Iris Coleman
October 25, 2024 01:41
Celestia announced the Ginger upgrade, increasing data throughput and reducing block times. Key changes include adoption of BBR and new CIPs to improve network performance.
Celestia is introducing the Ginger upgrade, which will deliver significant advancements in blockchain technology with improved data availability and transaction speeds. Following the Lemongrass upgrade in September, this new iteration, celestia-app v3, doubles data throughput by reducing block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, improving user experience with faster transaction finality.
Key Features of the Ginger Upgrade
The Ginger upgrade, which is expected to become active on November 5, 2024 at Arabica height 2348907, will be released to the Mocha testnet in November and to the mainnet beta in December, according to the Celestia blog. We introduce several Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs) that are expected to improve the efficiency and governance of the network.
BBR integration for improved network performance
A significant non-consensus change in celestia-app v3 is the default activation of the congestion control algorithm BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round Trip Propagation Time). These changes are poised to significantly improve throughput by alleviating packet loss issues prevalent in existing congestion control methods, which are essential for real-world P2P networks.
Detailed changes through CIP
The Ginger upgrade includes several CIPs, including:
- CIP-21: Streamline the verification process by introducing “written blobs” with verified signers.
- CIP-24: Stabilize transaction costs by implementing versioned gas scheduler variables.
- CIP-26: Control the blocking time and associated timeouts by application version, halving the blocking time to 6 seconds.
- CIP-27: Set soft limits on PayForBlob (PFB) and non-PFB messages per block to improve processing speed.
- CIP-28: A transaction size limit of 2MiB is enforced to ensure efficient transaction gossip.
Impact on the Celestia ecosystem
The Ginger upgrade not only aims to double throughput, but also lays the foundation for future scalability, allowing block sizes to increase up to 8MB within a 6-second interval. These developments are critical to maintaining high performance as networks expand.
Interested parties are encouraged to refer to the official Celestia documentation for additional information about the Ginger upgrade, including technical details and update procedures.
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