Celestia's Core Values: Bridging Off-chain Governance with User-centric Network

blockchain.news:

Mustafa Al-Bassam, the trust-minimization engineer and co-founder of Celestia, elucidated the five cornerstone values governing the social layer of the Celestia network in a comprehensive post on 12th October 2023. These precepts are devised to bolster the trust-minimizing facet of the Celestia blockchain, ensuring a well-aligned community capable of consensus on protocol amendments.

The pivotal essence of Celestia's social layer is the belief that off-chain governance supersedes token-holder governance. As Al-Bassam quoted David D. Clark of IETF, «We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.» This framework postulates that no faction, regardless of size, can unilaterally alter or breach protocol rules. The canonical fork, along with the state transition function of Celestia's blockchain, is fundamentally governed by its social and ecosystem layers, not by token voting or validators.

Celestia places users at the zenith of its network hierarchy. This approach negates the necessity for users to place trust in centralized endpoints or committees, which are often seen as breaches of decentralization and Web3 principles. In lieu, the Celestia community has been ardently developing and promoting the use of trust-minimized light nodes. These nodes empower users to independently verify the chain's integrity employing data availability sampling techniques.

Embracing a positive-sum crypto ecosystem, Celestia’s community champions modularism over maximalism. The base layer of Celestia is crafted as a generalized data availability layer, maintaining neutrality towards all execution environments and applications built atop it. This stance prevents any undue favor towards a particular