Quick Intro
Ethereum has suddenly become crowded with scalability solutions such as L2s that ironically cause network congestion to the point that the number of transactions to process has become a challenge, more specifically, ensuring that the details about transactions are available on demand.
Scalability solutions require constant data flow which Ethereum is not initially designed to support. The demand for Data Availability solutions has incentivized the innovation in the space, as the need for network integrity and security has increased. One of the top protocols addressing this issue is Celestia.
In a previous article we covered the data availability challenge on Ethereum in which we give a brief overview about Celestia. But how does it actually work? Let’s dive in.
Celestia: Core Idea and Analogy
The core concept is that Celestia acts as a helper for Ethereum, by acting as a place where transactions can be published and accessed by anyone. Celestia is able to handle a great amount of data and makes it easier for light nodes to check if data is correct.
Explained in simpler terms, imagine there is an exclusive library (Ethereum) that has become so popular because everyone wants to store their own book there. Imagine a group of smart people comes up with the idea of creating special shelves (rollups) in the library where you are still able to place your books easily and quickly, without having to find space in the main shelves. However, although these special shelves magically hold a lot of books, they’re not very efficient when retrieving books from them.
Celestia acts as a magical bookshelf that helps organize these special shelves, it also has a super efficient storage system that keeps everything organized without getting messy. Celestia keeps summaries or important pages from all the books that are neatly organized.
Modular Architecture
This design principle is one of Celestia’s core innovations and it consists of separating the consensus layer from the data availability and execution layers. Celestia separates itself from other layers and only focuses on the ordering and availability of data.
Its modular architecture allows Celestia to easily work with many other execution layers (rollups) and help them process transactions and execute smart contracts, leveraging the data made available by Celestia itself.
Consensus Mechanism
Celestia’s consensus mechanism is designed to be lightweight and efficient in a way that it doesn’t interfere with the network throughput. This efficiency is achieved by two main technologies: block sampling and DAS.
Block Sampling
Big part of how Celestia achieves efficiency is through block sampling. It consists of a process where light nodes download only block headers containing commitments of the block data. This enables light nodes to verify data availability without needing to download the whole block.
Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
Celestia is very efficient and smart because it doesn’t make librarians check every single stored item to know it’s there; they only need to look at a few items to be sure everything else is in the right place. This is possible because of Celestia’s Data Availability Sampling (DAS) that lets small computers (light nodes) confirm data is there without having to download everything.
DAS allows nodes to verify the availability of the entire block by only checking a small, random piece of it. It is a key technique for scalability as it ensures necessary data is available to verify transactions without requiring the data to be stored or processed on the main blockchain.
While they sound very similar, DAS and Block Sampling are not the same. DAS takes care of the random selection of unique coordinates in a big matrix to query full nodes for data chunks while Block Sampling is the process of actually downloading the block headers.
Fraud Proofs
Fraud Proofs are widely used to enable on-chain scalability, and they are a proof that works as cryptographical evidence that a verifier submits into the blockchain to challenge a transaction’s validity.
These play a crucial role in Celestia as they are leveraged to enhance security and scalability. This consists of Celestia exchanging fraud proofs with other networks and using them to prove invalid transactions, allowing nodes to re-execute disputed transactions to assess if they are fraudulent.
Additionally, Celestia uses fraud proofs of Incorrectly Generated Extended Data to enhance light nodes to reject blocks that contain invalid extended data, improving the network's security against malicious block producers.
There is no doubt that L2s and pertinent solutions are driving Ethereum closer to being what it was envisioned initially, however, it must be accepted that the development of new solutions most of the time comes at the cost of other aspects. The Data Availability challenge remains one of the top issues to be addressed in Ethereum regardless of solutions like Celestia being great at achieving what they’re envisioned to do, but causing other issues to branch out.
One thing that can be attributed to Celestia is their ability to quickly become a solution provider for many projects in the space thanks to their modular approach which allows them to work closely with all other rollups instead of being operating in a closed environment.
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