Celestia Launches Mamaki Testnet – Crypto Briefing

The Celestia team has announced the launch of its first testnet, codenamed “Mamaki.”

Data Availability Sampling on the Blockchain

Celestia’s first testnet was successfully launched today.

“Mamaki”, an upgraded version of Celestia’s now-retired devnet, offers a new data availability API that allows developers to submit or retrieve data by namespace from the blockchain. New community-oriented features have also been added, including the possibility of operating light nodes, delegating to validators, and sending transactions between wallets.

Other projects developed in parallel with the Celestia chain will be bringing more upgrades to Mamaki. A Celestia-native EVM settlement layer is expected.

According to Celestia co-founder John Adler, Mamaki marks the first time that “end-users can perform Data Availability Sampling (DAS) on a persistent, permissionless, decentralized blockchain.” He went on to explain that DAS allowed “block size to increase [securely] as more nodes join the network” without sacrificing decentralization.

A “modular” blockchain network, Celestia paints itself in opposition to traditional “monolithic” blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana. It aims at decoupling consensus from its execution layer, offering developers the freedom to easily deploy their own blockchains within the network, not unlike in the Cosmos ecosystem. 

Celestia’s architecture should also provide compatibility with any execution logic, including EVM and SDK, while maintaining high-security standards and avoiding potential scaling issues.

The project is backed, among others, by IBC co-creator Zaki Manian and Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman, and is open about its collaboration with the Interchain Foundation.

The team stressed that Mamaki is not Celestia’s incentivized testnet, stating another will be launched before mainnet.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, ATOM and other cryptocurrencies.

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