
Deep Dive into Celestia (TIA) with CEO Mustafa Al-Bassam
About this episode
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.
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
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