Exclusive Interview with CELESTIA COO Nick White | KBW2023

[Music] Korea has a really vibrant ecosystem uh there's a lot of Builders a lot of people specifically that I know in the cosmos ecosystem who are building lots of different protocols and there's just so much uh enthusiasm also on the consumer side a lot of gaming and what I also like about Korea is the um adoption on the actual like government side there seems to be a lot of support for crypto and and blockchain as a as a industry which is very different to some other countries in the [Music] world Celestia's goal is to build a user owned user verified internet where um people can be connected in a network of of cryptographic trusts so they can uh transact and and cooperate with each other in a way that uh is like borderless and and Trust minimized and um I think this is sort of the next evolution in how human beings will be able to like interact with each other so the the next big things that Celestia is doing are we're going to launch our main net in the next few months and uh that will make Celestia the first uh modular blockchain Network to support data availability sampling and um from there we're going to be uh bootstrapping a new ecosystem of rollups and other modular protocols that will be integrated with and our goal is to enable anyone to deploy a blockchain as easily as a smart contract and so if we're successful there's going to be a whole new ecosystem of of rollups that emerge uh each with different use cases from defi to gaming to Social and um they'll all be able to sort of uh connect with each other through this common sort of security uh uh zone of of Celestia [Music] shared security is really important because if you think of blockchains and web 3 as a new Evolution of the internet um these chains and applications need to be able to talk to each other uh in a secure way um and it's sort of like imagine an internet where there aren't hyperlinks between websites then the internet just has isolated information they can't talk to each other and I think a world without shared Security in web 3 would would be similar to that where you have state and applications and value and liquidity and users but they can't actually effectively be connected and and usually this connectivity is what like makes these emergent use cases and and network effects that make the overall platform more powerful than this sum of its parts so the ideal customer for uh a rollup is uh can be a lot of different things they can be someone who uh wants to build their own ecosystem their own chain um and so they want to have a a smart contract sort of based like General execution rollup on which other developers deploy things um or it could be someone who wants to build an app chain like a a rollup that's specifically tailored to a specific use case and those like the advantage is that rather than having when when you deploy a smart contract you're kind of beholden to the uh rules of the underlying layer one blockchain monolithic L1 and you're kind of giving up a lot of your ability to capture meev or fees from your application when you build a rollup you can capture more of that so you you get that ability and versus like uh a monolithic L1 uh if you deploy as a rollup you reduce the uh amount of overhead to launch the chain so rather than having to bootstrap a set of validators and continue to and issue a token and pay the validators all those operating costs in coordinate with them as a rollup you dramatically reduce that because you're basically uh borrowing Celestia's validator set and paying as you go for that service so polka dot and a lot and also Cosmos have similar visions of uh a network of interconnected blockchains in the polka dot model um they have uh sort of the relay chain which is meant sort of like The Hub of security and interoperability of their platform the thing about polka dot that's different to Celestia is that at the end of the day the underlying protocol is still monolithic in the sense that uh it doesn't scale when you add more blockchains the entire system has to do more work to verify them in the Celestia model the uh each additional rollup doesn't cause more overall verification for the entire network so you're actually able to in terms of like verifiability preserve verifiability even as you scale up the system that's a really key one another one is that in polka dot the economic model is that you have to rent uh uh sort of like core time or block space from the the the relay chain and uh and and to do that you have to stake a certain number of tokens that's at least what I remember in Celestia it's a it's a pay as you go more like ethereum gas where you pay for the amount of block space you want to consume and it's completely on demand and flexible and so um my understanding in in polka dot is that like you launch you to bid and launch a par chain you have the par chain for a certain amount of time right and like that uh the economics of that model I think and and the way that it's kind of gated on governance uh is not very optimal and it doesn't cater to permissionless Innovation like Celestia does I would say Obviously modularity is a big one I think modular chains are going to continue to grow in their capabilities and the entire ecosystem is going to start to attract more and more Builders and enable use cases that uh weren't possible in a monolithic system uh another major Trend that I'm excited about from the user experience standpoint is intense which is a new way of uh for users to interact with blockchains in a way that abstracts a lot of the complexity and makes it so that user users don't have to understand deeply what's happening under the hood and a third uh Trend that I think will be really powerful would be sort of more social or onchain gaming apps apps that have um will be able to bring in sort of like the non crypto audience and that aren't gated by uh regulation and uh and have sort of a built-in viral nature to them so so you know we've seen that with things like friends. Tech it it's had the ability to actually penetrate outside of the web 3 space into more normal users because it has this natural social network effect I think gaming is another example of that that can actually penetrate beyond the existing set of web through users and pull in more people um and it's not going to be stuck with you know a regulator trying to like block