easier to deploy rollups on Celestia’s infrastructure. One of these innovations is Lazybridging, which improves interoperability between rollups on Celestia by addressing modular fragmentation. This will allow assets to flow seamlessly across different rollups without the need for complex bridging operations, making the ecosystem more fluid and user-friendly.
The upcoming Lemongrass hard fork is a significant milestone in Celestia’s development and will introduce several key features. One of the most anticipated upgrades is CIP-10, which introduces a new signaling mechanism for validators to coordinate network upgrades. This mechanism simplifies the upgrade process by allowing validators to signal their readiness for a hardfork, ensuring that upgrades can proceed more efficiently with minimal downtime. Other improvements, such as CIP-6 (price enforcement for transactions) and CIP-14 (interchain accounts for better interoperability with IBC-enabled chains), will also be introduced in Lemongrass, further enhancing the network’s capabilities.
Celestia’s Data Availability layer is undergoing parallel technical changes, including CIP-4, which focuses on pruning blob data to optimize resource usage, and CIP-19, which introduces a new messaging framework called Shwap for data availability and sampling. These changes are designed to streamline the network’s performance while maintaining the integrity and efficiency of data availability. With these upgrades, Celestia is preparing to scale its DA layer further while ensuring it remains resource-efficient and accessible to a broad range of users and developers.
Celestia’s recent developments highlight its commitment to scalability, accessibility, and innovation in the modular blockchain space. The upcoming Lemongrass upgrade, the roadmap to 1GB blocks, and the continuous improvement of the DA layer all position Celestia as a leader in blockchain infrastructure. As the ecosystem continues to grow, Celestia’s ability to scale beyond the limitations of traditional blockchains will unlock new possibilities for developers and users alike, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the decentralized world.
Going forward the team has a lot of work and a very in depth roadmap to fulfill. Celestia has done a great job at keeping pace thus far and continues to explore the different approaches to scaling data availability across the modular ecosystem. If you’re looking for further information or updates on Celestia you can check out their Twitter here or their blog here.
Disclaimer: This research report is exactly that — a research report. It is not intended to serve as financial advice, nor should you blindly assume that any of the information is accurate without confirming through your own research. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other digital assets are incredibly risky and nothing in this report should be considered an endorsement to buy or sell any asset. Never invest more than you are willing to lose and understand the risk that you are taking. Do your own research. All information in this report is for educational purposes only and should not be the basis for any investment decisions that you make.
Disclosure: At least one member of the Reflexivity Research team currently holds a position in Celestia's token (TIA) at the time of writing/publishing. See the bottom of this write-up for more disclosures.
What is Celestia?
Celestia is a blockchain project focused on solving a fundamental challenge in the modular world: data availability.
As a modular blockchain network, Celestia separates consensus and data availability from the execution layer, creating a highly flexible and scalable solution for decentralized applications (dApps) and other protocols. Celestia enables new, more efficient forms of blockchain architecture that are not constrained by the limitations of monolithic blockchains like Ethereum, where consensus, data availability, and execution are all bundled together. This modular approach offers increased scalability, security, and flexibility for developers looking to build decentralized solutions.
Celestia's innovation comes in its role as a data availability layer.
Historically, blockchains must not only process transactions but also ensure that the data associated with those transactions is available to all participants in the network. Celestia’s unique design decouples these tasks, enabling it to specialize solely in ensuring that transaction data is available to anyone who needs it without performing the computations associated with those transactions. This allows other blockchains and decentralized applications to "plug in" to Celestia for data availability, while handling their own execution and consensus, reducing congestion and boosting overall performance.
One of the primary advantages of this modular architecture is scalability. Because Celestia doesn't execute smart contracts or manage transactions directly, it can scale horizontally by increasing the number of nodes that participate in data availability verification. This is a marked contrast to traditional blockchains, which often face bottlenecks as the volume of transactions increases.
In Celestia’s system, other blockchains can use Celestia as a “data layer” to publish their data without burdening themselves with the task of ensuring its availability. This enables dApps and blockchain developers to build more efficient and scalable solutions without having to sacrifice security or decentralization.
Another key feature of Celestia is its rollup-centric design. Rollups are layer-2 solutions that bundle transactions and execute them off-chain, significantly reducing the load on the main blockchain. Celestia takes this concept to the next level by acting as the data availability layer for rollups, allowing them to operate independently of the constraints of a single layer-1 blockchain. By doing so, Celestia allows developers to deploy their own sovereign roll ups that can function as independent chains while still benefiting from the security and data availability guarantees of Celestia’s modular architecture.
Celestia's design also solves a significant challenge in blockchain governance. By decoupling execution from data availability, it allows for a higher degree of sovereignty for projects building on top of it. Developers can create custom execution environments without being constrained by the base layer’s governance or limitations. This opens up new possibilities for blockchain innovation, as different projects can build and optimize their own ecosystems without compromising on scalability or security.
Celestia is a breakthrough project in the blockchain space, offering a modular approach that allows developers to scale more efficiently, innovate more freely, and optimize for security and decentralization. By separating data availability from execution and consensus, Celestia opens the door to new, more flexible blockchain architectures and solves many of the challenges faced by traditional monolithic blockchains. Its innovative model, combined with the growing demand for scalable decentralized solutions, positions Celestia as a significant player in the future of blockchain infrastructure.
Deeper look at data availability
Celestia is designed to address one of the most critical issues in blockchain technology: data availability. As a modular data availability network, Celestia decouples the execution of transactions from the processes of consensus and data availability, creating a more scalable and efficient blockchain architecture.
The core of Celestia’s design is based on a novel solution to the data availability problem through data availability sampling (DAS), a process that allows nodes to verify that all necessary transaction data is available without requiring them to download entire blocks. This modular architecture lays the groundwork for the next generation of scalable blockchain systems, enabling developers to launch custom blockchains with ease while leveraging Celestia’s secure data availability layer.
Celestia’s data availability layer operates by ensuring that all necessary transaction data is available to participants in a trust-minimized manner, enabling blockchains built on top of Celestia to focus on execution and settlement without worrying about data availability. This is achieved through a combination of data availability sampling and Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs). DAS allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data by sampling small random portions of the block rather than downloading the entire dataset. The use of NMTs enables nodes and layers on top of Celestia to efficiently retrieve and verify only the data relevant to them, significantly reducing the computational load required for each participant in the network.
One of the more central aspects to Celestia’s data availability platform is 2D Reed-Solomon encoding, which is applied to every block of data. This encoding splits the block into shares and then extends it by adding parity data to create an extended matrix. This ensures that if a block producer attempts to withhold any part of the block, the rest of the data can be recovered by sampling a small portion of the shares. The key here is that the more light nodes that participate in sampling, the more data the network can handle without increasing the cost of verifying the entire chain. Essentially, as the network grows, it becomes more scalable and capable of handling larger block sizes.
The concept of light nodes is important when discussing Celestia’s scalability.
Unlike full nodes - which download and store entire blocks - light nodes only download block headers and perform data availability sampling. This process is extremely resource-efficient, allowing light nodes to verify the integrity and availability of large blocks with minimal bandwidth and computational power. As more light nodes join the network, the overall data availability improves, allowing the block size to increase without a corresponding increase in verification costs. This relationship between the number of light nodes and the scalability of the network is a major advantage of Celestia’s architecture.
Celestia also introduces a fraud-proof mechanism to prevent malicious block producers from creating incorrect extended data. If a block producer generates invalid extended data, light nodes can issue fraud proofs, which allow other participants to detect and reject the invalid block. This mechanism ensures that even if a small number of nodes attempt to act dishonestly, the network as a whole remains secure and reliable. Fraud proofs can be generated efficiently because Celestia’s 2D Reed-Solomon encoding allows nodes to verify the integrity of just a small portion of the data rather than the entire block.
In addition to DAS, Celestia’s use of NMTs enhances its scalability and flexibility. NMTs allow applications building on Celestia to download only the data relevant to their specific use case, such as a rollup or dApp. This means that block data can be partitioned into different namespaces, and applications only need to concern themselves with the data in their own namespace. This feature is especially useful for rollups and other execution layers that rely on Celestia for data availability but have their own distinct execution environments.
Celestia’s modular architecture allows for greater specialization at every single layer of the blockchain stack. Traditional blockchains—known as monolithic blockchains—must handle execution, consensus, and data availability in a single layer. This can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks, particularly as the network grows. In contrast, Celestia’s modular design allows it to focus exclusively on data availability and consensus, while leaving execution to other layers. This separation enables Celestia to optimize for data availability, allowing execution layers to scale independently while benefiting from the secure, scalable foundation provided by Celestia.
The underlying Proof-of-Stake blockchain that powers Celestia’s data availability layer—called the celestia-app—is built using the Cosmos SDK and a modified version of the Tendermint consensus algorithm. Celestia-core, the modified consensus layer, supports the 2D Reed-Solomon encoding scheme and replaces traditional Merkle trees with NMTs, enabling the efficient handling of large data blocks. By leveraging these modifications to the Tendermint consensus, Celestia ensures that the data availability layer remains robust, secure, and highly scalable.
Celestia compared to EigenDA
Celestia and EigenDA are two different solutions designed to address the data availability problem within the modular space.
While both serve as modular data availability layers, they differ in design philosophy, technical architecture, and ecosystem integration. Each protocol offers a unique approach to handling data availability for roll ups and other blockchain applications, but they also share a common goal: scaling decentralized applications by optimizing the way data is stored, verified, and made available to the network. Below is a detailed comparison between these two innovative DA protocols.
Celestia is built as a dedicated data availability and consensus layer for modular blockchains, decoupling these functions from the execution layer. This allows developers to build rollups and other blockchain applications that handle transaction execution while relying on Celestia for data availability. Celestia’s design emphasizes flexibility, enabling developers to use any virtual machine or execution environment. The primary focus of Celestia is to provide a trust-minimized DA layer that can scale without requiring every participant in the network to store all data—this is achieved through data availability sampling.
EigenDA, in contrast, is built on top of EigenLayer, a restaking protocol that leverages the security of Ethereum by allowing ETH holders to restake their ETH to secure external services, such as EigenDA. Unlike Celestia, which has its own consensus mechanism, EigenDA inherits the security of Ethereum by using ETH restakers to validate data availability. EigenDA’s core functionality is focused on enabling hyper scalability, where the throughput of data can scale linearly with the number of operators in the network. As a result, EigenDA can provide high-throughput DA services, particularly tailored for Ethereum rollups.
One of the key differences between Celestia and EigenDA lies in their security models. Celestia uses its own Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm to secure its network. Validators stake native tokens to participate in the consensus, ensuring that the data stored and made available is reliable. Celestia’s design leverages DAS, which allows light nodes to sample a small portion of data in a block to verify its availability without downloading the entire dataset. This makes Celestia highly secure while maintaining decentralization, as it does not rely on trusted intermediaries or external security sources.
EigenDA, on the other hand, inherits its security from Ethereum via the EigenLayer. In EigenLayer’s model, ETH holders restake their ETH to secure services like EigenDA. This allows EigenDA to leverage Ethereum’s massive economic security, backed by millions of ETH restaked in the protocol. EigenDA’s security is further bolstered by a slashing mechanism that punishes operators who misbehave or fail to properly store data. This integration with Ethereum makes EigenDA particularly attractive to rollups built on Ethereum, as they can utilize EigenDA’s services without adding new trust assumptions.
In terms of scaling, Celestia and EigenDA take different approaches to achieve high throughput. Celestia’s modular architecture is designed to scale by increasing the size of the blocks that can be processed by its data availability layer. Celestia’s goal is to scale to 1-gigabyte blocks, which would allow it to handle massive data throughput comparable to traditional Web2 systems like Visa. This scaling is made possible by DAS, which distributes the burden of verifying data availability across a large number of light nodes, allowing the network to scale as more nodes participate.
EigenDA aims to achieve scalability through its operator set, which scales linearly with the number of operators participating in the network. At launch, EigenDA offers 10 MB/s of write throughput, which is 5x higher than its nearest competitor. As more operators join the network and more ETH is restaked, EigenDA’s throughput can increase, making it an ideal solution for high-volume applications such as rollups on Ethereum. This design makes EigenDA particularly well-suited for the Ethereum ecosystem, where throughput demands are growing rapidly with the adoption of rollups and layer-2 scaling solutions.
Celestia is designed as a modular, blockchain-agnostic DA layer, making it compatible with a wide range of blockchain environments. Developers building on Celestia can deploy rollups using any execution environment, including Ethereum Virtual Machine, WASM, or other specialized VMs. This flexibility makes Celestia a versatile platform for developers looking to build sovereign rollups or scale existing blockchain ecosystems. Celestia’s DA layer can serve as the foundational infrastructure for a variety of blockchain networks, allowing for seamless interoperability and scalability across different chains.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem. It supports rollups built on frameworks like the OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit, as well as AltLayer, Conduit, Caldera, and Gelato. EigenDA’s compatibility with these rollup-as-a-service platforms allows developers to easily integrate EigenDA’s DA services into their rollups, enabling cost-effective, high-throughput, and secure DA. EigenDA’s native token staking model also provides flexibility for rollup developers to customize how data availability is verified, allowing them to use their native tokens for security if desired.
Both Celestia and EigenDA offer compelling economic models, but they approach cost and resource efficiency quite differently.
Celestia focuses more on reducing the cost of data availability by enabling light nodes to perform DAS with minimal resource consumption. This reduces the cost of operating nodes and makes it economically viable for a larger number of participants to join the network. Celestia’s design also ensures cheap transaction fees for end users by efficiently distributing data availability verification across the network.
EigenDA introduces a unique pricing model that offers on-demand and reserved bandwidth options for rollups using its DA services. EigenDA’s linear scaling of throughput with the number of operators ensures that it can offer highly competitive pricing as the network grows.
EigenDA recently introduced a 10x reduction in pricing for both on-demand and reserved bandwidth customers, making it one of the most cost-efficient DA solutions for Ethereum rollups. EigenDA also offers a free tier for developers, allowing them to get started with 1.28 KiB/s of throughput for up to 12 months, making it accessible for projects in their early stages.
Celestia’s roadmap is focused on achieving its ambitious goal of scaling to 1 GB blocks, which would place it among the most scalable DA layers in the blockchain space. Celestia’s modularity ensures that it can adapt to the evolving needs of decentralized applications, particularly as more rollups, sovereign chains, and on-chain worlds emerge. Celestia’s long-term vision is to be the foundational DA layer for a broad range of ecosystems, supporting cross-chain interactions and enabling the scalability of decentralized applications that demand high throughput and minimal latency.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is designed to be the endgame for Ethereum-native data availability. By leveraging Ethereum’s economic security and offering hyper scalability, EigenDA is positioned to become the go-to solution for rollups and L2s within the Ethereum ecosystem. EigenDA’s mission is to scale the decentralized world by making reliable, scalable, and secure DA abundant, enabling applications that were previously unthinkable due to data throughput limitations. With its recent mainnet launch and rapidly growing ecosystem of rollup partners, EigenDA is set to play a critical role in the future of Ethereum’s scalability solutions.
While Celestia and EigenDA both aim to solve the data availability problem, their approaches, target ecosystems, and technical designs set them apart. Celestia is focused on modularity, flexibility, and cross-chain integration, while EigenDA is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s ecosystem, offering unparalleled scalability and security through restaking. Both solutions will play a significant role in the future of blockchain scalability, but their distinct focuses ensure that each will serve different needs within the evolving decentralized landscape.
Exploring Celestia’s future
Celestia stands at the forefront of the evolving modular blockchain ecosystem, acting as a crucial data availability (DA) and consensus layer that addresses the scalability and efficiency challenges faced by decentralized systems. In the world of blockchain, modularity is becoming the dominant trend, as it allows blockchains to scale and operate more efficiently by decoupling key functions like execution, consensus, and data availability. Celestia’s architecture is designed to optimize DA and consensus, providing the necessary infrastructure for other layers—especially execution layers like rollups—to function independently but securely. This decoupling is essential for breaking through the bottlenecks that have historically limited the scalability of monolithic blockchains.
In a monolithic blockchain, all the major components—consensus, execution, and data availability—are tightly bundled together. This creates inefficiencies, as these systems have to perform multiple complex functions at once. For instance, blockchains like Ethereum or Solana have to manage both the execution of transactions and the storage and verification of data, leading to state bloat and limiting scalability. Celestia's role in the modular blockchain paradigm is to relieve execution layers from these burdens by offering a dedicated data availability layer. By allowing execution layers like rollups to offload data availability to Celestia, these rollups can focus purely on transaction execution, vastly improving their performance and scalability.
Celestia enables the creation of sovereign rollups, which are roll ups that operate as independent blockchains with their own governance and execution environments, but which rely on Celestia for data availability and consensus. This allows developers to launch highly customizable roll ups without being tied to the constraints of a monolithic chain. Rollups benefit from Celestia’s ability to securely scale data availability, meaning that even as the number of rollups or the volume of transactions increases, Celestia can handle the growing data load without becoming a bottleneck. This is especially crucial for high-throughput applications like DeFi platforms, on-chain games, and payments networks, which require significant data capacity to function efficiently.
Celestia’s unique advantage within the modular ecosystem lies in its use of data availability sampling, a technique that allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data without having to download the entire block. This is a game-changer for scalability. Traditional blockchains require every node to store the full dataset, but with DAS, light nodes only need to sample small portions of the data to confirm availability. This means that as more light nodes join the network, the system can handle larger blocks and more data while keeping the computational and storage costs for each individual node low. DAS not only reduces the resource requirements for nodes but also makes Celestia’s DA layer inherently scalable, ensuring that it can support a growing number of users and transactions.
The Namespaced Merkle Trees used by Celestia further enhance the modular blockchain architecture by enabling execution layers to download and verify only the data relevant to them. This means that rollups or other applications don’t need to handle irrelevant data, which minimizes overhead and boosts efficiency. NMTs essentially partition data into namespaces, allowing different applications to interact with their specific dataset while ignoring others. This optimization is particularly beneficial in environments where multiple rollups are operating simultaneously, as it reduces congestion and ensures that each application can access the data it needs quickly and efficiently.
When compared to other data availability solutions, Celestia’s modular approach offers several distinct advantages. One of its closest competitors, Avail, also focuses on providing a scalable data availability layer. Celestia’s DAS protocol gives it a competitive edge, particularly in terms of reducing node requirements and improving the scalability of light nodes. This makes Celestia’s architecture more lightweight and adaptable, particularly for developers who want to build highly efficient execution environments. Celestia’s infrastructure allows execution layers like Optimistic Rollups or ZK-Rollups to scale independently of the constraints typically imposed by monolithic blockchains, while still maintaining high levels of security and data integrity.
Celestia's role as a data availability provider means it integrates seamlessly with other layers in the modular blockchain stack. In a fully modular ecosystem, the DA layer interacts with settlement layers and execution layers to form a cohesive, yet highly scalable, blockchain architecture. By decoupling DA from consensus and execution, Celestia enhances cross-layer interoperability. For example, rollups built on top of Celestia can take advantage of lazy bridging mechanisms to transfer assets and data across different execution environments with minimal friction. This level of interoperability is crucial for enabling multi-chain ecosystems, where assets and applications are no longer confined to a single blockchain but can move freely between various environments.
Celestia’s modular design is also a boon for developers who are looking to build on a flexible, high-performance foundation. Unlike monolithic chains, where developers must work within the constraints of a single virtual machine or programming language, Celestia allows developers to use any execution framework or VM. This could include popular environments like the Ethereum Virtual Machine, but it also opens the door for more specialized systems like WASM or custom VMs that cater to specific application needs. This flexibility is a major selling point for Celestia as it enables developers to innovate without being locked into a particular ecosystem’s limitations.
The economic benefits of Celestia’s modular approach are also significant. For developers, the ability to offload consensus and data availability to Celestia reduces the overhead involved in deploying and maintaining their own infrastructure. By relying on Celestia’s DA layer, developers can focus on building execution layers and applications, knowing that their data will be securely stored and verified. This is particularly appealing for applications that need high throughput and low fees, such as DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, or gaming platforms. By reducing the resource requirements for verifying data, Celestia enables these applications to operate at scale without incurring the prohibitive costs associated with monolithic blockchains.
Celestia’s role in the modular blockchain ecosystem is transformative. By decoupling the key functions of a blockchain—specifically, consensus and data availability—from execution, Celestia provides a foundational layer that enables unprecedented levels of scalability and flexibility. Its use of DAS, NMTs, and an open, flexible architecture means that developers are no longer constrained by the limitations of monolithic chains. As a result, Celestia is a key enabler of the next generation of blockchain applications, helping to realize the full potential of decentralized technology while maintaining the security, efficiency, and scalability needed to support a global user base. As the modular ecosystem continues to evolve, Celestia’s position as a data availability provider will be central to the success of these next-generation systems.
Recent developments and next steps for Celestia
Celestia has made significant strides in its development and expansion, particularly since the launch of its Mainnet Beta last year. This milestone marked a new phase for the project, as it shifted from a development-heavy stage to actively supporting its growing ecosystem. Over the past year, the early ecosystem of Celestia has seen substantial growth, with developers deploying the first 20 rollups.
These rollups are a critical component of Celestia’s modular blockchain architecture, allowing various applications to take advantage of Celestia’s data availability layer. Currently, Celestia blobs (the data packets stored and shared on the network) represent 40% of all data published, indicating the increasing reliance on Celestia's infrastructure by its ecosystem projects.
At the same time, Celestia's core developers have been hard at work preparing for the next phase of the protocol’s evolution. The development community has held 16 public core dev calls and formed a zero-knowledge working group, reflecting a high level of collaboration across multiple teams. One of the community’s achievements has been the drafting and proposing of 24 Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs), submitted by six core development entities.
These CIPs aim to refine and upgrade Celestia’s infrastructure, ensuring it can scale effectively and remain secure as adoption continues to grow. The collaborative, more community-driven nature of Celestia’s development is a pillar of its modular architecture, and the CIPs highlight the collective effort to push the protocol forward.
Going forward, the Lemongrass upgrade is a key focus for Celestia’s core developers. Lemongrass will be the protocol’s first major upgrade and is set to introduce several important improvements to the consensus layer. A new technical roadmap has been released to guide this next phase of development, with a particular emphasis on scaling the network’s data throughput. The roadmap outlines a core objective: scaling to 1 gigabyte blocks.
This ambitious goal will increase Celestia’s data throughput, paving the way for high-performance applications, including those requiring significant data capacity, such as Visa-scale payment networks and fully on-chain games. This scaling effort is enabled by Celestia’s modular design, which allows the network to grow without the state bloat or overhead commonly associated with monolithic blockchains.
Achieving 1GB block sizes would allow Celestia to deliver a massive increase in throughput, with enough capacity to support many parallel networks operating at the scale of Visa’s transaction throughput (~24,000 transactions per second, or TPS). The increase in block size would also unlock the potential for new on-chain applications that were previously deemed unviable due to data limitations. This includes Web2-like latency for dApps, making them more user-friendly and responsive for end users. Celestia’s architecture allows developers to build applications using any virtual machine they prefer, providing the flexibility to innovate without the constraints of a single smart contract language or rollup framework. This flexibility makes Celestia a highly adaptable platform for developers looking to scale their projects.
A critical component of Celestia’s roadmap to 1GB blocks involves several technical innovations. These include the introduction of a content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, and optimization of the CometBFT block propagation system, among other upgrades. Celestia’s team is also working on internally sharding nodes and improving the data availability sampling (DAS) protocol. Together, these innovations aim to significantly increase Celestia’s capacity without requiring higher resource usage from light nodes. By focusing on DA and consensus rather than execution, Celestia can push the limits of blockchain scalability in ways that monolithic layer-1 blockchains cannot.
One of Celestia's most important goals is ensuring that blockspace is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, on any device.
This commitment to accessibility is driving the development of light nodes that can run directly in a web browser, allowing any user to verify the correctness of data in Celestia’s blockspace. An early version of this browser-based light node, developed by Eiger at Lumina.rs, is already available for users to try. This move represents a step toward the trust-minimized future that Celestia envisions, where applications built on its infrastructure are verifiable by anyone, ensuring that the decentralized ethos of blockchain is preserved.
In addition to scaling block size and improving accessibility, Celestia is also working on frictionless blockspace for both developers and end users. The team is focused on enhancing the developer experience for rollup builders, providing tools and frameworks to make it easier to deploy rollups on Celestia’s infrastructure. One of these innovations is Lazybridging, which improves interoperability between rollups on Celestia by addressing modular fragmentation. This will allow assets to flow seamlessly across different rollups without the need for complex bridging operations, making the ecosystem more fluid and user-friendly.
The upcoming Lemongrass hard fork is a significant milestone in Celestia’s development and will introduce several key features. One of the most anticipated upgrades is CIP-10, which introduces a new signaling mechanism for validators to coordinate network upgrades. This mechanism simplifies the upgrade process by allowing validators to signal their readiness for a hardfork, ensuring that upgrades can proceed more efficiently with minimal downtime. Other improvements, such as CIP-6 (price enforcement for transactions) and CIP-14 (interchain accounts for better interoperability with IBC-enabled chains), will also be introduced in Lemongrass, further enhancing the network’s capabilities.
Celestia’s Data Availability layer is undergoing parallel technical changes, including CIP-4, which focuses on pruning blob data to optimize resource usage, and CIP-19, which introduces a new messaging framework called Shwap for data availability and sampling. These changes are designed to streamline the network’s performance while maintaining the integrity and efficiency of data availability. With these upgrades, Celestia is preparing to scale its DA layer further while ensuring it remains resource-efficient and accessible to a broad range of users and developers.
Celestia’s recent developments highlight its commitment to scalability, accessibility, and innovation in the modular blockchain space. The upcoming Lemongrass upgrade, the roadmap to 1GB blocks, and the continuous improvement of the DA layer all position Celestia as a leader in blockchain infrastructure. As the ecosystem continues to grow, Celestia’s ability to scale beyond the limitations of traditional blockchains will unlock new possibilities for developers and users alike, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the decentralized world.
Going forward the team has a lot of work and a very in depth roadmap to fulfill. Celestia has done a great job at keeping pace thus far and continues to explore the different approaches to scaling data availability across the modular ecosystem. If you’re looking for further information or updates on Celestia you can check out their Twitter here or their blog here.
Disclaimer: This research report is exactly that — a research report. It is not intended to serve as financial advice, nor should you blindly assume that any of the information is accurate without confirming through your own research. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other digital assets are incredibly risky and nothing in this report should be considered an endorsement to buy or sell any asset. Never invest more than you are willing to lose and understand the risk that you are taking. Do your own research. All information in this report is for educational purposes only and should not be the basis for any investment decisions that you make.
Disclosure: At least one member of the Reflexivity Research team currently holds a position in Celestia's token (TIA) at the time of writing/publishing. See the bottom of this write-up for more disclosures.
What is Celestia?
Celestia is a blockchain project focused on solving a fundamental challenge in the modular world: data availability.
As a modular blockchain network, Celestia separates consensus and data availability from the execution layer, creating a highly flexible and scalable solution for decentralized applications (dApps) and other protocols. Celestia enables new, more efficient forms of blockchain architecture that are not constrained by the limitations of monolithic blockchains like Ethereum, where consensus, data availability, and execution are all bundled together. This modular approach offers increased scalability, security, and flexibility for developers looking to build decentralized solutions.
Celestia's innovation comes in its role as a data availability layer.
Historically, blockchains must not only process transactions but also ensure that the data associated with those transactions is available to all participants in the network. Celestia’s unique design decouples these tasks, enabling it to specialize solely in ensuring that transaction data is available to anyone who needs it without performing the computations associated with those transactions. This allows other blockchains and decentralized applications to "plug in" to Celestia for data availability, while handling their own execution and consensus, reducing congestion and boosting overall performance.
One of the primary advantages of this modular architecture is scalability. Because Celestia doesn't execute smart contracts or manage transactions directly, it can scale horizontally by increasing the number of nodes that participate in data availability verification. This is a marked contrast to traditional blockchains, which often face bottlenecks as the volume of transactions increases.
In Celestia’s system, other blockchains can use Celestia as a “data layer” to publish their data without burdening themselves with the task of ensuring its availability. This enables dApps and blockchain developers to build more efficient and scalable solutions without having to sacrifice security or decentralization.
Another key feature of Celestia is its rollup-centric design. Rollups are layer-2 solutions that bundle transactions and execute them off-chain, significantly reducing the load on the main blockchain. Celestia takes this concept to the next level by acting as the data availability layer for rollups, allowing them to operate independently of the constraints of a single layer-1 blockchain. By doing so, Celestia allows developers to deploy their own sovereign roll ups that can function as independent chains while still benefiting from the security and data availability guarantees of Celestia’s modular architecture.
Celestia's design also solves a significant challenge in blockchain governance. By decoupling execution from data availability, it allows for a higher degree of sovereignty for projects building on top of it. Developers can create custom execution environments without being constrained by the base layer’s governance or limitations. This opens up new possibilities for blockchain innovation, as different projects can build and optimize their own ecosystems without compromising on scalability or security.
Celestia is a breakthrough project in the blockchain space, offering a modular approach that allows developers to scale more efficiently, innovate more freely, and optimize for security and decentralization. By separating data availability from execution and consensus, Celestia opens the door to new, more flexible blockchain architectures and solves many of the challenges faced by traditional monolithic blockchains. Its innovative model, combined with the growing demand for scalable decentralized solutions, positions Celestia as a significant player in the future of blockchain infrastructure.
Deeper look at data availability
Celestia is designed to address one of the most critical issues in blockchain technology: data availability. As a modular data availability network, Celestia decouples the execution of transactions from the processes of consensus and data availability, creating a more scalable and efficient blockchain architecture.
The core of Celestia’s design is based on a novel solution to the data availability problem through data availability sampling (DAS), a process that allows nodes to verify that all necessary transaction data is available without requiring them to download entire blocks. This modular architecture lays the groundwork for the next generation of scalable blockchain systems, enabling developers to launch custom blockchains with ease while leveraging Celestia’s secure data availability layer.
Celestia’s data availability layer operates by ensuring that all necessary transaction data is available to participants in a trust-minimized manner, enabling blockchains built on top of Celestia to focus on execution and settlement without worrying about data availability. This is achieved through a combination of data availability sampling and Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs). DAS allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data by sampling small random portions of the block rather than downloading the entire dataset. The use of NMTs enables nodes and layers on top of Celestia to efficiently retrieve and verify only the data relevant to them, significantly reducing the computational load required for each participant in the network.
One of the more central aspects to Celestia’s data availability platform is 2D Reed-Solomon encoding, which is applied to every block of data. This encoding splits the block into shares and then extends it by adding parity data to create an extended matrix. This ensures that if a block producer attempts to withhold any part of the block, the rest of the data can be recovered by sampling a small portion of the shares. The key here is that the more light nodes that participate in sampling, the more data the network can handle without increasing the cost of verifying the entire chain. Essentially, as the network grows, it becomes more scalable and capable of handling larger block sizes.
The concept of light nodes is important when discussing Celestia’s scalability.
Unlike full nodes - which download and store entire blocks - light nodes only download block headers and perform data availability sampling. This process is extremely resource-efficient, allowing light nodes to verify the integrity and availability of large blocks with minimal bandwidth and computational power. As more light nodes join the network, the overall data availability improves, allowing the block size to increase without a corresponding increase in verification costs. This relationship between the number of light nodes and the scalability of the network is a major advantage of Celestia’s architecture.
Celestia also introduces a fraud-proof mechanism to prevent malicious block producers from creating incorrect extended data. If a block producer generates invalid extended data, light nodes can issue fraud proofs, which allow other participants to detect and reject the invalid block. This mechanism ensures that even if a small number of nodes attempt to act dishonestly, the network as a whole remains secure and reliable. Fraud proofs can be generated efficiently because Celestia’s 2D Reed-Solomon encoding allows nodes to verify the integrity of just a small portion of the data rather than the entire block.
In addition to DAS, Celestia’s use of NMTs enhances its scalability and flexibility. NMTs allow applications building on Celestia to download only the data relevant to their specific use case, such as a rollup or dApp. This means that block data can be partitioned into different namespaces, and applications only need to concern themselves with the data in their own namespace. This feature is especially useful for rollups and other execution layers that rely on Celestia for data availability but have their own distinct execution environments.
Celestia’s modular architecture allows for greater specialization at every single layer of the blockchain stack. Traditional blockchains—known as monolithic blockchains—must handle execution, consensus, and data availability in a single layer. This can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks, particularly as the network grows. In contrast, Celestia’s modular design allows it to focus exclusively on data availability and consensus, while leaving execution to other layers. This separation enables Celestia to optimize for data availability, allowing execution layers to scale independently while benefiting from the secure, scalable foundation provided by Celestia.
The underlying Proof-of-Stake blockchain that powers Celestia’s data availability layer—called the celestia-app—is built using the Cosmos SDK and a modified version of the Tendermint consensus algorithm. Celestia-core, the modified consensus layer, supports the 2D Reed-Solomon encoding scheme and replaces traditional Merkle trees with NMTs, enabling the efficient handling of large data blocks. By leveraging these modifications to the Tendermint consensus, Celestia ensures that the data availability layer remains robust, secure, and highly scalable.
Celestia compared to EigenDA
Celestia and EigenDA are two different solutions designed to address the data availability problem within the modular space.
While both serve as modular data availability layers, they differ in design philosophy, technical architecture, and ecosystem integration. Each protocol offers a unique approach to handling data availability for roll ups and other blockchain applications, but they also share a common goal: scaling decentralized applications by optimizing the way data is stored, verified, and made available to the network. Below is a detailed comparison between these two innovative DA protocols.
Celestia is built as a dedicated data availability and consensus layer for modular blockchains, decoupling these functions from the execution layer. This allows developers to build rollups and other blockchain applications that handle transaction execution while relying on Celestia for data availability. Celestia’s design emphasizes flexibility, enabling developers to use any virtual machine or execution environment. The primary focus of Celestia is to provide a trust-minimized DA layer that can scale without requiring every participant in the network to store all data—this is achieved through data availability sampling.
EigenDA, in contrast, is built on top of EigenLayer, a restaking protocol that leverages the security of Ethereum by allowing ETH holders to restake their ETH to secure external services, such as EigenDA. Unlike Celestia, which has its own consensus mechanism, EigenDA inherits the security of Ethereum by using ETH restakers to validate data availability. EigenDA’s core functionality is focused on enabling hyper scalability, where the throughput of data can scale linearly with the number of operators in the network. As a result, EigenDA can provide high-throughput DA services, particularly tailored for Ethereum rollups.
One of the key differences between Celestia and EigenDA lies in their security models. Celestia uses its own Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm to secure its network. Validators stake native tokens to participate in the consensus, ensuring that the data stored and made available is reliable. Celestia’s design leverages DAS, which allows light nodes to sample a small portion of data in a block to verify its availability without downloading the entire dataset. This makes Celestia highly secure while maintaining decentralization, as it does not rely on trusted intermediaries or external security sources.
EigenDA, on the other hand, inherits its security from Ethereum via the EigenLayer. In EigenLayer’s model, ETH holders restake their ETH to secure services like EigenDA. This allows EigenDA to leverage Ethereum’s massive economic security, backed by millions of ETH restaked in the protocol. EigenDA’s security is further bolstered by a slashing mechanism that punishes operators who misbehave or fail to properly store data. This integration with Ethereum makes EigenDA particularly attractive to rollups built on Ethereum, as they can utilize EigenDA’s services without adding new trust assumptions.
In terms of scaling, Celestia and EigenDA take different approaches to achieve high throughput. Celestia’s modular architecture is designed to scale by increasing the size of the blocks that can be processed by its data availability layer. Celestia’s goal is to scale to 1-gigabyte blocks, which would allow it to handle massive data throughput comparable to traditional Web2 systems like Visa. This scaling is made possible by DAS, which distributes the burden of verifying data availability across a large number of light nodes, allowing the network to scale as more nodes participate.
EigenDA aims to achieve scalability through its operator set, which scales linearly with the number of operators participating in the network. At launch, EigenDA offers 10 MB/s of write throughput, which is 5x higher than its nearest competitor. As more operators join the network and more ETH is restaked, EigenDA’s throughput can increase, making it an ideal solution for high-volume applications such as rollups on Ethereum. This design makes EigenDA particularly well-suited for the Ethereum ecosystem, where throughput demands are growing rapidly with the adoption of rollups and layer-2 scaling solutions.
Celestia is designed as a modular, blockchain-agnostic DA layer, making it compatible with a wide range of blockchain environments. Developers building on Celestia can deploy rollups using any execution environment, including Ethereum Virtual Machine, WASM, or other specialized VMs. This flexibility makes Celestia a versatile platform for developers looking to build sovereign rollups or scale existing blockchain ecosystems. Celestia’s DA layer can serve as the foundational infrastructure for a variety of blockchain networks, allowing for seamless interoperability and scalability across different chains.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem. It supports rollups built on frameworks like the OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit, as well as AltLayer, Conduit, Caldera, and Gelato. EigenDA’s compatibility with these rollup-as-a-service platforms allows developers to easily integrate EigenDA’s DA services into their rollups, enabling cost-effective, high-throughput, and secure DA. EigenDA’s native token staking model also provides flexibility for rollup developers to customize how data availability is verified, allowing them to use their native tokens for security if desired.
Both Celestia and EigenDA offer compelling economic models, but they approach cost and resource efficiency quite differently.
Celestia focuses more on reducing the cost of data availability by enabling light nodes to perform DAS with minimal resource consumption. This reduces the cost of operating nodes and makes it economically viable for a larger number of participants to join the network. Celestia’s design also ensures cheap transaction fees for end users by efficiently distributing data availability verification across the network.
EigenDA introduces a unique pricing model that offers on-demand and reserved bandwidth options for rollups using its DA services. EigenDA’s linear scaling of throughput with the number of operators ensures that it can offer highly competitive pricing as the network grows.
EigenDA recently introduced a 10x reduction in pricing for both on-demand and reserved bandwidth customers, making it one of the most cost-efficient DA solutions for Ethereum rollups. EigenDA also offers a free tier for developers, allowing them to get started with 1.28 KiB/s of throughput for up to 12 months, making it accessible for projects in their early stages.
Celestia’s roadmap is focused on achieving its ambitious goal of scaling to 1 GB blocks, which would place it among the most scalable DA layers in the blockchain space. Celestia’s modularity ensures that it can adapt to the evolving needs of decentralized applications, particularly as more rollups, sovereign chains, and on-chain worlds emerge. Celestia’s long-term vision is to be the foundational DA layer for a broad range of ecosystems, supporting cross-chain interactions and enabling the scalability of decentralized applications that demand high throughput and minimal latency.
EigenDA, on the other hand, is designed to be the endgame for Ethereum-native data availability. By leveraging Ethereum’s economic security and offering hyper scalability, EigenDA is positioned to become the go-to solution for rollups and L2s within the Ethereum ecosystem. EigenDA’s mission is to scale the decentralized world by making reliable, scalable, and secure DA abundant, enabling applications that were previously unthinkable due to data throughput limitations. With its recent mainnet launch and rapidly growing ecosystem of rollup partners, EigenDA is set to play a critical role in the future of Ethereum’s scalability solutions.
While Celestia and EigenDA both aim to solve the data availability problem, their approaches, target ecosystems, and technical designs set them apart. Celestia is focused on modularity, flexibility, and cross-chain integration, while EigenDA is tightly integrated with Ethereum’s ecosystem, offering unparalleled scalability and security through restaking. Both solutions will play a significant role in the future of blockchain scalability, but their distinct focuses ensure that each will serve different needs within the evolving decentralized landscape.
Exploring Celestia’s future
Celestia stands at the forefront of the evolving modular blockchain ecosystem, acting as a crucial data availability (DA) and consensus layer that addresses the scalability and efficiency challenges faced by decentralized systems. In the world of blockchain, modularity is becoming the dominant trend, as it allows blockchains to scale and operate more efficiently by decoupling key functions like execution, consensus, and data availability. Celestia’s architecture is designed to optimize DA and consensus, providing the necessary infrastructure for other layers—especially execution layers like rollups—to function independently but securely. This decoupling is essential for breaking through the bottlenecks that have historically limited the scalability of monolithic blockchains.
In a monolithic blockchain, all the major components—consensus, execution, and data availability—are tightly bundled together. This creates inefficiencies, as these systems have to perform multiple complex functions at once. For instance, blockchains like Ethereum or Solana have to manage both the execution of transactions and the storage and verification of data, leading to state bloat and limiting scalability. Celestia's role in the modular blockchain paradigm is to relieve execution layers from these burdens by offering a dedicated data availability layer. By allowing execution layers like rollups to offload data availability to Celestia, these rollups can focus purely on transaction execution, vastly improving their performance and scalability.
Celestia enables the creation of sovereign rollups, which are roll ups that operate as independent blockchains with their own governance and execution environments, but which rely on Celestia for data availability and consensus. This allows developers to launch highly customizable roll ups without being tied to the constraints of a monolithic chain. Rollups benefit from Celestia’s ability to securely scale data availability, meaning that even as the number of rollups or the volume of transactions increases, Celestia can handle the growing data load without becoming a bottleneck. This is especially crucial for high-throughput applications like DeFi platforms, on-chain games, and payments networks, which require significant data capacity to function efficiently.
Celestia’s unique advantage within the modular ecosystem lies in its use of data availability sampling, a technique that allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data without having to download the entire block. This is a game-changer for scalability. Traditional blockchains require every node to store the full dataset, but with DAS, light nodes only need to sample small portions of the data to confirm availability. This means that as more light nodes join the network, the system can handle larger blocks and more data while keeping the computational and storage costs for each individual node low. DAS not only reduces the resource requirements for nodes but also makes Celestia’s DA layer inherently scalable, ensuring that it can support a growing number of users and transactions.
The Namespaced Merkle Trees used by Celestia further enhance the modular blockchain architecture by enabling execution layers to download and verify only the data relevant to them. This means that rollups or other applications don’t need to handle irrelevant data, which minimizes overhead and boosts efficiency. NMTs essentially partition data into namespaces, allowing different applications to interact with their specific dataset while ignoring others. This optimization is particularly beneficial in environments where multiple rollups are operating simultaneously, as it reduces congestion and ensures that each application can access the data it needs quickly and efficiently.
When compared to other data availability solutions, Celestia’s modular approach offers several distinct advantages. One of its closest competitors, Avail, also focuses on providing a scalable data availability layer. Celestia’s DAS protocol gives it a competitive edge, particularly in terms of reducing node requirements and improving the scalability of light nodes. This makes Celestia’s architecture more lightweight and adaptable, particularly for developers who want to build highly efficient execution environments. Celestia’s infrastructure allows execution layers like Optimistic Rollups or ZK-Rollups to scale independently of the constraints typically imposed by monolithic blockchains, while still maintaining high levels of security and data integrity.
Celestia's role as a data availability provider means it integrates seamlessly with other layers in the modular blockchain stack. In a fully modular ecosystem, the DA layer interacts with settlement layers and execution layers to form a cohesive, yet highly scalable, blockchain architecture. By decoupling DA from consensus and execution, Celestia enhances cross-layer interoperability. For example, rollups built on top of Celestia can take advantage of lazy bridging mechanisms to transfer assets and data across different execution environments with minimal friction. This level of interoperability is crucial for enabling multi-chain ecosystems, where assets and applications are no longer confined to a single blockchain but can move freely between various environments.
Celestia’s modular design is also a boon for developers who are looking to build on a flexible, high-performance foundation. Unlike monolithic chains, where developers must work within the constraints of a single virtual machine or programming language, Celestia allows developers to use any execution framework or VM. This could include popular environments like the Ethereum Virtual Machine, but it also opens the door for more specialized systems like WASM or custom VMs that cater to specific application needs. This flexibility is a major selling point for Celestia as it enables developers to innovate without being locked into a particular ecosystem’s limitations.
The economic benefits of Celestia’s modular approach are also significant. For developers, the ability to offload consensus and data availability to Celestia reduces the overhead involved in deploying and maintaining their own infrastructure. By relying on Celestia’s DA layer, developers can focus on building execution layers and applications, knowing that their data will be securely stored and verified. This is particularly appealing for applications that need high throughput and low fees, such as DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, or gaming platforms. By reducing the resource requirements for verifying data, Celestia enables these applications to operate at scale without incurring the prohibitive costs associated with monolithic blockchains.
Celestia’s role in the modular blockchain ecosystem is transformative. By decoupling the key functions of a blockchain—specifically, consensus and data availability—from execution, Celestia provides a foundational layer that enables unprecedented levels of scalability and flexibility. Its use of DAS, NMTs, and an open, flexible architecture means that developers are no longer constrained by the limitations of monolithic chains. As a result, Celestia is a key enabler of the next generation of blockchain applications, helping to realize the full potential of decentralized technology while maintaining the security, efficiency, and scalability needed to support a global user base. As the modular ecosystem continues to evolve, Celestia’s position as a data availability provider will be central to the success of these next-generation systems.
Recent developments and next steps for Celestia
Celestia has made significant strides in its development and expansion, particularly since the launch of its Mainnet Beta last year. This milestone marked a new phase for the project, as it shifted from a development-heavy stage to actively supporting its growing ecosystem. Over the past year, the early ecosystem of Celestia has seen substantial growth, with developers deploying the first 20 rollups.
These rollups are a critical component of Celestia’s modular blockchain architecture, allowing various applications to take advantage of Celestia’s data availability layer. Currently, Celestia blobs (the data packets stored and shared on the network) represent 40% of all data published, indicating the increasing reliance on Celestia's infrastructure by its ecosystem projects.
At the same time, Celestia's core developers have been hard at work preparing for the next phase of the protocol’s evolution. The development community has held 16 public core dev calls and formed a zero-knowledge working group, reflecting a high level of collaboration across multiple teams. One of the community’s achievements has been the drafting and proposing of 24 Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs), submitted by six core development entities.
These CIPs aim to refine and upgrade Celestia’s infrastructure, ensuring it can scale effectively and remain secure as adoption continues to grow. The collaborative, more community-driven nature of Celestia’s development is a pillar of its modular architecture, and the CIPs highlight the collective effort to push the protocol forward.
Going forward, the Lemongrass upgrade is a key focus for Celestia’s core developers. Lemongrass will be the protocol’s first major upgrade and is set to introduce several important improvements to the consensus layer. A new technical roadmap has been released to guide this next phase of development, with a particular emphasis on scaling the network’s data throughput. The roadmap outlines a core objective: scaling to 1 gigabyte blocks.
This ambitious goal will increase Celestia’s data throughput, paving the way for high-performance applications, including those requiring significant data capacity, such as Visa-scale payment networks and fully on-chain games. This scaling effort is enabled by Celestia’s modular design, which allows the network to grow without the state bloat or overhead commonly associated with monolithic blockchains.
Achieving 1GB block sizes would allow Celestia to deliver a massive increase in throughput, with enough capacity to support many parallel networks operating at the scale of Visa’s transaction throughput (~24,000 transactions per second, or TPS). The increase in block size would also unlock the potential for new on-chain applications that were previously deemed unviable due to data limitations. This includes Web2-like latency for dApps, making them more user-friendly and responsive for end users. Celestia’s architecture allows developers to build applications using any virtual machine they prefer, providing the flexibility to innovate without the constraints of a single smart contract language or rollup framework. This flexibility makes Celestia a highly adaptable platform for developers looking to scale their projects.
A critical component of Celestia’s roadmap to 1GB blocks involves several technical innovations. These include the introduction of a content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, and optimization of the CometBFT block propagation system, among other upgrades. Celestia’s team is also working on internally sharding nodes and improving the data availability sampling (DAS) protocol. Together, these innovations aim to significantly increase Celestia’s capacity without requiring higher resource usage from light nodes. By focusing on DA and consensus rather than execution, Celestia can push the limits of blockchain scalability in ways that monolithic layer-1 blockchains cannot.
One of Celestia's most important goals is ensuring that blockspace is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, on any device.
This commitment to accessibility is driving the development of light nodes that can run directly in a web browser, allowing any user to verify the correctness of data in Celestia’s blockspace. An early version of this browser-based light node, developed by Eiger at Lumina.rs, is already available for users to try. This move represents a step toward the trust-minimized future that Celestia envisions, where applications built on its infrastructure are verifiable by anyone, ensuring that the decentralized ethos of blockchain is preserved.
In addition to scaling block size and improving accessibility, Celestia is also working on frictionless blockspace for both developers and end users. The team is focused on enhancing the developer experience for rollup builders, providing tools and frameworks to make it easier to deploy rollups on Celestia’s infrastructure. One of these innovations is Lazybridging, which improves interoperability between rollups on Celestia by addressing modular fragmentation. This will allow assets to flow seamlessly across different rollups without the need for complex bridging operations, making the ecosystem more fluid and user-friendly.
The upcoming Lemongrass hard fork is a significant milestone in Celestia’s development and will introduce several key features. One of the most anticipated upgrades is CIP-10, which introduces a new signaling mechanism for validators to coordinate network upgrades. This mechanism simplifies the upgrade process by allowing validators to signal their readiness for a hardfork, ensuring that upgrades can proceed more efficiently with minimal downtime. Other improvements, such as CIP-6 (price enforcement for transactions) and CIP-14 (interchain accounts for better interoperability with IBC-enabled chains), will also be introduced in Lemongrass, further enhancing the network’s capabilities.
Celestia’s Data Availability layer is undergoing parallel technical changes, including CIP-4, which focuses on pruning blob data to optimize resource usage, and CIP-19, which introduces a new messaging framework called Shwap for data availability and sampling. These changes are designed to streamline the network’s performance while maintaining the integrity and efficiency of data availability. With these upgrades, Celestia is preparing to scale its DA layer further while ensuring it remains resource-efficient and accessible to a broad range of users and developers.
Celestia’s recent developments highlight its commitment to scalability, accessibility, and innovation in the modular blockchain space. The upcoming Lemongrass upgrade, the roadmap to 1GB blocks, and the continuous improvement of the DA layer all position Celestia as a leader in blockchain infrastructure. As the ecosystem continues to grow, Celestia’s ability to scale beyond the limitations of traditional blockchains will unlock new possibilities for developers and users alike, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the decentralized world.
Going forward the team has a lot of work and a very in depth roadmap to fulfill. Celestia has done a great job at keeping pace thus far and continues to explore the different approaches to scaling data availability across the modular ecosystem. If you’re looking for further information or updates on Celestia you can check out their Twitter here or their blog here.
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