Why this matters

As more and more projects include offchain components such as bridges, intents, social messaging, or airdrops, the lack of accountability and transparency has become apparent. We’ve been instructed to trust the operators of these offchain services, with little to no ability to verify or dispute their outputs. Furthermore, as users interact with these services, fragmentation ensues as context around actions is siloed and compartmentalized.

Align solves these issues by introducing a native attestation layer any offchain service can use to publish user actions. Align’s network allows these services to stake their reputation on attestations, allowing anyone to dispute their claims. After integrating with Align, projects can contribute to a user’s stateful and contextual identity. This unlocks use cases, such as badges, messaging, bridging, intents and ZK proofs. These attestations together create your AlignId, which in turn allows companies and projects to customize rewards, accolades, and reduce fees to specific groups of users.

Align’s design is only possible with help from the Caldera team as they are instrumental in bringing our Arbitrum Orbit L2 chain to life in a safe and secure manner. Caldera is a rollup deployment platform that allows you to launch high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups with the Arbitrum Nitro and Optimism Bedrock frameworks.

This integration enables Align to natively include our attestation layer as a precompile, simplifying and reducing the cost for smart contract developers to issue attestations. In terms of gas cost, Caldera is working to bring Celestia’s Data Availability layer to Align, making Align one of the first projects to implement the Arbitrum Orbit + Celestia DA stack. This stack unlocks massive gas savings and a higher transactions per second directly passed onto our users. Finally, we’re excited to work with Caldera on their shared sequencer initiatives to decentralize the sequencer stack.

Getting Started

Using the bridge provided by Caldera to move from Ethereum Sepolia to Align Testnet, and visit our website at Align.Network to complete quests onchain. Happy Questing!

We’re excited to announce our integration with Celestia!

What is Align Network?

Introducing Align: an Ethereum L2 focused on providing decentralized identity and verification for social interactions. Align combines gasless onboarding with attestation verification to provide a rich and customized DeFi experience tailored to the user’s reputation and past onchain actions.

The Align Network will:

• Create a gasless, account abstracted intake stream similar to web2 for easy onboarding

• Incubate a verification network that provides checks and balance for attestation issuers

• Issue a rich and meaningful identity allowing DeFi apps to tailor your experience via reduced rates, exclusive access, or custom environments

What is Celestia?

At the forefront of blockchain innovation, Celestia introduces a unique modular approach to scalability and flexibility within the blockchain space. It achieves scalability by separating execution from consensus and introducing data availability sampling, focusing solely on transaction ordering and their availability. Through this, a network of light nodes can verify data availability efficiently by sampling random block chunks, and as more light nodes participate, the more data the network can handle enabling larger block sizes without raising verification costs.

How does Celestia help Align Network?

Using Celestia as Align Network’s data availability layer provides the network with the tools needed to realize its vision and enables a near zero cost of onboarding new users. Celestia will drastically improve the usability of our network by reducing gas costs. Celestia moves the L2 one step closer to providing a rich and tailor-made onchain experience to our users.

Celestia’s is the only production ready data availability layer with a live mainnet–a testament to the foresight and strength of core contributors. Celestia enables L2s to push the bounds of what can be done onchain. By integrating the Celestia network, Align will be able to more closely compete with its centralized counterparts.

As we venture into this promising future, the Align Network invites developers, users, and blockchain enthusiasts to join in exploring the vast opportunities that lie ahead. With this integration, the journey towards a more scalable, interoperable, and user-friendly blockchain ecosystem has just begun.

Stay connected as we continue to break new ground in the quest for a rich and efficient onchain future.

Celestia

Celestia is a modular data availability network that securely scales with the number of users, making it easy for anyone to launch their own blockchain.

🌐 https://celestia.org/build/

tw: https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg

Align:

🌐 https://align.network/

tw: https://twitter.com/align_network

At its core, our social layer is purpose-built to handle this new wave on on-chain data. With the publishing of their paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul, Vitalik, Weyl and Ohlhaver laid out a roadmap for how social actions can exist on-chain. We’ve seen the rise of decentralized social networks, such as Farcaster and Lens that provide excellent message handing and twitter-like functionality.

An ecosystem of SBTs could unlock a censorship-resistant, bottom-up alternative to top-down commercial and “social” credit systems. — Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul

These apps blur the line between social and financial apps, attempting to mash together two enigmatic aspects of the crypto ecosystem. However, with these approaches, social data still exists in un-formatted messages/NFTs with little attention paid to the two larger issues; identity and validation.

Align was created to tackle the Identity and validation aspects of a decentralized society. An identity system needs to be portable, understandable and extendable as well as easily verifiable. On the validator end, projects, companies, businesses and defi protocols need a consistent path to supply their data to a users identity.

Align achieves these goals by providing a decentralized identity system (DID) and validator network to allow a structured way for users and validators to interact.

For projects, companies, businesses, defi protocols (Validators)

• Simple, gasless app to reward users’ actions on-chain

• Base rule layer to facilitate common reporting standards

• Web2-style CRM app to view & reward users

• Offer rebates and rewards for users on your DeFi app

For Users (you!)

• Network of validators both IRL and online uploading your actions to your identity

• Earn rewards faster, and interact with your favorite projects

• Join new and up and coming projects looking to bootstrap their network

• Access DeFi benefits like lower commissions, cheaper fees and lower rates

For Developers

• Native Account Abstraction

• Attestation baselayer

• EVM compatible chain

• Precompiled contracts to facilitate cheaper fees

• Custom bridge Infrastructure

• Portable cross chain representation of profile

Phase 1: Testnet

To kickoff our network, Align testnet is live at: https://align.network, bridge eth & mint your first NFT to begin crafting your Decentralized Identity today! We’ll be activating the mystery quests in due time, so follow us on our twitter, as our Discord is closed for now!

Network Information & links

Align testnet is a rollup live on Arbitrum Sepolia. Follow our Quickstart to get testnet eth.

name: Align Testnet

chain id: 53049387904

rpc: https://rpc.align.network/

explorer: https://explorer.align.network

github: https://github.com/AlignNetwork

docs: https://docs.aligned.lol/