Celestia Founder Slams Ethereum With Hyperliquid’s Throughput

• Celestia posted more data in 120 days than Ethereum could handle without high gas fees.
• Mustafa Al-Bassam claims Ethereum’s full Danksharding plan cannot match Hyperliquid’s throughput.
• Modular tools like Celestia now attract more Layer 2 builders who need faster solutions.

A debate over blockchain data scalability escalated after Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam responded to sharp criticisms from Ethereum supporters. Al-Bassam stated that Ethereum’s current roadmap—even with full Danksharding—falls short of the throughput required by modern apps such as Hyperliquid. He directly challenged claims that using Celestia is akin to “shorting ETH,” asserting that Celestia meets performance needs Ethereum cannot yet deliver.

His remarks followed a public statement from Ethereum advocate Zak, who argued that Celestia undermines Ethereum by diverting its economic activity to a competing chain. Zak stated that users “skip fees, skip alignment, and hand ETH’s monetary premium to a rival chain.”

Growing Friction Over Ethereum’s Alignment Politics

Zak’s comments stirred tension among Ethereum and Celestia supporters. He accused Celestia users are bypassing Ethereum’s fee model and devaluing its monetary structure. The alignment critique focused on Ethereum’s long-term plan to retain economic value within its ecosystem through gas fees and incentives tied to ETH. Zak suggested that Celestia users ignore this model, and are weakening Ethereum’s growth strategy.

In contrast, Al-Bassam said Celestia helps real builders who need practical throughput rather than alignment loyalty. He stated that Ethereum’s scalability roadmap is not enough even to support 10% of Hyperliquid’s demands. His position reflects a growing number of developers turning to modular systems that offer efficiency over ideological adherence.

Ethereum’s current path toward scalability includes EIP-4844, rolled out with the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. The update introduced blob-carrying transactions that helped reduce L2 fees and increase block capacity. While this marks progress, full Danksharding is still years away.

Celestia’s Modular Model Gains Developer Attention

Celestia offers a data availability layer designed to separate execution from consensus. This approach allows rollups and Layer 2s to post data without relying on Ethereum’s congested base layer. Celestia currently supports block sizes of ~8MB every 12 seconds and has achieved 128MB on the testnets, with long-term goals aiming at 1GB blocks.

In comparison, Ethereum’s future Danksharding targets 1.3 MB/s throughput. Critics note this would still fall behind the performance requirements of high-throughput applications like Hyperliquid. During its first 120 days, Celestia processed almost one million blocks and 4.5GB of posted data—an amount that would be too expensive to replicate on Ethereum’s base layer.

Such projects as Manta enabled the saving of millions of dollars in gas fees, utilizing Celestia. Layer-3 chains, Rollup-as-a-Service platforms, and zkSync Hyperchains shares some similarity with the Arbitrum orbit rollup environment. The relevance of modularity is evident in the fact that a couple of providers presently provide rollup deployments that enable developers to select their desired data availability layer.

Related: Polychain Nets $80M From Celestia Staking Rewards Alone

Competing Visions for Blockchain Infrastructure

The roadmap of Ethereum, which is developed by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, is based on monolithic principles, where the focus is put on economic alignment and network cohesion. This involves associating the execution and posting of transactions with the Ethereum consensus layer and token rewards.

The defenders of Celestia note that this model is slow compared to innovation and does not support the current scalability needs. Alternative data availability networks such as EigenDA and Avail are also emerging. EigenDA has reached 15MB/s on its restaking model via EigenLayer. Avail has tested 4MB and even 128MB blocks, reflecting a broader shift toward modularity.

With high-performance chains entering production, one question remains: Can Ethereum deliver scalability before developers fully shift to modular systems like Celestia?