Celestia

Celestia, formerly LazyLedger, is a pluggable consensus and data availability layer, to enable anyone to quickly deploy a decentralized blockchain without the overhead of bootstrapping a new consensus network.

Similar to how cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) made it possible to launch new virtual servers with their own operating systems within seconds by using the same physical server, Celestia is a decentralized project that aims to make it possible to launch decentralized chains quickly by using the same consensus layer.

From a technical perspective, Celestia is a stripped-down layer 1 that only does the core things a layer 1 needs to do, in a scalable way: order transactions, and make the data for them available. Celestia only orders and publishes any arbitrary data that developers and users throw at it, and does not perform any computation on the data.

As there’s no on-chain smart contract environment in Celestia, all execution happens off-chain, using technologies such as optimistic rollup. Whereas other layer 1 blockchains follow the “world computer” paradigm, where the chain provides both consensus and execution, Celestia’s goal is to make the blockchain stack more modular by decoupling consensus and execution. Developers can therefore define their own execution layers.