Deep Dive into Celestia (TIA) with CEO Mustafa Al-Bassam – The Defiant

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Episode Description

Today we’re joined by Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO and Co-Founder of Celestia Labs. 15 years after Satoshi, we finally have what a blockchain actually is Celestia provides the ability to publish data and make sure that data is available. Celestia had what many are calling one of the best launches of 2023, and they are the first Data Availability Layer live today.

In our conversation we get into how Mustafa built Celestia, other Data Availability Layers in the space, how Celestia can be thought of as a bulletin board for computers with some cryptographic and economic assurances – computers posting info so everyone can see it. It’s so simple. It’s an obvious fundamental building block. Yet they were the first to do it. Prior to Celestia, Mustafa was generally known for his expertise in ethical hacking. He had the US government at the age of 16 and was sentenced for it. We get into this and so much more, but first to ground the conversation, Mustafa shares what he is focused on at Celestia today.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:10 Mustafa Al-Bassam

8:45 Hacking the US Government

10:47 Lazy Ledger

14:13 Colab with Vitalik

16:00 Challenges

18:00 DA and Celestia within Blockchain

19:27 Modular Blockchain

21:54 Monolithic Chains

24:55 Celestia within Cosmos

25:40 Celestia technicals

29:08 Requirements to run a node

35:05 The Graph vs Celestia

36:42 Developer experience

38:23 Starting fresh

40:21 Advice for teams

41:10 Celestia’s culture

43:27 Payments

45:10 Decentralized Stablecoins