TIA surged over 30%, and the founder of Celestia wrote a sovereign chain declaration

Original Title: “Blockchains as sovereign communities: a manifest”
Author: Mustafa Albasam, Founder of Celestia
Compiled by: Ismay, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: Today, Celestia's native token TIA has risen from a low of $9 to nearly $12, an increase of over 30%. Last night, Celestia founder Mustafa published an article on the official forum about sovereign blockchains, outlining his views on how blockchain technology empowers communities to achieve sovereignty through self-organization and collective action. This technological innovation enables new social and economic models to emerge, and sovereign rollups further lower the barriers to achieving community sovereignty, making the deployment of sovereign chains simpler and driving the surge of millions of sovereign communities with their own top-level social contracts.

In 2018, Mustafa co-authored a paper titled “Data Availability Sampling and Fraud Proofs” with Vitalik, describing a system that allows light clients to receive and verify fraud proofs from full nodes, and designs a data availability proof system that reduces the trade-off between on-chain capacity and security, thereby addressing blockchain scalability without sacrificing security and decentralization.

This marks the birth of the new primitive of modular blockchains. Now, as the price of TIA rebounds, will people refocus their attention on modularity and sovereign chains?

“Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and association. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.” - Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Communities have an inalienable right to thrive through self-organization and collective action, unbound by the status quo. The technology that enables the launch of community-owned computer programs to form sovereign blockchains is crucial to realizing this right.

Throughout human history, societies have been driven by like-minded individuals pursuing common goals, whether for grassroots movements, struggles, innovations, or culture.

To fully realize the right to freedom of assembly and association, people must be able to create and enforce shared social agreements and contracts to record interpersonal relationships within the community. They must be able to enforce these agreements without relying on intermediaries such as states or corporations, which are traditionally slow, bureaucratic, untrustworthy, corrupt, or subject to censorship.

Blockchain enables people who have reached consensus to establish shared economic and contractual relationships among themselves without relying on untrusted intermediaries to enforce the terms of these relationships. This has led to the emergence of many new social and economic prototypes, including Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Collaborative Finance (CoFi), and Regenerative Finance (ReFi).

Sovereign Blockchains as Sovereign Communities

“O governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of the mind. To the future, I ask you to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” - The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Blockchains are community-owned computer programs whose rules are executed collectively by all those who possess a copy of the same computer program and participate as nodes in the network.

This network does not require any higher authority, such as an army or police, to enforce the rules of the community-owned computer program. The rules are executed directly by network participants, and the ledger generated by the network has meaning and value because it is endowed by the existence of the community through social contracts.

Thus, blockchains are sovereign because they directly realize the will of the community bound by shared social contracts. This, in turn, grants the community sovereignty, akin to the sovereignty of nation-states.

Top-Level Social Contracts

All rules and laws governing contractual relationships derive their authority ultimately from social contracts.

For example, the authority of traditional organizations comes from the laws of the country in which they are registered, which may derive their authority from the national legislature, such as a parliament, and the authority of the parliament ultimately comes from the social contracts among the people, which may be recorded in a constitution. Through social consensus, these social contracts can and often do modify the laws beneath them peacefully or coercively.

These social contracts are top-level social contracts because they serve as the fundamental source of authority for all subordinate contracts, with no higher authority above them.

Blockchains uniquely possess their own top-level social contracts, independent of the top-level social contracts that underpin nation-states, enforced by the social consensus of the sovereign communities participating in the network, and endowing the ledger generated by the network with meaning and value. Similarly, this social consensus can modify the rules of the blockchain through hard forks, which only make sense when the community of the blockchain network possesses sovereignty through its own top-level social contracts.

Sovereign Rollups as Sovereign Communities

Similar to traditional contracts, non-sovereign smart contracts can be created beneath a sovereign blockchain that serves as a smart contract platform. For example, a DAO can deploy smart contracts on Layer 1. However, this DAO would not be a sovereign community because its authority does not derive from its own top-level social contract but from third-party contracts. If the community of the DAO wishes to achieve justice in enforcing its social contract, it cannot do so without the permission of a higher top-level social contract.

The ability of sovereign communities to create top-level social contracts is a unique and powerful new primitive enabled by blockchains. However, creating a Layer 1 sovereign community requires bearing the substantial costs of deploying and maintaining its own first-layer consensus and validator network.

By avoiding the need for each sovereign community to deploy a new consensus network, sovereign rollups significantly reduce the friction for sovereign communities to realize their top-level social contracts (in the form of community-owned computers). This will bring about a new reality where communities indeed possess an inalienable right to thrive through self-organization and collective action, unbound by the status quo.

By making the deployment of sovereign chains as simple as deploying a blog, a surge of millions of sovereign communities with their own top-level social contracts (in the form of sovereign chains) may be imminent.

Build modularity. Become sovereign.