Arbitrum Orbit integrates Celestia for data availability

Developers who are building their networks using Arbitrum Orbit will now have the option to use Celestia for data availability.

Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution and is one of the largest chains by total value locked (TVL) today. According to information on DeFiLlama, Arbitrum currently has a TVL of $1.82 billion and has an estimated 470 dapps deployed on its network. 

Arbitrum Orbit is a tool that enables its users to build layer-3 blockchains that settle onto one of Arbitrum’s layer-2 chains: Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova. 

Celestia is a modular data availability layer. Now that it will be integrated with Arbitrum’s Nitro stack, projects that have been built using Arbitrum Orbit will have the additional option to publish data onto Celestia. 

A Celestia Foundation spokesperson told Blockworks that Celestia is designed to be modular, which means that developers won’t have to set up their own data availability committee (DAC) or trust a small committee of validators to store data for a limited period of time. 

“They will just deploy out of the box with full integration into the Nitro stack/ fraud proofs, from day one,” the spokesperson said. “Celestia provides cryptoeconomic security and scales with data availability sampling (DAS), the first approach that securely scales with the number of users.” 

Read more: Why data availability sampling matters for blockchain scaling

What is an Ethereum rollup? 

In the Ethereum scaling community, a regular question that is asked is: What exactly is an Ethereum rollup?

Generally speaking, Ethereum rollups are scaling solutions designed to make Ethereum faster and more cost-effective. Rollups perform execution outside of the layer-1 blockchain, then post the data back on the mainnet. 

The question then begs, if a rollup solution does not post its data back onto the layer-1 blockchain, can it still be considered a scaling solution for the network?

Read More: Do rollups actually scale Ethereum or are we fooling ourselves?

In a statement to Blockworks, a Celestia Foundation spokesperson notes that Celestia itself is something that originated from the Ethereum research community. 

“The DAS paper was co-written with Vitalik, and John Adler was a researcher working on Ethereum scaling before he founded Celestia. So, there has always been social layer alignment from day one,” they said. 

The spokesperson added that Celestia itself also opens up a new range of possibilities for Ethereum developers which are not possible with the level of scale afforded by Ethereum even after EIP-4844 . 

“Any developer, not just VC-backed teams or large-scale rollups, will be able to afford their own rollup with Celestia without having to rely on trusted committees or hidden trust assumptions,” the spokesperson said.

Updated Oct. 25, 2023 at 1:16 pm ET: Modified for additional context; a previous version of this article stated that John Adler was an Ethereum core developer.

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