Modular Blockchain Stack

What you'll learn

• The Modular Thesis
• Celestia: The First DA Layer
• EigenDA and Avail
• The Restaking Economic Stack
• Rollup-as-a-Service: Conduit, Caldera, AltLayer
• Modular vs Monolithic and the App-Chain Thesis
• For Deeper Reading

Key terms

Celestia

The first production data availability layer. Mainnet October 31, 2023. Uses data availability sampling and erasure coding to let light clients verify data availability with high cryptographic confidence. TIA token distributed via 580K-wallet airdrop.

Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

A scheme where light clients verify a block's data is available by random sampling of erasure-coded shards. With high probability, unavailable data is detected without requiring full block download.

EigenDA

Data availability service built on EigenLayer restaking. Mainnet Q2 2024 (April 2024). First AVS launched. Operator stake requirement evolved from 320 ETH per node to 96 ETH as the network matured.

Avail

Data availability project that spun out of Polygon in 2023. Mainnet launched July 23, 2024 with AVAIL token TGE. Roadmap includes Avail Nexus (cross-rollup messaging) and Avail Fusion (Bitcoin-secured DA).

Liquid Restaking Token (LRT)

Tokenized representation of restaked ETH (Ether.fi eETH, Renzo ezETH, Kelp rsETH, Puffer pufETH). Earns baseline ETH yield plus AVS yield. Total LRT TVL exceeded $14B at peak.

Kelp Hack (April 19, 2026)

Exploit at Kelp DAO that drained approximately $6B of liquid restaking collateral, rippling through Ethereum DeFi and contributing to Aave's TVL decline from $30.5B to ~$20B.

Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Commodity rollup deployment platforms: Conduit, Caldera, AltLayer. Handle sequencer infrastructure, DA integration, monitoring, and operations so customers can launch custom chains in days.

AltLayer Restaked Rollup

AltLayer's product where the rollup's sequencer set is itself an EigenLayer AVS. Adds restaked ETH backing as an additional security layer on top of underlying L1.

Monolithic Blockchain

Architecture where one chain handles execution, consensus, settlement, and data availability natively. Solana is the paradigmatic example. Argued to deliver simpler UX and cleaner composability than modular alternatives.

App-Chain

Sovereign chain dedicated to a single application or category. Cosmos SDK and Polkadot pioneered the model. Avalanche subnets extend it. Trades composability for control over the entire stack.

dYdX V4 Migration

dYdX's late-2023 migration from an Ethereum L2 (StarkEx-based V3) to a sovereign Cosmos chain (V4). The canonical example of the app-chain thesis at scale; V4 launched October 2023.

Vitalik's "Don't overload Ethereum's consensus" essay (May 2023)

Vitalik Buterin's warning that AVSs should not require Ethereum L1 forking decisions, since this would create perverse pressure on social consensus. Shaped EigenLayer's formal position on legitimate slashing conditions.