How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia - Ep. 672

Mustafa Al-Bassam was a teenage hacktivist who outsmarted a US government contractor, shamed the Westboro Baptist Church, hacked Sony a record number of times, and eventually got arrested—though his 80 transgressions got halved for a funny reason. At the Modular Summit in Brussels, Laura had a fireside chat with Mustafa to discuss how he went from his teenage years as the head of LulzSec and member of Anonymous to founding Celestia, a project aiming to solve key issues in blockchain scalability by going with a modular approach. He also discussed data availability sampling, why he believes Celestia has achieved significant product-market fit since its launch, and the three key components of Celestia’s road map. Show highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:47 Mustafa’s origin story and how he became a developer who ended up hacking FBI affiliates and Fox News 05:32 How he hacked a military contractor to the US Department of Defense and Sony 09:16 Why Mustafa was arrested at the age of 16 11:14 What about Bitcoin attracted his attention and got him interested in the industry 15:22 Why he founded Celestia, after doing a PhD in scaling blockchains and understanding the problems of sharding 21:16 What data availability sampling is and why it is important 23:52 Why Mustafa believes that Celestia has had “extreme product market fit” since the launch 26:16 What’s next for Celestia and why Mustafa is so excited about the possibilities that increased block size can enable 29:36 How Celestia is working with zero knowledge accounts for defragmenting liquidity in rollups and access liquidity even within the Cosmos ecosystem 30:57 What the endgame for Celestia and the overall industry looks like, according to Mustafa 37:36 Q&A with the audience 44:44 Crypto News Recap Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! iTrustCapital Polkadot PlayFi Labs Guest Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia Labs. Previous appearance on Unchained: Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups Links Previous coverage of Unchained on modular blockchains: Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices