According to Ismail Khoffi, co-founder of Celestia, developers and communities will soon have the ability to easily deploy their own customized blockchains. Khoffi spoke about the project’s mission during Korean Blockchain Week 2022, stating that Celestia aims to separate the consensus and application execution layers, opening up new opportunities for decentralized app builders. Celestia is essentially a simplified layer-1 blockchain that provides users with the necessary infrastructure to deploy their own blockchain or layer-2 rollup with ease.
Khoffi compared Celestia to Amazon Web Services, explaining that the goal is to make deploying a blockchain as simple as deploying a smart contract. Users will be able to write their code and deploy it with a click of a button, allowing others to immediately start using it. Similar to Ethereum’s rollup-centric vision, where the consensus and data availability layers are separated from the execution layer, Celestia is designed to be modular and customizable, giving users the freedom to choose their execution environments.
Khoffi emphasized that communities will have the option to choose which settlement layer they want to use or even launch their own settlement layer or sovereign rollup. Celestia was built on the idea that online communities desire a sense of sovereignty and the ability to launch their own blockchains without being dependent on Ethereum’s governance and design choices. For instance, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) may want to deploy its own blockchain and establish its own rules of operation while benefiting from Celestia’s infrastructure and security.
The Celestia Testnet was deployed in May 2022, and the team is planning to launch the Mainnet in 2023. However, Khoffi acknowledged that there are still optimizations and bug fixes to be addressed before the official launch. Although Celestia has not yet issued a token, it has already generated significant excitement within the industry.