Revolutionizing the Blockchain Landscape: The Rise of Modular Blockchains and the Emergence of Celestia
Modular and monolithic blockchains - what they are and how they differ.
The first approach to building blockchains was monolithic, where all operations were processed on a single chain. In contrast, a modular blockchain delegates various functions to several specialized chains, which improves scalability, allows for system customization, and ensures security.
Modular blockchain is based on the principle of modular design, which involves dividing the system into smaller parts that can be replaced and modified. It specializes in specific functions, such as transaction processing or data availability. Different modular blockchains can be combined into a single system.
On the other hand, a monolithic blockchain concentrates all functions on a single chain. This leads to scaling problems, such as high hardware requirements, limited control, and high overhead. However, a monolithic blockchain retains the principle of decentralization and ensures security.
The basic principles of modular blockchains.
Modular blockchains have gained significant attention in recent years as a promising solution to the scalability and security issues of traditional blockchains. These blockchains aim to prioritize decentralization, scaling, and security, while reducing the costs for users to operate nodes and verify the network.
Decentralization is a critical component of modular blockchains, setting them apart from traditional distributed systems. Unlike web2 systems, modular blockchains are open and verifiable by any individual, allowing users to operate a node and verify the blockchain's integrity personally. This verifiability is crucial to its security, as nodes responsible for verifying the blockchain's rules play a crucial role in upholding its security.
As the number of users increases, blockchains must increase their capacity to process transactions. However, increasing the number of transactions processed by the blockchain can make it more challenging to verify the chain, making it less decentralized. To address this issue, modular blockchains prioritize scalability, enabling them to increase their capacity without increasing the cost for users to verify the network. This is achieved through technologies such as fraud proofs, validity proofs, and data availability sampling.
The security of modular blockchains is also of utmost importance. The validators or miners are responsible for processing transactions and adding them to the chain, and most Proof of Stake blockchains have a validator set that encompasses a group of nodes. To become a validator, nodes must stake tokens as a security deposit. In case of malicious activities, the stake can be burned in a process known as slashing, ensuring that the network remains secure.
While decentralization, scalability, and security are critical principles of modular blockchains, ultimately, it's the users who uphold the rules and ensure the chain's security. A robust, decentralized network of users who verify the chain can detect and punish malicious validators, making it nearly impossible to break the rules of the chain.
In conclusion, by understanding the core principles of modular blockchains, it becomes evident that they prioritize decentralization, scalability, and security while reducing the costs for users to operate nodes and verify the network. These principles are essential for ensuring the integrity and security of the network, making modular blockchains a promising solution for the challenges faced by traditional blockchains.
Benefits of modular blockchains
Modular blockchains have a number of advantages, including scalability, overall security and independence. One of the key ideas behind modular blockchains is their ability to share functions across multiple chains, allowing for greater scalability. A modular L1, such as Celestia, can specialize in data availability, providing L2 resources such as rollups that process more transactions.
In a monolithic world, all applications are on the same chain, resulting in competition between users when processing transactions. In the modular paradigm, applications are on separate chains, allowing users not to compete with each other for computing resources. Thus, transactions for many different applications can be processed simultaneously.
In addition, because of shared security, there is no need to create a new set of checkers when starting a new monolithic blockchain. Security is provided by a common source, such as Celestia, which allows the new blockchain to immediately leverage the security already created. This enables a more efficient and scalable startup of the blockchain ecosystem.
Sovereignty allows application rules to be controlled and technical parameters to be changed without the permission of external applications. This gives independence for developers and the community to set the rules for their sovereign blockchain. It also allows autonomy to be put back into the hands of the community.
What is Celestia and what are its advantages over monolithic blockchains.
Celestia is a modular blockchain network that enables anyone to launch their own blockchain. Unlike traditional blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Celestia is designed to be a cloud computer that provides consensus and data availability as essential resources to power a blockchain. It is analogous to a power grid where anyone can plug in to power their own blockchain, with the Celestia token serving as the currency to pay for the resources.
Data availability is critical to the security of any blockchain, and Celestia ensures that anyone can inspect the ledger of transactions and verify it. The network uses modular chains to solve the problem of downloading very large blocks, enabling users to verify them using data availability sampling.
Rollups are a type of blockchain that offload some work to a layer 1 like Celestia. They host apps and process user transactions, and once those transactions get processed, they are published to Celestia for order checking and availability.
Celestia promotes modularism rather than maximalism, creating a collaborative environment with many connected chains. Each new user that a modular blockchain brings in creates value for the whole ecosystem, not just a single L1. The most important layer in Celestia's blockchain is social consensus, allowing communities to self-organize in a sovereign way.
Overall, Celestia's modular design and focus on consensus and data availability make it a promising network for launching decentralized applications and promoting collaboration among different blockchain communities.
Conclusion
Modular blockchains, such as Celestia, are a new generation of blockchains that allow you to run your own blockchains on the same infrastructure. This solves the problem of competition between different blockchains and creates a collaborative ecosystem where each new user creates value for the entire ecosystem.
Celestia provides the means to create a cloud computing network that provides the necessary resources to run blockchains and ensure data security. Celestia uses data availability sampling technology to ensure that data is available for inspection, which ensures network security.
The outlook for modular blockchains is that they could become more popular because of the ability to run their own blockchains on the same infrastructure. This could lead to a more efficient ecosystem where different blockchains can interact with each other and share data.
Celestia's official pages:
Website: https://celestia.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YsnTPcSfWQ
Github: https://github.com/celestiaorg
Telegram: https://t.me/CelestiaCommunity
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLlvAEzXBFZ-P3zS6BF2Bjg