Celestia has exciting news! The Ginger upgrade is now live on the Mocha testnet, and they plan to launch the Mainnet Beta in December.
This upgrade brings a significant boost called “The Doubling.” It doubles Celestia’s data availability throughput right away. How? By cutting block times from 12 seconds to just 6 seconds. This change means faster transaction finality, which greatly improves the user experience.
Another key feature is the groundwork for community governance. This will allow the block size to increase up to 8MB every 6 seconds, or about 1.33 MB/s. That’s a big deal!
The Ginger upgrade includes several important changes. For starters, there are multiple Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs) and a non-consensus update in celestia-app V3. This update introduces a new congestion control algorithm called Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), developed by Google. It's now the default setting.
Let’s break down some of the changes:
CIP-21 introduces “authored blobs.” These blobs now include the signer’s address in their metadata. Validators will check that the signer matches the address that paid for the blob. This means rollups no longer need to separately retrieve and process PayForBlobs (PFB) transactions. It makes the verification process much more efficient.
CIP-24 modifies the gas scheduler. Now, variables like GasPerBlobByte and TxSizeCostPerByte can only be changed through a network upgrade, not on-chain governance. This aims to stabilize transaction costs, making them more predictable. It also simplifies gas calculations by allowing offline methods, which means no network queries are needed before each transaction.
CIP-26 outlines changes to the block time and related timeouts. These are now controlled by the application version. The update reduces block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, increasing network throughput and reducing transaction finality times. Additionally, the mempool’s ttl-num-blocks parameter is increased from 5 to 12 to ensure consistent transaction behavior with the faster block time.
CIP-27 sets limits on the number of PayForBlobs (PFBs) and non-PFB messages in each block. It establishes soft limits of 600 PFB messages and 200 non-PFB messages during the PrepareProposal stage. This prevents long block processing times by capping the number of transactions in each block, aiming for a processing time of 0.25 seconds per block.
Lastly, CIP-28 introduces a 2MiB (2,097,152 bytes) limit on individual transaction sizes for Celestia. This limit will be enforced at all stages of transaction processing. The goal is to avoid issues with propagating large transactions, even with larger block sizes like 8 MiB. It also allows room for future increases in block size and decreases in block time, further boosting throughput.
These updates show Celestia's commitment to enhancing its network. Stay tuned for more developments!