Pro Crypto: What Chris Burniske Wants You to Know About Celestia

29:52It is standard, right? Tons of networks, very household name networks have the feature that you can stake lock tokens and earn those rewards and those rewards are not locked. There are reasons for that, right? Like one is when you look at the tax code in the US, when you're receiving tokens, it's income, right? And so you have to be able to sell some of those tokens to cover your annual income tax. If you didn't, right, then you're incurring a liability that you may not have the ability to pay for. Another is like when the network launches, it needs stake weight, right? Like that's the security.

30:34And so if, you know, in the construct we've been in, which, you know, pre-2017, you could sell a lot of tokens to the public, right? That was the ICO era. And I think if Celestia had been around in the ICO era, you know, it probably would have gone that route. And it was really the SEC that pushed sales away from the public towards VCs. And that was the only regulated way to go that path. And so I would say Celestia, in good faith and has always been in good faith, you know, pursued that path of, well, we need to raise capital in order to fund the building we're doing, fund the innovation that we're going through.

31:18And, you know, in 23, 24, 25, a lot of these things have come to the forefront as conversations, and they're good conversations to have. But I think they, at least on X, they can lack a lot of the nuance of why the decisions are made. Or, you know, it's deemed to be decisions made out of malice or trying to take advantage of retail, whereas it's really decisions that were made given the facts and circumstances of the time. yeah i mean mstafa and nick do you want to weigh in at all on the um on the token launch aspects um maybe you know just for our viewers who are perhaps not aware like what was the breakdown in terms of that public private or public um so the insider split from the outset and you know your thoughts around that that launch yeah so i mean look i actually think the critics have a point but i think i think it's worth adding some context around this yeah um when it comes to as has been said when it comes to the staking awards i think celestia has uh kind of been made a poster child of the fact that staking awards can be sold when as you said it's a standard practice but but i still think the critics have a point that it potentially is not ideal that log participants can sell staking awards when they're supposed to be logged because that basically accelerates the liquidity but uh it's not it's not like some it's not it wasn't a conscious decision that you made.

32:48That was just the default Cosmos thinking module, which we didn't change because we were not trying to innovate on the kind of thinking economics. And it was also the case for most preferred stakeholders, including like Solana, Suri, Aptos, NIR, so on and so forth. But we are, there is now a community proposal, a celestial improvement proposal that, if accepted, should be implemented within the next two or so months that will make these staking awards locked so that will fix that and yeah so i think we're like we're the only protocol to actually fix that that started out that way but i will say as chris said um like if if you were a new protocol starting out i don't really see how you can square that tax issue because if you make staking awards uh locked and start then you do have this straight income tax problem where you can't stake unless you unless you have to pay unless you're for unless you you're able to pay taxes on tokens that you can't that are not liquid investments so that's kind of like an unsolved issue that that he's thinking about but that but that's something about fixing now when it comes to the token distribution and so we do have a relatively high insider distribution and again i think the critics have a point there like we have so I think it's around 33-34 % is allocated to investors and what I would say to this it's very easy to say oh yeah the investors got in at a very low price and it's unfair or what not but I think the context I have to realise is that when we did the seed around for Celestia in 2020-2019 you have to remember that Ethereum was around$100 and their 100 biggest protocol by market cap was like $50 billion.

34:40So if you go to CoinMarketCap and you go to the 100th protocol, it's like$50 billion. Right now, it's a billion dollars. So it's easy to say, oh yeah, the VCs got in at a low price. But the reality is that when I was first raising for Celestia, it took six months before even convincing a single investor to participate. And the first investor that I managed to participate was a college student who took a call in his dorm room that did a ticket into the spaceship. So it's not as if it's some scenario where, oh yeah, investors got some massive discount. That was genuinely the fair price at the time because crypto was very different back then.

35:23The prices were way lower. And it took six months before convincing a single person to even invest. Prices were way lower and the appreciation of data availability was not there, right? Like this was something that Celestia was creating. And so I think it's really easy for people from the here and now with, you know, widespread understanding of the importance of DA to be like, oh my God, you know, venture investors or private investors got at a great price. But at the time of investment, you know, probabilistically your investment was going to go to zero, right? If you just looked at the course of normal startups and, say, the creation that Moose was going through, you were working on ideating a belief into reality.

36:17Well, I'll pause there. Yeah, look, I mean, I don't think there's anything untoward there at all. And you were part of that class of protocols that launched in 2023. We were virtually the same. I mean, they had relatively high inside to public allocations, very same structures, very high valuations. And I think it's just a symptom of just the market structure and the lack of sort of regulatory oversight as well. But what I would personally like to see is valuations be much lower so that the tokens have a chance of actually generating returns from the get go. I mean, I think the biggest problem in the space right now is that we don't look at it the way sort of equity markets do, where generally, you know, there's a pricing mechanism and a higher assurance.

37:22not always successful, but it feels to me, and I come from equities, that there's a high assurance around the IPO actually performing. And it's just, I think that is maybe the issue at heart here. But it's just a... Just on that briefly, because when Celestia launched end of 23, it came out at$1 to$2, right? Which was a billion to 2 billion FDV. And then it ran to north of 20. So like at the IPO, if you bought, you know, before data availability was widespread within the crypto space as a concept, this is still at public launch, right? Open access. If you bought at IPO, it was, you know, 10 to 15x depending on where you exited.

38:09I think what ended up happening is like people call it the intellectual elite began to understand the importance of DA. that filtered through to everyone on X. There were a lot of people late to that trend, right? At the same time that crypto itself started rolling over, right? Basically, both a peak in like March, April of 24, and then December of 24. But so crypto started to roll over. Celestia started to go through unlocks. Celestia is also a very young ecosystem. So like it takes a long time to build. Like here we are in 2025, early 2025. we're about a year and a half into Celestia being live that's like you know Ethereum launched middle of 2015 right so like this is like Ethereum end of 2016 it hasn't even gone through its 2017 run just just as an example for folks but everything kind of goes a little bit faster in crypto now that people are attuned to the rewards and x is this hive mind and so something like Celestia and just looking at the price progression since.

39:16So like it came out public market, one to$2, one to$2 billion FDV, ran to 20 billion FDV and then sold off back down to three or just south of three, which is two and a half billion, two and a half billion, three billion FDV. I actually really like seeing that kind of price adjustment because it gives people opportunity again, right? Like if I go back in time and I look at where ETH bottomed in 1819, you know, bottomed about 100 bucks, that was 10 billion FDV. If I look at where Sol bottomed in 2223, just south of 10 bucks, you know, that was about 4 or 5 billion FDV. And so now you have Celestia coming into a 2, 3 billion FDV range.

40:01I think right now it's at 350, so 3 and a half billion FDV. that starts to be in that range where, hey, if this thing becomes a household name along, you know, an ETH or a Solana, it's potentially an attractive entry again. Right. And so there is this kind of like conflict that I see on X where people are mad that something has has sold off a lot. And I understand why they're mad. Like if they lost money, they can be an emotional experience. And I've gone through losing money, too. But at the same time, something being down 85 to 90 percent, if it really is a fundamental innovation, that should perk your ears up, right?

40:37Of, well, maybe this is also an attractive entry. Yeah, like, I mean, I think Celestia was different to a lot of the launches because as you said, like it actually went up, it rallied really well from that November or, you know, that sort of Q4 period in 2023. Most tokens though don't. And that's the issue. So it's not singling out Celestia, but general observation that I don't think a lot of the tokens are priced for launch well. And I think that's what X is picking up. But of course, X doesn't always pick up on the nuance that actually Celestia did have a really good launch in terms of the token price run up.

41:24but it's just if you look if you go through the launches over the last two years and just look at the way that it reacted now as you said like that that offers opportunity i mean look at sweet the way that it basically tanks and also abdos and then has rallied high into new all-time highs so it doesn't mean the death now i just think that um the space needs to get a little bit more clever about initial pricing. But look, I mean, I'm glad that we got to discuss that because it's been an area of conversation. Let's get back to actually what's happening today. Now, as you pointed out, like it's a very young protocol.

42:04I'm keen to hear about like what's happening on the adoption side. Where are you seeing, where are you having wins and what protocols, you know, are using Celestia today?

42:20yeah so um i think like we're i'm i think we're doing a lot better than i expected for adoption like i think we've got quite a lot of adoption for protocols only one year old so i can say some metrics so for example um like right now we have 90 market share of the da market because right now we're like the default place that rollups choose if they want scalable da because you can't do it on Ethereum, for example. If you're trying to deploy a roll-up, Ethereum's DA is too limited. So you're forced to use an alternative DA layer like Celestia. And right now, Celestia is the default place that roll-ups pick.

42:59So right now, I think we have something like 20, 30 different roll-ups deployed on Celestia with a total value secured right now of$500 million. And the biggest data poster of Celestia right now is Eclipse. which is a Solana virtual machine roll-up on Ethereum that is basically like a, it's bringing the Solana virtual machine into Ethereum as a roll-up, or as an L2. And it uses, it has to use Celestia as the VA because Ethereum's the A3 port, it's just not there to support it. And, but there's also other cool applications using Celestia that are basically early possible in Celestia. So Derive is, for example, a good example of that.

43:43It's a AppStacks that is developed as an Ethereum mobile that needs very high people. And they're doing hundreds of millions of logging every month recently. And other applications that we mentioned, like Pay, we mentioned that earlier. Applications that are basically only possible on Snapchat because they need very high people. yes i just want to jump in as well to say that like all the the trends on the actual adoption of the product and protocol from the demand of data availability the the number of roll-ups that are migrating and posting data to celestia are all like up into the right um and we're seeing kind of an exponential growth curve and demand but then a lot of people what they their criticism then becomes like oh well the the fees generated by celestia like the revenue overall has been very low.

44:34And I think it's important to address that because what they're missing is essentially that Celestia has intentionally set the fees for posting data extremely low, like virtually zero, just as a spam resistance mechanism. And essentially the game plan is to grow as much as possible. And then in the future, you know, figure out a fair way to price the service of of block space, essentially. And so I think people are kind of missing the forest for the trees. And if you also even rewind back in time to the early days of Solana, people had the exact same criticism, essentially, which was, oh, this thing is never going to generate enough fees, it's too cheap for people to use.

45:17And I think they kind of missed just thinking forward into the future and being patient to wait for the protocol to actually bootstrap its economy. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to show some data around this. My last screen wasn't working. So I'm pulling up some of the data that we provide for the Real Vision community, just looking at fees. And roughly at the moment, just on a smooth average, it's about$2 ,500 a day, which is roughly sort of$900 ,000 to a million a year. It's a very young protocol. But the interesting thing I thought just worth highlighting is that over the last 90 days, it's actually growing quite substantially while the rest of the market has retraced quite a lot in terms of fee activity.

46:01So that's actually a signal amongst the noise, I guess. And to your point, it sounds like you're sort of purposely setting the fees or the cost for data availability very, very low to grab market share. There was another screenshot which I was hoping to share, which does show that breakdown. So I can see that quite clearly that Celestia is really, in terms of the comparables to Ethereum started to really eat into that market share. And I'm not sure what the number that you've quoted, but it looks to me like on a Ethereum versus Soledice-to-Year basis at 80 % to 90 % of data availability fees. There we go.

46:42That's the one I was referring to. My screen wasn't loading. So, yeah, so there's definitely some signal there as well. I think the issue that, you know, me with sort of a market lens is looking at, you know, multiples. Now, I'll admit from the outset, you can't look at one particular metric as the only KPI for success when you're investing in crypto. It's far more nuanced and you need a lot more context. But if you look at just like the price versus the fees or the market cap versus fee multiples, I mean, it's many times the multiples that we're seeing on other blockchains. So at the moment, from that perspective, it's priced, you know, in a much more expensive range.

47:30But it's really about, I guess, growing faster than everything else to justify the valuation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think. Go ahead. Go ahead. yeah i mean i think for me um like the way i see it is like as you as you showed in your graph celestia has a 90 market share of data posted but in terms of fees it's like a something like a 5 market share of fees generated compared to ethereum because ethereum generates a lot more data fees because right now the fees in celestia are basically free like we're pre so in that sense for pre-revenue. But I think for me, the whole reason why I'm in crypto in the first place, and why I started Celeste in the first place, is because I want to see applications being developed that aren't possible unless you have abundant block space.

48:21And to see these applications developed, then the price of the block space needs to be way, way lower to actually see people experiment with those applications. So Eclipse, for example, they're using a ton of data on a silly tapping game, and people are complaining about oh yeah this is not real because it's just like a tapping game but the funny thing is like that that kind of application is not even possible on something like ethereum using ethereum da or any other or even salon and l1 itself like it's like if you want if you want to see crypto widely adopted like think about all applications think about all applications that um people envisioned that they want to use blockchains for but aren't possible today like let's decentralize uber for example like that's an example that people keep bringing up let's create this decentralized version of uber with decentralized version of airbnb but why aren't those applications actually why has the why aren't those applications actually possible in crypto today because there there is an abundant block space and for those applications to be possible in the first place use very very cheap block space and that's what we're trying to bootstrap by having data fees basically free on Celestia right now to see what kind of things that are only possible on Celestia that people are going to build.

49:35To just layering briefly, Jamie, on fees, it's like I think Celestia is about 100x cheaper than Ethereum for the same DA service. And so, you know, if you say, okay, Celestia is making about a million a year, that's just some not good math, right? A million a year in fees. If it were to price it where Ethereum is, you could say, well, Celestia could make 100 million a year. And that could make, you know, a lot of the trolls happy. Okay, here's like, 100 million a year protocol revenue for you. And so then you look at Celeste circulating, you know, call it one and a half billion. So Celeste fully diluted 3 billion.

50:11So it's 15 to 30 times, right? All of a sudden, it looks kind of cheap, you know, compared to a lot of different infrastructure out there. But the thing is, that would choke the growth that Celeste is here to provide. And it reminds me a lot of Amazon, right? Like Amazon in the early days, Wall Street was mad at Amazon because Amazon was never showing profitability. But it was just rolling into further growth, further growth, further growth, further growth in a really important market segment that it had a ton of conviction in. And now look at where Amazon is today. Right. And so and I also find it like a great irony that like it's meme coiners coming at, you know, me or Celestia being like, where are the protocol revenues?

50:49Whereas I'm like, well, like, you know which one do you want right like do you do you want meme coins do you want like real innovation and like i i think this is where it requires thinking along different time lenses and it's like celestia is intentionally keeping fees low such that its growth and market share can be greater later and then we'll figure out you know fair pricing at a later date yeah and by the way and by the way like the thing is right you could you could you can choose to take a pessimistic side of this and is like an attorney for example takes the pessimistic side of this where you basically believe that there isn't going to be any future growth in crypto there's only going to be like five crypto applications which is like token like meme coins nfts decentralized exchanges and that's the only applications we're ever going to get but like i'm choosing to take the optimistic side of this that we're going to see new applications that require tons of block space that people are still dreaming of, have even thought of.

51:51Things like autonomous agents on-chain, like on-chain AI agents will need to generate tons of transactions on-chain that are basically microtransactions, for example. So I'm choosing to take the optimistic side of this. And we might be wrong in the future. Maybe our optimism is wrong. But that's the thesis. That's the bet I'm taking. Yeah, I like the analogy. I mean, with Amazon, it makes sense. And I guess it sort of reaffirms this view or thesis that I've had for a while. It's not anything new or revolutionary, but like, block space is going to become severely commoditized over time. Like, that just is inevitable.

52:34So where the market meets in terms of that equilibrium is not Celestia, I believe, raising fees or costs substantially, but the rest of the space having to come down in their costs. So that seems to be the balance. And it's also causing me to think about actually from an asset allocation, portfolio allocation perspective, how balance should the what's the right balance in a crypto portfolio of blockchains and infrastructure versus applications um that's probably a discussion for another time maybe with you directly chris but yeah so it's very interesting to hear the those perspectives of how you're positioning yourself in the market to acquire massive market share um and also capture this trend where applications want full control over their execution environment so it's really really interesting from that perspective um look i mean have you guys this is a maybe a tough question um very hard to quantify but have you thought about like what the actual total size of this of the modular blockchain market is like have you got any thoughts around where we'll be in the next sort of three to five years i mean it could be like like in the in the best case scenario it could be as big or even bigger than internet like if you think about for example how every organization has its own like web presence they have their own website for example and most most most organizations you probably have a virtual machine on awgs running some kind of application, whether it's a shop or just the front page for the website or just some accounting processes for the company, you could imagine a future where like in the best case scenario, for example, a decentralized autonomous organization is to really kick off.

54:30And in the future, that's like the default way for people to go into business together. And then you could imagine a scenario where every DAO has its own like on-chain presence as a roll-up, for example. and so you can imagine a scenario where there's actually more blockchains than websites essentially every community every community might have its own on-chain presence and that on-chain presence might be in the form of their own roll-up or their own action for example yeah i uh i think it's very hard to predict the TAM but if you zoom out and you think of like the analogs to what block space and like Web3 is to previous paradigms of computing, like demand always outstrips supply, essentially.

55:20And you're always in this race to continue to provide more compute or more bandwidth, etc. And I think people, it's hard to predict in advance, like where the demand will come from. But then, you know, these interesting applications emerge that then all of eat up all that supply. Right. And so I think even I was talking to someone a week ago and they were saying that I found it very interesting that apparently in the early days of fiber, people had a really hard time raising funds to actually capitalize like the build out of fiber networks around the world because people, investors were like, well, who's going to need all that, that, that bandwidth?

55:58Like no one's, you know, we don't, no one uses the internet that much. Right. And now in hindsight, that's laughable. And so I think we're building, I think Celestia is basically equivalent to like fiber sort of upgrade to Web3. And while it seems like projecting those kind of numbers, you know, tens of millions of transactions per second and even more today seems sounds foolish. I think that in, you know, five to 10 years or even less, we'll realize that that's actually very reasonable, if not too small to actually meet the world's demand. And Jamie, too, it's like so we've kind of covered top down, which is hard when you're creating a category, which Celestia has.

56:40Jamie, you do a lot of work with, you know, looking at growth rates and regressions and just how fast crypto is growing, right? Every time you step back on an annual basis, you look at these growth rates and it's tremendous. And I remember Kathy would always say, it's all about growth at the margin. What is taking relative share? And I think you shared just 15 minutes ago or so, Celestia's growth was about 80 % in fees over 90 days. right uh if that's a 90 day growth rate and 80 80 compounded over four quarters as a 10x right and so it doesn't take that many 10x's in fees um to get to very sizable numbers uh of course the growth rates moderate as the size gets bigger right um but just to put rough dimensions in people's head here.

57:39So what about competition then? Let's go through like what that landscape looks like for Celestia. We had that chart earlier with Ethereum, but there are other data availability solutions out there. Do you guys just want to sort of talk about maybe some of the differences or the key differentiators between what you guys are doing versus those competitors? Sure. So I guess you can kind of place data availability to two buckets. The first bucket is Ethereum. Ethereum data availability solution, which is very expensive because there's a lot of demand for it and not a lot of capacity. But then there's these alternative data layers, so-called alternative data layers.

58:23And that's Celestia, and Celestia is one of them. And they provide a lot more data throughput than Ethereum. And so that's why rollouts like Eclipse have to use them. otherwise they just can't meet the demand and there's all the areas like ag in da for example or veil um but they have a lot less adoption than celestial and i think like like a lot of people say oh yeah like oh yeah da they're very short in da because it's a commodity but actually if you think about it and if it's a commodity that's actually kind of a good thing in some way because what we find is that the developers that use celestial they just want something that works right they They just want to pick the easiest solution.

59:06And the A fees right now and in the future are not the core cost or are not the significant cost of their product to run their product. And so if you imagine, for example, I think AWS is a good comparison. Amazon AWS charges, I'm not joking, it literally charges 100x for bandwidth than other providers. Like literally 100x for bandwidth. But people still use AWS. Like most businesses, AWS has the biggest market share. But why do they have the biggest market share even though they charge 100x for bandwidth? The reason for that is because even though they charge 100x for bandwidth, the end cost of web infrastructure for an average business is very low compared to the other costs.

59:56Like maybe 1 % of the external costs, even if the bandwidth is 100x. And they just want something that's reliable and that works. And Celestia is the best integrated and is the most reliable of the A solution up-built. So that's why it's the default. But even if the A was a commodity,

1:00:16like there's things that we're adding to Celestia to make Celestia more sticky as a product. So for example, we're adding native interoperability to Celestia to allow roll-ups that use Celestia to have incredibly fast interoperability experiences with all rollups. And that's something that Celestia is uniquely positioned to solve because Celestia has what's called a single slot finality or immediate finality, which means that Celestia finality time is a few seconds, whereas Ethereum, for example, is five minutes because you don't have immediate finality, which means that with Celestia, once we add native bridging, a native interoperability to Celestia, then roll-ups on Celestia can have interoperability between other roll-ups that's immediate.

1:01:03Like you will feel like you click a button and the transaction happens immediately. And that's only possible on Celestia because we have immediate finality where all the DAOs don't have that. And so that's like another thing that will make Celestia much more sticky as a product for roll-ups that are using Celestia. Yeah, so I mean, that's great. It still doesn't solve the problem of interoperability across the entire space. So is that something that you guys are looking to address as well, or is it just really the interoperability features within the Celestia ecosystem? I know that'll come first, but eventually.

1:01:39Is it something that you can see rolling out across sort of more broadly across ecosystems? Yeah, that's something that we're addressing. but the way that we're addressing it is in a way that we're not trying to create a walled garden because other roll-up systems also try and address this so for example like OP stack has the super chain for example and Arbitrum has like Arbitrum orbit and their own interoperability solutions so there's like different roll-up frameworks that are creating their own interoperability solutions but those interoperability solutions are kind of like a walled garden that only works between roll-ups that use that specific framework but we're coming at this from a different angle of a dealer we're neutral to the frameworks like you can different frameworks support Celestia so we're trying to create kind of create this as and an open garden and not trying to create a wall garden and in fact we're trying to make it that it's not even Celestia specific so that um if you deploy a rollup on Celestia you can access liquidity not just from Celestia but from any chain in blockchain X system and that's something that Celestia, again, is uniquely positioned to do because of the fact that we have IBC and we're also integrating Hyperlane natively as a module, which means that Celestia can have native bridges with other ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana, for example, without relying on some kind of third-party bridge like Wemble that is not really native.

1:03:07So because we can have native bridges with other ecosystems, you can kind of like natively, if you deploy on Celestia, you can natively access assets and users from any blockchain ecosystem. I want to jump in also and talk about this interoperability point because it's also key to understand what I think is the long-term bull case for Celestia and one of the unique things that it provides, which is that in the space of blockchain interoperability, if you want to have two applications or two chains connect to each other in a secure, like cryptographically secure way, they need to share a common data availability and consensus layer, which is what Celestia is.

1:03:51As soon as you branch out and you're on a separate chain, then you introduce trust. And basically that connection between those two chains, those two applications or blockchain computers, becomes insecure. And so you can kind of think of Celestia, It's sort of like imagine, again, analogizing back to the internet. It's like if you wanted to have HTTPS when you're connecting to an application you're using in your browser, if you want to have the equivalent of that in a blockchain setting, you need to share a common DA consensus layer. So I believe that in the long-term future, there's going to be a demand for co-location of applications that want to benefit from this secure interoperability.

1:04:36And that's where I think the network effects around Celestia really accrue. And that's why data availability in the long term is not a commodity. So one of the last things I just want to touch upon is like the data storage aspect. So where does the end result data, the final state or all of the data lie outside of like the data sampling? So is the data being constantly pruned and then kept with all the nodes? Or is there an off-protocol storage solution for these applications who are using Celestia? Yeah, so that's a good question because in some way, data advertibility is actually a bad phrase because it introduces a lot of confusion.

1:05:31because people get mixed up between data availability and data storage. So Celestia is not a data storage protocol like FileToyn or IPFS or WildRest from Sui. Celestia is like a proof of publication protocol. It's not a storage protocol and the difference is that you can think of Celestia as a newspaper. A newspaper publishes stuff but it's like that the newspapers are not necessarily going to be easily accessible in the future the idea of Celestia is that you can publish data to it and Celestia's job is to make sure that data can be downloaded by anyone that wants to access it for a certain period of time and that period of time right now is 30 days so anyone that wants to access the publish data will have had an opportunity to access that data and that's basically what the fundamental thing that any blockchain provides like if you look at the if you look at the bitcoin white paper it it doesn't actually mention the word blockchain it mentions this concept of a timestamping server right and the timestamping server takes data and timestamps it and makes it available for people to download and that's it and that's what celestia provides and and scales really well.

1:06:50So it's not a long-term storage solution. It's a publication. It's a way to publish data to the internet verifiably such that anyone who wants to download it can download it because that's fundamentally what a blockchain fundamentally is. You can almost think of it like a magical billboard on the internet where anyone can write something there and then there's a guarantee, a cryptographic guarantee that anyone around the world could see that and copy that for themselves. And fundamentally, that's what all blockchain kind of boils down to. And that's the core insight of why Celestia makes sense.

1:07:27Yeah, and it sounds like a really boring piece of infrastructure. But again, it's like if you go to the Bitcoin white paper, that's fundamentally what a blockchain is. It's a time-stopping server. And that's how Satoshi describes it. Look, guys, this has been fantastic. I have got one last question before we wrap up. And it's probably something I should have asked a little bit earlier. but like we've discussed really Celestia in the context of being this alternative to the monolithic blockchains being the two most dominant ones at the moment, which are Ethereum and Solana. But you've got this whole new subset of blockchains.

1:08:06They're using parallelization and different and sharding and different scaling solutions to become very, very high throughput and much more responsive or elastic as well with demand as it increases over time and you can put into this bucket you know the move language um protocols such as SWE and say sorry Aptos and also I guess say some degree NIA and some of the other blockchains that are pursuing horizontal um scaling or sharding so how do you guys sort of see that see those particular new entrants maybe you know Chris what are they third generation blockchains i don't know but the newer entrants like because at the moment the real problem is the way i see it is that the network effects have been created on ethereum and network in large part they dominate activity um but they have you know quite big flaws in terms of their ability to scale but some of these other newer protocols have addressed that um interested to get your thoughts on like that are you think that there's going to be a world where it'd be sort of I guess the paralyzed blockchains, you know, tag market share or like, what's your thoughts about it?

1:09:26And maybe this is for me to kick off. You know, I would say that

1:09:36the innovation in the execution environments, you know, it's really gone Ethereum virtual machine, Solana virtual machine, and then the Moo Virtual Machine with Sui and Optos. And there is a lot of good work coming from teams such as Monad on paralyzing the EVM. So basically bringing the EVM to where the SVM and MooVM currently are. That's all really important work. I would say it is still going to face a lot of the issues that we talked about earlier of like everyone trying to use the same world computer at the same time. and how big does that world computer have to be and what are the hardware requirements in order for that to remain really fast, reliable, and cheap.

1:10:23And so while I think there are implementations of that and you could see worlds where there is co-location of some sectors of finance on something like Solana or SUI or some sectors of culture within EVM, I think that we're still going to end up back in this question and looking for the solution of, okay, how does everyone get their own computer, their own execution environment with a shared data set, right? And so that always brings us back to Celestia or some really slick implementation of data availability, right? And so technologically, I'm pretty... firmly set, I would say, on Celestia's architecture as the one that we're converging on 5-10 years here, in the next 5-10 years.

1:11:18And for what it's worth, Ethereum is evolving in that direction. It's a messy evolution because it has a lot of technological debt and pre-existing monolithic attributes. And if you're deep in the Solana conversations, there are already conversations of Solana L2s or durable nonces, teams coming up with ways to avoid the noisy neighbor problems. And so like I would say Solana is kind of in the early innings of figuring out this evolution for itself. And every monolithic blockchain that achieves enough success of adoption is probably going to have to go through the same questions in evolution, right?

1:11:58And it will probably lead them back to where Celestia is already. And so that is, you know, what I expect. Now, does that mean that some of these other chains won't be successful? Absolutely not. Like Solana has been doing fantastic this cycle. Right. And you could argue from a here and now point, this is Solana cycle, just as, you know, last cycle was Ethereum cycle. And then Celestia is really this raw innovation environment that's really attractive to entrepreneurs this cycle. But like, again, these are setups for the next five, 10, 15 years. Well, again, I'm going to add to that. Sorry, go on.

1:12:39I'm sorry, I was going to click after that. This is basically why Celestia was created, because every crypto cycle, we end up with this loop of new layer ones. So for example, in the first cycle around 2015, Ethereum and stuff like IOTA and Cardano. Then after that, in the next cycle, we had stuff like Solana and Avalanche. Then in this cycle, we have Sui and Aptos. because like every cycle there's these new layer ones that create that have that have an incremental improvement over the previous layer ones whether it's scalability or flexibility but that's why Celestia was basically created instead of trying to be opinionated about how the future of blockchain technology looks like instead of saying that one specific um execution environment or blockchain will be like the last solution because I'm sure like Anatoly believes that Solana is the last blockchain you ever need or the founders of Aptos and Ciri probably believe that's like the last blockchain you ever need but that's just not how technology works that's not like technology is always going to be evolving so is it realistic to say like okay are we going to do this again the next cycle we're going to create a new layer one that's better than Ciri and Aptos and we're going to copy the entire X systems over copy the Dexis over copy all the NFTs over that's not that's obviously not realistic so that's why Celestia was basically created like a blank canvas and that's why this modular architecture was created so that we can make incremental improvements into the paths to architecture without having to bootstrap a whole unique system.

1:14:13Yeah, look, I mean, I think that's a fairly pragmatic response. I mean, the whole space is one of constant evolving, really. So I don't think anything is set in stone at this stage and to claim otherwise would perhaps be a little bit um a little bit arrogant but uh i know that from my perspective there's you know there's key markers which i'll be um looking at when i'm thinking about celestia you know fees will be one but just also the type of applications that are starting to build and i think that's really the um the kpi for me when i look at the space and when I'm writing research because, I mean, it's a different animal to other blockchains.

1:14:57You're really dealing with L2s as your customers rather than active addresses. So you have to sort of, you have to go up two layers to look at the L2s that are building and then their active addresses. But I think there's a framework evolving in my mind now after this conversation that I can take away and start to apply and use when I'm sort of looking at TIA as a token, as an investment. So gentlemen, I really appreciate your time. I think this is a great format. We can just finish up maybe with anyone's last thoughts or comments. I think you did a great job of covering it all, Jamie, especially given you just ramping on Celeste yourself.

1:15:38Maybe that's perfect though, right? You're coming at it with a fresh mind. So you're asking all the important questions. I don't have anything further to add. I want to give Nick and our Moose the last word. yeah my only last thought is again like the whole like my whole the whole reason why i'm doing this or why i'm working on this last year is because i'm optimistic about the future of crypto applications and i'm choosing to believe that there's a lot of pessimism right there's a lot of pessimism right now about people thinking that there's too much infrastructure and not enough applications and i'm choosing to be optimistic to say well maybe the only applications of crypto isn't just decentralized exchanges and tokens that people trade.

1:16:19Maybe the applications that people have been dreaming of, like decentralized web, decentralized web applications, like decentralized Uber, decentralized Airbnb, on-chain autonomous agents, scalable micropayments and microtransactions, like maybe those are actually feasible. And so that's why I'm working on Celestia and working on Abundant Blockspace. and you know my my um you know like my optimism could be wrong like maybe maybe we'll look back at this in 10 years and uh like those applications are not going to materialize and crypto is still like a token casino but i'm choosing to be optimistic because um i just think that's that's a better thing to do and i think that's that's more kind of productive than choosing a pessimistic approach.

1:17:09Add on to the optimism, I think that for those of us who are like deep in the space and interacting with builders and seeing what the technology is now able to do, I think this is one of the best like moments in time in crypto for people to build like consumer grade applications that I could see, you know, my mom or like a normal Web2 user use seamlessly. We have embedded wallets that don't require you to save your seed phrase. You can just download the app and get right started. We have, for the first time, really scalable block space and infrastructure that we can see onboarding millions of users without having any hiccups.

1:17:49We have these virtual computers, virtual blockchains that you can deploy on demand. And so to me, we're at this point of maturation of the whole space that I think we're going to look back on and say like, this was the inflection point. So I'm extremely optimistic. And I think Celestia plays a big role in that, but it's a group effort and so many things are coming together at this moment in time. Look, gentlemen, I also share that optimistic sort of framework and outlook as well. And I think, yeah, consumer applications is where really we need to innovate into or the space needs to evolve into because, I mean, we've seen just how cyclical and thematic the crypto casino is.

1:18:32And I think for durability of the space, we definitely need to see more consumer applications, social applications move on chain. So I'm extremely optimistic about the future as well. It was awesome to have you guys on. I think this format works really well. We'll have to replicate it in the future. And also to have all of you back, maybe in 12 months time to do a recap. That sounds great. Thanks, Jamie. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you very much, everyone. and tune in to Real Vision Pro Crypto. The next report is out next week. I'll sign up from here and wish everyone a very happy day. Thank you.

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