Celestia collaborates with Starknet for layer-3 crypto

A few days ago Starknet announced a collaboration with Celestia for layer-3 crypto. 

The announcement states that modularity will meet integrity, as Celestia Blobstream is coming to Starknet to enable high-performance L3 with Celestia underneath.

Celestia and the new crypto collaboration with Starknet

Celestia is a new crypto project that landed on the markets in October of last year.

This is a modular blockchain network that securely adapts to the number of users, making it easy for anyone to launch their own blockchain.

For example, with Celestia “underneath” (meaning as a basic infrastructure), it is possible to quickly launch and deploy a blockchain with the main Ethereum rollup frameworks, or transform almost any VM into its own proprietary chain.

Its native cryptocurrency is TIA, which landed on the crypto markets at the end of October 2023 at a price of $2.2.

Unlike many other airdrops that have been launched in recent months, TIA’s airdrop has been a true great success, for many unexpected.

In fact, already in mid-November the price of TIA had exceeded $7, and then also exceeded $14 by the end of the year. 

In the course of 2024, it set a new historical record when it even exceeded $20 in January. Practically, its value almost multiplied by ten in just two and a half months. 

Since then it has dropped by 20%, but the current value is still 650% higher than the launch value. 

This is probably the most successful crypto launch of 2023, mainly because the initial boom was not followed by a dump, as happened in other similar occasions. 

Starknet 

Starknet is indeed a layer-2 of Ethereum.

Specifically, it is a permissionless and decentralized Validity-Rollup (ZK-Rollup). 

Validate off-chain transactions, thanks to advanced mathematics and cryptography, to overcome Ethereum’s scalability limits. Its goal is to provide unlimited scalability while maintaining the security and decentralization of Ethereum.

As an L2 on Ethereum, it allows any dApp to achieve unlimited scalability for its computations, without compromising the composability and security of Ethereum. 

The StarkNet contracts and the StarkNet operating system are written in Cairo, supporting the implementation and scaling of any use case, regardless of the business logic.

Furthermore, thanks to its Native Account Abstraction, all accounts are smart accounts, and their behavior is determined by developers, rather than at the protocol level. 

This allows for greater flexibility in account management, as developers can customize their applications beyond the constraints of the protocol, thus improving user experience and security.

Starknet immediately launches into crypto collaboration with Celestia

36 hours after Starknet’s announcement regarding the collaboration with Celestia, more than 10 external contributors have been assigned to the tasks and have started developing the Blobstream Starknet project.

The idea is to use Celestia for storing Starknet data with the aim of minimizing gas costs.

In this way it will be possible to create low-cost layer-3 on Starknet. 

All of this is made possible by using the key component of the Celestia ecosystem called Blobstream, which is a data availability (DA) layer capable of securely storing large amounts of off-chain data while still providing verifiable proofs of their existence.

On-chain vs. off-chain

There was a time when the Ethereum ecosystem boasted about being able to handle everything on-chain, unlike Bitcoin whose layer-2 solutions work well mostly off-chain. 

The transition to Proof-of-Stake was supposed to consolidate this difference, but in reality, it has not solved one of the main problems of on-chain transactions: the cost of fees.

Instead, the best way to eliminate on-chain transaction fees is to not have to register them on-chain, just like Celestia’s Blobstream does. 

Or, some transactions make sense to continue recording them on-chain, even if the cost is higher, but the vast majority of transactions, especially those of small entities or that basically only record data, it is actually convenient not to record them on-chain. 

So here, even within the Ethereum ecosystem, as demonstrated by this choice of Starknet, there is an increasing trend towards minimizing on-chain transactions as much as possible, since off-chain transactions are much faster, efficient, and cost-effective. 

Sure, it is not easy to maintain a high level of off-chain security, and it is also not easy to do it in a truly decentralized way, but as demonstrated by Lightning Network and Celestia, it can be done. 

The same Vitalik Buterin has said that it will take some more time before reaching a good on-chain solution (sharding), and that in the meantime the best solutions are precisely the rollups. 

The ideological approach of those who want to do everything on-chain at all costs is proving to be less efficient than the more realistic approach of those who do not hesitate to move minor things off-chain.