Celestia is a layer one proof of stake blockchain which provides a pluggable data availability and consensus layer. It orders data and makes it available, but it does not execute transactions. Celestia is optimized as a shared security layer for specialized execution environments such as rollups to live on top of. While Celestia will support all flavors of rollups, it is initially focused on the EVM and Cosmos SDK. Celestia itself is built on the Cosmos SDK and uses Tendermint as its consensus engine. The key team members behind it each have incredibly impressive track records in the space.
Celestia offers multiple advantages over traditional solutions:
Scalability — By decoupling execution from consensus and data availability, Celestia is able to specialize and scale linearly with the number of nodes on the network. Execution environments are then free to optimize on top.
Simplicity — Celestia refers to itself as a pluggable solution, hoping to make it as easy to deploy an app-specific blockchain as clicking a button. The long tail of a potentially infinite number of blockchains will have a natural home on top of Celestia.
Shared Security — No more need to bootstrap your own security and validator set as an individual chain. Whether this is for what would be an otherwise stand-alone chain, or a Validium that would need to bootstrap a data availability committee, those options are far more difficult and fragment security.
Sovereignty — The beauty of the simplicity of Celestia’s design is that it offers so much freedom to those applications built atop it. No more being tightly bound by the execution environments and governance decisions of the chain you sit on top of.
The good news is the launch of the Cilistia testnet on January 30th, and you still have time to do it! WELLCOME!