Pro Crypto: What Chris Burniske Wants You to Know About Celestia
01:21:07 Share

Hi, everyone. I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much.

Welcome to Real Vision Procure to everyone. My name is Jamie Coutts and today we've got a very special episode with a format that's a little bit different from our usual one-on-one conversations and something that I've been really looking forward to. We're diving into the world of modular blockchains and to do that we have the team from Celestia joining us.

Now, if you've been following Crypto and some of the debates and discussions that have been happening on X, you'll probably notice that Celestia has been a pretty hot topic since it launched in 2023, generating quite a bit of excitement, but also debate. So today what we have is three very special guests. We've got the Celestia co-founder, Mustafa Al-Bassam, and we've also got VP of Celestia Labs, Nick White.

Joined by them is actually Chris Boninski from Placeholder Capital. Now, Chris is one of Celestia's earlier backers and most vocal supporters. He's also a pioneer in the space, developing frameworks for crypto assets going back nearly seven or eight years now. So,

It's an interesting format. And what makes it especially unique is that we're not just here to really explore just Celestia's vision. We're also tackling some of the really big questions and some of the criticisms that have also surfaced in the community. And that's why Chris is here, because not only is an investor, but someone who's really actively engaging on X. He's here to really, I guess, unpack some of those key issues and clear up any of the misconceptions as he sees them.

Now, for me, really as a moderator, yeah,

I just want to basically learn. I have only just really started to go down the rabbit hole of this corner of the market, modular blockchains, but I find it especially interesting, not only intellectually, but also from an investment standpoint. So I think it'll be an interesting one for the Real Vision community to also wrap your heads around as well. And I'll also bring in some, you know, some approaches that I sort of think about. I'm generally a markets first typewriter.

type analyst rather than a tech first. So hopefully I'll be able to share some perspectives on what I'm also seeing in the marketplace in regards to Celeste, the asset and broader blockchain space. Now, hopefully by the end of the discussion, everyone will walk away with a much clearer picture of both the opportunities and the challenges that lie ahead. So with that, let's get into it. Mustafa, Nick and Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks, Jamie. Thank you. Hi, Raoul here.

Listen, I think we've got until 2030 before the economic singularity arrives. Now, it might not be the exact date, but it's around then. So we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future. I've put together a report to help you called Prepare for 2030. It's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030. So just click on the link below and start your journey now.

All right, guys. Look, I mean, why don't we just lay it all out in the first instance around what is Celestia's core value proposition and mission? So just break it down in the most simplest of terms. What is Celestia? Maybe get into some of those sort of general terms that you're sort of innovating upon, like data availability sampling and that. And what are the major problems that Celestia is trying to solve?

So I think the simplest way I could explain Celestia is you can think of Celestia as a building block that provides a blank canvas of a blockchain. And it's the most blank canvas you can think of as a blockchain. And we scale that really well. And that blank canvas is basically where a blockchain that does nothing except for just allow developers to post data on it and provide consensus

of that data and make sure that data is available. That's all we do. It's like a very, it's like a lazy, like dumb blockchain that serves as a scalable blank campus. And this is like very useful for developers that are trying to innovate or create applications that need full stack customizability. Because in the past, if you wanted to develop your own application,

but you couldn't use the Ethereum old one or the Slotnet old one because of certain limitations in the programming languages that you could use or the execution environment, then in the past, you would have to create your whole new blockchain from scratch with your own consensus mechanism and your own validator set. Whereas now, you don't have to do that anymore because Celestia provides this bank canvas that allows anyone to develop application on top of it, but with having complete customizability over the entire stack. And that allows you to kind of

modify the environment in which your application is created and to do things that aren't possible in the past. And the way that works is using this technology called roll-ups, which you might have heard of. And a roll-up is basically, you can kind of think of it as like a virtual blockchain on top of another blockchain, in this case, Zesture. The same way that you can deploy virtual machines on Amazon AWS that are basically like a computer running on someone else's computer,

a virtual blockchain is very similar in the sense like it's a it's a it's a it's a blockchain that's running on top of another blockchain and so when you think about the comparisons then to other l1s like ethereum like you've laid out i guess so um the basics there but what are the major problems with the existing format or the existing blockchain tech stack as you see it

Yeah. So in the past, I think one of the core motivations of Celestia is that we've kind of been stuck in this cycle of new layer ones because of limitations that Ethereum has. So with Ethereum, for example,

you're limited to the Ethereum virtual machine, which means that certain applications that people want to build, for example, like let's say privacy-preserving money or very fast DEXs like Hyperliquid that are based on order books, those just aren't possible on a shared smart contract environment like Ethereum or Solana. Because not only because you're limited to...

what that execution environment provides in terms of programming, like programming capabilities, but also the fact that you have to share your computational resources with everyone else that's using that environment. And so that just makes certain user experiences or certain products just fundamentally impossible to build.

on environments like Ethereum L1 or Solana L1 and that's why you have things, that's why people are building roll-ups and like Derive for example is a good example of that it's a DEX and Celestia that has high throughput that simply wouldn't be possible on the Ethereum L1 and Hyperliquid is also another example of that but that's the whole reason why Hyperliquid created L1 for example that it just wouldn't be possible as a swap contract on Ethereum or Solana

Maybe I can jump in with an analogy here. So you can kind of think of an Ethereum L1 or Solana L1, these monolithic chains, like almost like a mainframe computer, right, where it already has defined, it's kind of vertically integrated as the infrastructure. So it's defined, made all these choices for you of how things get ordered and sequenced, what execution environment, what programming languages they support.

And then you just get this little thin layer on top, which is your smart contract and your business logic of your application. And what modular blockchains like Celestia do is sort of invert that, right? Instead of being a mainframe computer, it's this like more like a cloud computing environment where it has the most minimal thin layer

infrastructure to be useful so you can actually build a decentralized secure application. But the application gets to determine the sequencing rules, the execution environment, and all those, the application gets to be vertically integrated as opposed to the infrastructure. And so what we see, the thesis has been, and what we continue to see is that the most ambitious builders, the most ambitious projects are

or any application that even starts as a smart contract, but wants to take their, you know, application to the next level are going to want to start to vertically integrate into the infrastructure. And that's, that's where Celestia comes in is for those really ambitious high powered applications. And we think is the future of where web three goes.

So you sort of see a world where any application that really has generated product market fit will eventually want to take control of the MAV and the revenue share or increase the revenue share and therefore will move towards this structure of basically being a roll up.

where they can actually, you know, where they can basically outsource consensus. Ethereum is already doing that, but you just see that on a broader scale, even like with potentially applications existing today on some of the larger networks like Solana actually using or migrating to this kind of approach that Celestia is offering.

Yeah, I'd say that it's not even just only about MEV. It's also about providing new features that you can't actually build on a shared execution environment that's already made decisions for you. So another example of a great application that's building on Celestia that Mustafa alluded to is an application called Pay, which is all about private stablecoin payments.

And essentially, in an application, they had to actually define a whole new sort of like virtual machine that preserves privacy in a similar model to protocols like Zcash. And that's just something you fundamentally can't do on a shared execution environment like Solana. And I think that, I mean, the mental model I use is that shared execution layers like Solana or Ethereum are actually these launchpads. It's a good place to bootstrap

you know, your application and your user base and try out and test out your ideas. But in the long run, it's sort of like, those are like launch pads because once those applications are successful enough,

They're going to migrate elsewhere. Our chief strategy officer, Jacob, put it really well when he said that Celestia's infrastructure for when you've outgrown your infrastructure, if that makes sense. So I think applications over time outgrow the L1s that they're built on and kind of want to take over more control and more autonomy and more economics. And that's where Celestia is sort of like, that's the world that Celestia is built for.

And, you know, I'll layer in here using a related analogy. And it really goes back to when Ethereum first came to market, it was popularized as a world computer, right? And I think a lot of the decade since has been debate over how do we build that world computer or what components of that world computer show up on a blockchain. And if you look at

in very rough terms, you know, how Ethereum came to market, how Solana is now,

everyone is on the same world computer. That's the mainframe Nick was alluding to. And so when everyone wants to use the same world computer, it gets congested or really expensive or we face issues. And really what I would say Celestia came about saying, and really as a category definer here of data availability that introduced a lot of these concepts, Celestia said, okay, we're

well, what if we just create a world database of the minimum amount of information necessary for everyone to coordinate and let everyone bring their own computing environment? That will scale a lot better for each individual user application while they still share the data that's necessary. And that makes blockchain powerful as a coordination mechanism.

So we're starting to see some applications that have achieved product market fit or have maybe outgrown the network that they're placed on or that they've decided to build on. But we haven't seen it really proliferate. Like there are now applications with, you know, much more revenue in terms of just fees than most of the entire industry.

blockchain or smart contract platform universe. I mean, I track all this data so I can see that some applications on not only on Solana, but also in Ethereum are actually generating immense amount of fees and they're trading at very, very low multiples relative to the blockchains themselves. I'm surprised given this is your thesis and that the technology now exists that we haven't seen

more applications start to move away and leverage technology, like either become their own app chain or use Celestia. Why do you think that is? So, I mean, we have seen some applications start to move away, but I think the reason why people still build smart contract environments or build applications on smart contract environments is because right now, if you choose to deploy a rollout,

or your own chain, the main thing that you're trading off right now is access to users and liquidity because right now the bridging story isn't really perfected right now for the roll-up system. Like there's still friction for the end user to go on board to these roll-ups. But I think that that's something that will be solved in a matter of time and that's something that we're solving at Celestia by adding a native bridging experience into Celestia.

But I expect like within one, possibly less than one year, but definitely within a few years. The end goal basically, or the mission, at least from my perspective, is to make the bridging experience so seamless that interacting with a multi-chain or multi-roll-up existence feels like interacting with one chain or with like one internet. And so the thesis is that if we can make

using different chains or using multiple chains, the same experience as using one wallet on one chain, then developers choosing to deploy applications in this way will no longer be sacrificing access to liquidity for the users.

And then it will be a no-brainer that that will be the default way that you should deploy application because if you don't do that, then you're basically leaking value for MEV or fees to the base layer. Where ideally the application wants to have full customized overview of the application and that includes capturing the value that the application is creating.

Yeah, I mean, it seems at the moment what you're doing is you're taking full control, I guess, of the execution. If I was an application today, what I'd be doing if I was moving to the sort of roll-up or app chain type world that Celestia is proposing is the future then.

yeah, I get all the control over the execution environment and I can do all these wonderful things that I can't if I'm attached to an Ethereum as it is today. But that friction with bridging and the fragmentation is quite large. It's a major problem. It's probably the biggest problem at the moment in blockchain world because I think it feels like

We're getting to a point where there's enough block space and the scaling solutions are such that it can handle a lot more demand. It can start to even handle the demand that we think we're going to see very soon from AI agents. But until that bridging or that fragmentation issue is tackled, a lot of applications will probably stay where they are or we just won't see this proliferation of L2s. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I'll jump in with another analogy to sort of explain the shortcoming of sort of the modular like multi-chain thesis. And that is, you know, if you think about each one of these blockchains as its own computer or virtual computer, we're living in a world where

You know, the internet, like the original internet, is a network that connects all these computers and allows them to all talk to each other, right? And now it feels seamless. Like I can pull data and information from anywhere in the world instantaneously with zero friction.

And the reality is that the internet equivalent of connecting these blockchain computers is still very rough around the edges and is not really quite, there's still just a lot of friction essentially. But we know the protocols that we need to build the equivalent of TCP IP and all these internet protocols to make that a seamless experience. It's just a matter of time and effort.

And I think also kind of alluded to what, you know, Mustafa was saying, we haven't invented the equivalent of the browser, which is like, what is the unifying front end experience that we present to the user that obscures all of the technical complexity of the back end? But again, I feel like there's been significant progress over the past few years. And it's not that there's any unsolved problems. It's just a matter of time and energy and effort to get us to that end game.

Yeah, it feels like a problem that a lot of teams are working on. Chain abstraction, chain signatures seems to be something that is popping up on various different blockchains

So I'm in agreement. I think, I don't know what the timeframe is, but it does seem like it is starting to get solved. And yeah, maybe within the next 12 months, it just becomes that the issue becomes literally abstracted away. Well, also Jamie, just briefly there. It's I, I think we also have to ask, okay, well, what is the underlying architecture have to look like to allow for say a

a Solana like front end experience with a modular back end infrastructure. Right. And so one of the keys there, because that's what we're trying to get to. Right. One of the keys, and I think there's underappreciated about Celestia because Celestia is arguably the most minimized blockchain since Bitcoin. Right. So it's really stripped down what goes up the base layer.

it sets Celestia up to have really fast finality times. The reason fast finality times are important is because that's what allows you to go from one rollup or L2 or virtual environment to another, right? To take the data or an executed transaction from one place to another. There's a bit more to it, like proving times and things like that. But at the core of the base layer is how fast can that thing go?

be final. And the more simplified the base layer is, I would argue the better chance that base layer has of being the fastest to finality, right? And so because Celestia is

strip down all these components, whereas like Solana has a lot more complexity. Ethereum has a lot more complexity. Sui has a lot more complexity. So there's more that goes into finality. Since Celestia stripped it down, I would argue it has the best chances of having fastest finality, which then has the best chance of having the most seamless user experience between different modular execution environments.

So I was actually going to ask this question a little bit later, but now seems like an appropriate time to talk about the consensus mechanism for the Celestia blockchain. So are you referring to there with the innovation that Celestia has developed around data sampling as being the data availability sampling as being what makes it, what makes that finality faster? Can we talk a little bit about that? Because that's an area that

From my perspective, it's probably the most challenging to understand, not being a tech-first sort of investor, thinking about it through sort of a market lens. But I'm keen to get you guys break it down for me. Totally. And yeah, I'll pass it to Nick or Mustafa for that one. Yeah. So if you think about what differentiates Web3 from Web2 fundamentally, it's the fact that Web3 is verifiable by the end user. So it's like from an end user perspective, using Web3 can feel like the same as using Web2.

But what differentiates a blockchain from a centralized database is the fact that people or anyone, if they choose, they can verify that the blockchain is correct. And so you have this verifiability property or this trust minimization property, right? And so it's all well and good if Celestia says, okay, let's just make the blocks as big as possible. And that's indeed our roadmap goal is that we want to have one gigabyte blocks.

But that's not hard to do. You can just increase the block size and you can increase the requirements of the validators. You can just say, okay, each validator should have 100 gigabit or 10 gigabit or whatever connection and have very big blocks. That's not the hard part. The hard part is how do you scale a blockchain and increase the block size while also keeping the blockchain decentralized in such a way that...

anyone could verify that the chain was correct or the end user to verify that the validators have been doing their job correctly because if you can't do that then from the end user perspective it's not really that different to web2 because you're just trusting another middleman and that's actually one of the biggest issues in my opinion with web3 today is that most wallets these days like if you go and install metamask or phantom

The way that they interact with the chain is through the centralized RPC or the centralized API endpoint, like Alchemy or Infura. And you're just trusting that centralized endpoint to tell you where the chain is. And that's basically identical to trusting some Web2 database.

And so that's something that we've put a lot of effort into avoiding with this technology called data availability sampling. And the way it basically works, it basically allows users to have wallets that can verify that the chain was correct. But instead of having to download the entire chain and download every single transaction in that chain,

to verify that it was correct, which is obviously not feasible for the average user. They can instead sample random pieces of every block and then check that's correct and available. And then they can, if they do that sampling and they combine it with this technology called erasure coding, they can basically get a almost 100% guarantee that the chain was correct and was constructed correctly by only downloading less than 1% of the data.

And that's something that we have put a lot of effort into and that we have, we can actually, we've actually embedded this into a real wallet on your phone. So like phones can actually do this process as well. But this just really dramatically reduces the computational burden on nodes on the network to validate the transactions, right?

And so you're talking about massive block sizes, but you could still potentially do this as a validator on any general hardware today, like a phone, like you said. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, yeah. And that seems like a real innovation because...

Blockchains today have sort of got fixed block sizes. Well, I mean, varying degrees, but generally much more fixed than variable. All you're talking about is variable or maybe sort of somewhat elastic block sizes. Yeah, so that's a huge point, right? Because it's like Celestia is one of the first examples where you add more nodes and you can get more throughput.

without sacrificing the core tenets of what makes blockchains powerful as decentralized verifiable machines right so and that's yeah and that's from the das properties data availability sampling properties that moose just went over so that's a key one and then you know some users will be like well i don't want to go through all that complexity right like i don't want to actually run a node

But then, you know, you can start to think of it more from the application perspective because applications or dApps have to go through a lot of work, as Moose was alluding to, with the underlying blockchains, right? And it could become as simple as a world where, you know, just with our iPhones, right, you can turn on application location services on your application when you're using it, right? So like, let's say you're using an application. That application, when you're using it, you know, theoretically could,

operate as a light node if all of this is lightweight enough right to to verify the veracity of that transaction but it doesn't mean that like you as an everyday user are walking around with the Celestia light node on all the time right and some of this is is more theoretical as like I go into the future more but like I think one of the struggles people have with Celestia is it can sound really futuristic or technical or whatever whereas in reality I would say it's

working to solve everyday people's problems while preserving the tenets of blockchain's ideology. Yeah, I mean, look, so we'll circle back to, I guess,

what's happening with Celestia today in terms of like adoption and whatnot. I think what we really also want to make sure that we covered today is the aspects around the launch, because there's obviously been a lot of debate. And Chris, this is, you know, one of the things that you've been engaging a lot of people on our next about. So let's just tackle it head on. So one of the issues that, and let me just say sort of preface as well, like Celestia

The whole space has a major problem because there's no sort of conventions around how to do things, around how to do launches and the formats, especially the splits. And Chris, I think maybe the first time we ever spoke was around the whole discussion of like, what's the real idea around a fair launch or what are the sort of things that

both VCs and protocol should do to really try to sort of respect all participants, right? In a vacuum where there's no regulations, in a vacuum where at that time, maybe it was 2023 when we had that conversation, it was during a extremely hostile regulatory environment, which

which had left the industry to its own devices to try and work this out. And obviously, there's been extremes on both ends of how to do this. So, you know, I don't come at it from a standpoint where I absolutely know what's the right way to launch, other than the fact that, obviously, you know, there has to be a decent amount of the tokens that go to the public.

What that split is, is where the debate sort of lies. So with that sort of as a framing, I'm keen to get your thoughts around a couple of aspects. Firstly, the unvested tokens that have been staked, there was some criticism that I saw on X regarding, you know, if you're actually an early investor and you've got a stake which is locked,

that and you're actually, and you are staking that and generating rewards, those rewards can be sold. From my perspective, what I see across the space is generally that is deemed to be, that's deemed to be standard. But let me get your reactions on that.

Yeah, maybe I'll jump in there just from the investor perspective. It is standard, right? Like tons of networks, you know, 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 U.S., 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. And 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. And,

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, Mustafa and Nick, do you want to weigh in at all on the token launch aspects? 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 sort of insider split from the outset? And, you know, your thoughts around that launch? Yeah, so, I mean, look, I actually think the critics have a point.

But I think it's worth adding some context around this. When it comes to, as has been said, when it comes to the staking awards, I think Celestia has 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 I still think the critics have a point that it potentially is not ideal that locked participants can sell staking awards when they're supposed to be locked.

because that basically accelerates the liquidity. But it wasn't a conscious decision that we made. That was just a default Cosmos staking module, which we didn't change because we weren't trying to innovate on the kind of staking economics. And it was also the case for most prefer staked reticles, including Solana, Suri, Aptos, Near, so on and so forth. But

we are there is now a community proposal and a celestial improvement proposal that if accepted should be implemented within the next two or so months that will make these sticking awards locked so that will fix that and yeah so i think we're like with 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 locked from the start, then you do have this straight income tax problem where you can't stake unless you have to pay, unless 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 he's thinking about. But that's something that we'll fix. Now, when it comes to the token distribution, 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 that's around 33-34% is allocated to investors. And what I would say to this is like, it's very easy to say, oh yeah, the investors got in at a very low price and it's unfair or whatnot. But I think the context you have to realize is that when we did the seed round for Celestia in 2020, 2019, you have to remember that Ethereum was around $100 and the top there, $100

biggest protocol by market cap was like 50 million dollars so if you go to coin market cap and you go to the 100th protocol it's like 50 billion dollars 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 that that did a ticket into special so it's not it's not as if like it's some scenario where oh yeah investors got in you got some massive discount that was genuinely that was gen genuinely um the kind of like the fair price at the time because crypto was was very different back then like the 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 to

with widespread understanding of the importance of DA to be like, oh my God, venture investors or private investors got at a great price. But at the time of investment, probabilistically your investment was going to go to zero, right? Like if you just looked at like the course of normal startups and say the creation that Moose was going through, like you were working on ideating a belief that

into reality right um and the well i'll pause there yeah look i mean i i think it's the i don't think there's anything untoward there at all and you like you were part of that um class of protocols that launched in 2023 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 this, you know, it's a symptom of just the of the market structure and their lack of sort of regulatory oversight as well. 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 this 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

not 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.

Just on that briefly, because when Celestia launched end of 23, it came out at $1 to $2, which was a billion to $2 billion FDV. And then it ran to north of 20. So 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. I 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 um 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 a

Ethereum end of 2016. It hasn't even gone through its 2017 run, 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, so like it came out public market $1 to $2, $1 to $2 billion FDV, ran to $20,000.

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,

bottom of about $100, that was $10 billion FDV. If I look at where Sol bottomed in 2022-2023, just south of $10, that was about $4-5 billion FDV. And so now you have Celestia coming in to a $2-3 billion FDV range. I think right now it's at $3.50, so $3.5 billion FDV.

that starts to be in that range where, hey, if this thing becomes a household name along an ETH or a Solana, it's potentially an attractive entry again. And so there is this kind of conflict that I see on X where people are mad that something has sold off a lot. And I understand why they're mad. If they lost money, it can be an emotional experience. And I've gone through losing money too. But at the same time, something being down 85% to 90%,

If it really is a fundamental innovation, that should perk your ears up, right? Of, 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.

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.

But 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 offers opportunity. I mean, look at Sweet, the way that it basically tanks and also Avdos and then has rallied high into new all-time highs. So it doesn't mean the death knell. I just think that 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 recently.

Let's get back to actually what's happening today. Now, as you pointed out, like it's a, it's a very young protocol. I'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? Yeah. So Celestia,

I think we're doing a lot better than I expected for adoption. I think we've got quite a lot of adoption for protocols that are only one year old. So I can say some metrics. For example, right now we have 90% market share of the DA market because right now we're the default place that roll-ups choose if they want scalable DA because you can't do it

You can't do on Ethereum for example, like if you're trying to deploy a rollup, Ethereum's DA is too limited So you're forced to use an alternative DA layer like Celestia and right now Celestia is like the default place that rollups pick So right now I think we have something like 20-30 different rollups deployed on Celestia and with the total value secured right now of 500 million dollars and the biggest The biggest data purser of Celestia right now is Eclipse which is a

Solana Virtual Machine rollup on Ethereum that is basically like a, it's bringing in the Solana Virtual Machine into Ethereum as a rollup, or as an L2. And it uses, it has to use Celestia as the VA because Ethereum's DA throughput is just not there to support it.

But there's also other cool applications used in Celestia that are basically only possible in Celestia. So Derived is, for example, a good example of that. It's a app stack that is developed as an Ethereum rollout that needs very high throughput. And they're doing hundreds of millions of volume every month recently. And other applications that we mentioned, like Pay, we mentioned that earlier. Applications that are basically only possible in Celestia because they need very high throughput.

I just want to jump in as well and say that like all the trends on the actual adoption of the product and protocol from the demand of data availability, the number of rollups that are migrating and posting data to Celestia are all like up into the right. And we're seeing kind of an exponential growth curve and demand. But then a lot of people, what they don't,

their criticism then becomes like, oh, well, the fees generated by Celestia, the revenue overall has been very low. And 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 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.

um and i think they kind of like missed like the just thinking forward into the future and being patient to wait for the 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 um data that we provide for the real vision community just looking at uh fees and like roughly at the moment just on a um smooth average it's about two and a half thousand bucks a day um

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 from worth highlighting is that over the last 90 days, it's actually grown quite substantially while the rest of the market has retraced quite a lot in terms of fee activity. So 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

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 quoted, but it looks to me like on a, you know, Ethereum versus Celestia basis at 80 to 90% of data availability phases. There you go.

That'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. But it's really about, I guess,

growing faster than everything else to justify the valuation. Yeah. I mean, I think... Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, like the way I see it is, like, 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. So in that sense, we're pre-revenue. But I think for me, the whole reason why I'm in crypto in the first place and why I started Celestia in the first place is because I want to see applications being developed that aren't possible unless you have abundant block space.

and 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 like Eclipse for example, they're using a ton of data on like a silly tapping game like 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 will not even be possible on something like Ethereum

using Ethereum DA or any other or even Solana L1 itself. Like it's like if you want to see crypto widely adopted, like think about all applications. Think about all applications that

people envisioned that they want to use blockchains for but aren't possible today. Like, let's decentralize Uber, for example. That's an example that people keep bringing up. Let's create a decentralized version of Uber with a decentralized version of Airbnb. But why aren't those applications actually possible in crypto today?

because there is an abundant block space and for those applications to be possible in the first place, you need a 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. To just layering briefly, Jamie, on fees, it's like,

I think Celeste is about 100x cheaper than Ethereum for the same DA service. And so, you know, if you say, okay, Celeste is making about a million a year. This is 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, Celeste 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.

And so then you look at Celeste circulating, you know, call it one and a half billion, Celeste fully diluted, three billion. So 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 people.

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? Whereas I'm like, well, like, you know, which one do you want? Right. Like, do you want meme coins? Do you want like real innovation? And like, 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 like, and I told you, 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 script 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 optimistic side of this that we're going to see new applications that require tons of block space that people that people are still dreaming of i haven't even thought of things like um

on chain like autonomous agents on chain like like on-chain ai agents will need to generate like tons of transactions on chain that are basically micro transactions for example so i'm choosing to take the optimistic side of this and i might be like we might be wrong in the future like maybe maybe our optimism is wrong but that's that this is that's the debt 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. So where the market meets in terms of that equilibrium is not Celestia, I believe, like rising, sorry, raising prices

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 you know causing me to think about actually from an asset allocation portfolio allocation perspective how balanced should the what's the right balance in a crypto portfolio of blockchains and infrastructure versus applications

That's probably a discussion for another time, maybe with you directly, Chris. But yeah, so it's very interesting to hear those perspectives of how you're positioning yourself in the market to acquire massive market share and also capture this trend where applications want full control over their execution environment. So it's really, really interesting from that perspective.

Look, I mean, have you guys, this is maybe a tough question, very hard to quantify, but have you thought about what the actual total size of the modular blockchain market is? Have you got any thoughts around where we'll be in the next three to five years? I mean, it could be, in the best case scenario, it could be as big or even bigger than internet. If you think about, for example, how every organization

has its own like web presence, they have their own website for example and most applications most most organizations you probably have a virtual machine on AWS 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 in the future where like in the best case scenario for example at decentralized autonomous organizations you really kick off

And in the future, that's like the default way for people to go into business together. And then you can imagine a scenario where every DAO has its own like on-chain presence as a rollout, for example.

And so you can imagine a scenario where there's actually more blockchains than websites, potentially. 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 app-chain, for example.

Yeah, I think it's very hard to predict the TEM. 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. And you're always in this race to continue to provide more compute or more bandwidth, et cetera. 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 a sudden 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 bandwidth? Like 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 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. Jamie, you do a lot of work with, you know, looking at

growth rates and regressions and just how fast crypto is growing, right? Like 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, you know, it's all about growth at the margin, right? Like 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? Yeah.

If that's a 90 day growth rate and 80 percent, 80 percent compounded over four quarters is a 10x. Right. And so it doesn't take that many 10x in fees to get to very sizable numbers. Of course, the growth rates moderate as the size gets bigger. Right. But just to put rough dimensions in people's head here. So what about competition then? Yeah.

Let's go through 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 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 three 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 that people, so-called alternative data layers, and the Celestia, and Celestia is one of them, and they provide a lot more data throughput than Ethereum. And so that's why roll-ups like Eclipse have to use them. Otherwise they just can't meet the demand. And there's all of the other areas like AgingDA, for example, where they're available, but they have a lot less adoption than Celestia.

And I think a lot of people say, oh yeah, like, they're very sure on DA because it's a commodity. But actually, if you think about it, 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 used it last year, they just want something that works, right? They just want to pick the easiest solution. And the DA fees right now and in the future,

are not the significant cost of their product to run their product. 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, literally 100x for bandwidth. But people still use AWS. 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, like maybe 1% of the cost, 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 solution out there. So that's why it's the default.

But even if the A was a commodity, 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 roll-ups. And that's something that Celestia is uniquely positioned to solve because Celestia has what's called

and single slot finality or immediate finality which means that Celestia finality time is a few seconds whereas Ethereum for example is five minutes because they don't have immediate finality which means that with Celestia and once we add native bridging and native interoperability to Celestia then roll-ups on Celestia can have interoperability between other roll-ups that's immediate like you like 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 of the areas 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 like 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, is 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 world garden because other roll-up systems are also trying to address this. So for example, like OPStack has the Superchain, for example, and Arbitrum has Arbitrum Orbit and their own interoperability solutions. So there's different roll-up frameworks that are creating their own interop solutions, but those interop solutions are kind of like a world garden that only works between roll-ups that use that specific framework. But we're coming at this from a different angle of a DLAO

we're neutral to the frameworks like you can different frameworks support Celestia so we're trying to create this as an open garden and not trying to create a world garden and in fact we're trying to make it that it's not even Celestia specific so that if you deploy a roll up on Celestia you can access liquidity not just from Celestia but from any chain in blockchain existence 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 Wormhole that is not really native. So because you 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 I think 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, right?

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. As soon as you branch out and you're on a separate chain, then you introduce trust. And basically the connection between those two chains, those two applications or blockchain computers becomes insecure. And so you can kind of think of

Celeste, it's sort of like imagine, again, you know, 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, those those 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. And 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 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 availability is actually a bad phrase because it introduces a lot of confusion.

because people get mixed up between data availability and data storage. So Celestia is not a data storage protocol like Filecoin or IPFS or Walrus from CIVI. Celestia is like a proof of publication protocol. It's not a storage protocol. And the difference is that you can kind of think of Celestia as a newspaper, right? A newspaper publishes stuff, but the newspaper's

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 published data will have had an opportunity to access that data

And that's basically what the fundamental thing that any blockchain provides. If you look at the Bitcoin white paper, 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 scales really well.

So 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. Yeah, 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-strapping 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 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 they'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 blockchain sort of pursuing horizontal um scaling or sharding so

How do you guys sort of 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, 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 these sort of um i guess the the paralyzed uh blockchains you know take market share or like what's your thoughts about it and maybe this is for me to to kick off you know i would say that um

The innovation in the execution environments, it's really gone Ethereum virtual machine, Solana virtual machine, and then the Moo virtual machine with Suri 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, you know, 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? And I, so while I think there are implementations of that and you could see,

You could see worlds where like there is co-location of some sectors of finance on, you know, something like Solana or SUI or some sectors of culture, you know, within EVM. I think that we're still going to end up back in this question and looking for the solution of, OK,

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

five, 10 years here in the next five, 10 years. And for what it's worth, like Ethereum is evolving in that direction, right? It's a messy evolution because it has a lot of technological debt and pre-existing monolithic attributes, right? And if you're deep in the Solana conversations, like there are already conversations of like Solana L2s or, you know, durable nonces, teams coming up with ways, right?

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? And 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 Solana

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's 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 5, 10, 15 years. Look, gentlemen, I'm glad to do that. Sorry, go on.

Sorry, I was gonna clear after that. This is basically why Celeste 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 like SUI and Aptos. So 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

and 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 apps and three 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 realistically say that okay are we going to do this again the next cycle we're going to create a new layer one that's better than syria and aptos and we're going to copy and copy the entire systems over

copy the nexus over copy all the entities over that's not that's obviously not realistic so that's why celestia was basically created as like a blank canvas and that's why um this modular architecture was created so that we can make incremental improvements into different in to do to the pasta architecture without having to bootstrap a whole unique system yeah look i mean i mean

I think that's a fairly pragmatic response. I mean, the whole space is one of constant evolving, evolvement really. So I don't think anything is set in stone at this stage and to claim otherwise would perhaps be a little bit...

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 it's a different um animal to other blockchains you don't you'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 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 um 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're just ramping on Celeste yourself. Maybe 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 or 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 Celestia 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 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. Maybe the applications that people have been zooming off, like decentralized web, decentralized web applications, like decentralized eBrow, decentralized Airbnb, on-chain autonomous agents, scalable micropayments and microtransactions,

like maybe those are actually feasible and so like i'm like that's that's that's why i wasn't on celestial and working on abundant block space 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 I just think that's a better thing to do. And I think that's more productive than choosing a pessimistic approach.

Add 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 moments in time in crypto for people to build consumer grade applications that I could see, you

you know, my mom or like a normal web to user use seamlessly. We have embedded wallets that don't require you to save your seed phrase. You can just, you know, 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. We have these, these like virtual computers, virtual blockchains that you can deploy on demand and,

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, Jeremy, 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.

And 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 off from here and wish everyone a very happy day. Thank you. If you like this episode, I'd love for you to head over to realvision.com forward slash join for a free membership. Start your journey today to unfuck your future. Just one click away.