How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia

Mustafa Al-Bassam, cofounder of Celestia, shares his most vivid stories of his early days of hacking, the next steps for Celestia, and what he's cautious about.

Jul 13, 2024

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Mustafa Al-Bassam was a teenage hacktivist who outsmarted a US government contractor, shamed the Westboro Baptist Church, hacked Sony a record number of times, and eventually got arrested—though his 80 transgressions got halved for a funny reason.

At the Modular Summit in Brussels, Laura had a fireside chat with Mustafa to discuss how he went from his teenage years as the head of LulzSec and member of Anonymous to founding Celestia, a project aiming to solve key issues in blockchain scalability by going with a modular approach.

He also discussed data availability sampling, why he believes Celestia has achieved significant product-market fit since its launch, and the three key components of Celestia’s road map.

Show highlights:

0:30 Mustafa’s origin story and how he became a developer who ended up hacking FBI affiliates and Fox News
4:16 How he hacked a military contractor to the US Department of Defense and Sony
8:00 Why Mustafa was arrested at the age of 16
09:58 What about Bitcoin attracted his attention and got him interested in the industry
14:11 Why he founded Celestia, after doing a PhD in scaling blockchains and understanding the problems of sharding
19:00 What data availability sampling is and why it is important
21:33 Why Mustafa believes that Celestia has had “extreme product-market fit” since the launch
23:56 What’s next for Celestia and why Mustafa is so excited about the possibilities that increased block size can enable
27:20 How Celestia is working with zero-knowledge accounts for defragmenting liquidity in rollups and access liquidity even within the Cosmos ecosystem
30:57 What the endgame for Celestia and the overall industry looks like, according to Mustafa
35:39 Q&A with the audience

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Guest

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia Labs.
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Links

Previous coverage of Unchained on modular blockchains:
Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide

Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk.

HOST

Laura Shin

Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and author of “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (Public Affairs, 2022). Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had more than 15 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.