Celestia CEO: Proposal for Five Core Values of the Celestia Social Layer
Off-chain governance is superior to token holder governance; users are first-class citizens of the network...Original author: @musalbus, Co-founder & CEO of Celestia**
Original compilation: Luccy, BlockBeats
Celestia co-founder and CEO @musalbus wrote on social media to introduce a proposal regarding the five core values of the Celestia social layer. BlockBeats now compiles the original text as follows:
Off-chain governance is superior to token holder governance
"We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." ------David D. Clark, IETF
The Celestia network strives for trust minimization, one key aspect of which is that dishonest majorities cannot arbitrarily change or violate protocol rules. Therefore, the specification for forks and state transitions of the Celestia blockchain is ultimately determined by its social layer and ecosystem, rather than by token voting, validators, or large holders.
If a hard fork is widely accepted by the social layer and ecosystem, it is considered the canonical chain. Before adoption, network upgrades can be evaluated based on the values of the social layer, which may involve the values described in this article.
Users are first-class citizens of the network
Requiring users to trust centralized endpoints or committees violates the core principles of decentralization and Web3. The Celestia community prioritizes the development and adoption of trust-minimized light nodes, enabling users to directly verify the correctness of the chain using techniques such as data availability sampling.
Maintain trusted neutrality towards execution environments and applications
The Celestia community firmly believes in a mutually beneficial crypto ecosystem, where modularity is preferred over maximization. To achieve this, the Celestia base layer is committed to being a universal data availability layer, remaining neutral towards any execution environment and applications built on it. This means not favoring any execution environment to avoid harming the experimentation of other execution environments.
Achieve economic sustainability through economies of scale
Celestia is a public good. Therefore, Celestia seeks to achieve economic sustainability by providing high-quality block space at scale to serve billions of people, rather than relying on artificial resource scarcity. Resource pricing should aim to achieve economic sustainability, avoiding unnecessary exploitation.
Reduce overhead and state bloat
One core design principle of Celestia is to minimize on-chain state, thereby creating a blockchain optimized for data availability with minimal overhead. This means that Celestia currently has no inherent on-chain smart contract environment. Future network improvements should strive to keep Celestia's state machine as simple as possible to maintain this characteristic.
This allows rollups to verify Celestia's canonical chain without validating overhead unrelated to smart contracts, reducing state bloat for both rollups and Celestia.
