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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.
