Modular March EP 18: Unveiling Blobstream and Celestia's Node Architecture

The core innovation of data availability in the modular landscape revolves around minimalism. Due to the minimal smart contract execution capabilities of altDA chains, they can focus solely on providing a specialized service of data verification & publishing. In addition to the design of minimal blocks, these chains are able to perform a unique task of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) which is a revolutionary innovation for blockchain scaling. In today’s presentation, we sit down with John Adler, an Ethereum OG and creator of optimistic rollups. We take a deep, technical dive through the various node types (full, light, and partial) in Celestia’s architecture. After that, we took a second to digest and summarize and then dove right into Blobstream, another cornerstone of Celestia's approach. Blobstream acts as a one-way relay for data attestations between Celestia and other blockchains and recently has been deployed in testnet on Base and Arbitrum Orbit. We also touched on the development of Succint’s Blobstream X, and their zk version of Blobstream. Finally, we asked some rapid fire questions about Celestia’s design and John’s perspectives on the modular space at large. Enjoy!