Celestia

Celestia (opens in a new tab) is a data availability (DA) layer that provides a scalable solution to the data availability problem (opens in a new tab). Due to the permissionless nature of the blockchain networks, a DA layer must provide a mechanism for the execution and settlement layers to check in a trust-minimized way whether transaction data is indeed available.

Key features

Two key features of Celestia's DA layer are data availability sampling (opens in a new tab) (DAS) and Namespaced Merkle trees (opens in a new tab) (NMTs). DAS enables light nodes to verify data availability without needing to download an entire block; NMTs enable execution and settlement layers on Celestia to download transactions that are only relevant to them.

• Data availability sampling light clients play an important role in the security, scalability and interoperability of the Celestia ecosystem.
• Celestia light clients enjoy nearly the same security as full nodes and do not rely on an honest consensus majority for state validity.
• Celestia's implementation integrates 2D Reed-Solomon erasure coding with Tendermint consensus and components of IPFS to achieve data availability sampling.