Celestia’s Ginger upgrade is now live on the Mocha testnet, with the mainnet upgrade scheduled for December.

by
Alyssa Davidson

Posted: November 15, 2024 10:30 AM Updated: November 15, 2024 10:02 AM

by well

Correction and fact check date: November 15, 2024, 10:30 AM

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Modular blockchain network Celestia has announced that its Ginger upgrade is now live on the Mocha testnet and is planning a mainnet beta launch in December.

Ginger launched “The Doubling,” which instantly doubles Celestia’s data availability throughput. This is achieved by reducing the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in V3, improving the user experience with faster transaction finality. The upgrade also lays the foundation for community governance, allowing block sizes to increase up to 8MB per 6 seconds, or 1.33MB/s.

Major changes to Ginger include several Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs) along with important non-consensus updates to celestia-app V3. This update introduces new congestion control algorithms developed by Google: Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round Trip Propagation (BBR) with default settings.

What changes will come to Celestia?

In particular, CIP-21 introduces “written blobs” that include the signer’s address in the blob metadata. Validators on the Celestia network now verify that the signer matches the address that paid for the blob, eliminating the need for rollups to separately retrieve and process PayForBlob (PFB) transactions. This improves the efficiency of the verification process by allowing the rollup to check authenticity directly on the blob’s signer field. Meanwhile, CIP-24 introduces modifications to the gas scheduler, setting variables such as GasPerBlobByte and TxSizeCostPerByte to only be changed via network upgrades and not through on-chain governance. These changes are designed to stabilize transaction costs and increase predictability. It also simplifies gas calculations by allowing an offline method without requiring a network query before each transaction.

CIP-26 also outlines changes to block times and associated timeouts, which are now controlled by application version. The update aims to increase network throughput and reduce transaction finality time by reducing block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in V3. Additionally, the ttl-num-blocks parameter of the mempool has been increased from 5 to 12 to ensure faster block times and consistent transaction behavior. CIP-27 sets limits on the number of PayForBlob (PFB) and non-PFB messages that can be included in each block. The proposal sets a soft limit of 600 PFB messages and 200 non-PFB messages per block during the prepareProposal phase. These limits are designed to prevent extended block processing times by limiting the number of transactions processed in each block, with the benchmark targeting a processing time of 0.25 seconds per block in the recommended validator configuration.

Finally, CIP-28 sets a 2MiB (2,097,152 bytes) limit on the size of individual transactions in Celestia. This restriction is enforced at all stages of transaction processing (CheckTx, prepareProposal, and ProcessProposal), resulting in a consensus-breaking change. The rationale for this limit is to avoid problems propagating large transactions, even with larger block sizes, such as 8MiB. It also provides room to increase block size in the future and further improve throughput by reducing block time.