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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:

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

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