James Ding
September 6, 2024 15:22
Celestia aims to dramatically improve the performance and scalability of decentralized applications by announcing a roadmap to scale blockchain data throughput to 1GB blocks.
After years of development, Celestia’s Mainnet Beta launched last year. Since then, the initial ecosystem has taken shape, developers have released the first 20 rollups, and Celestia Blobs now account for 40% of all published data, according to the Celestia Blog.
Expands to 1 gigabyte blocks
A key goal of the Celestia roadmap is to dramatically increase the data throughput of Celestia’s rollup ecosystem by scaling to 1-gigabyte blocks. Unlike existing blockchains that optimize for monolithic L1, Celestia is not constrained by execution layer overhead or state bloat. This allows developers to build high-throughput, unstoppable applications using any virtual machine (VM), whether scaling existing ecosystems like Ethereum or their own sovereign networks.
Several technological innovations are paving the way to 1 gigabyte blocks. These include content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, CometBFT block propagation optimizations, internal sharding nodes, and improved data availability sampling protocols. With these advancements, Celestia aims to provide the capacity of many Visa networks in parallel, unlocking previously infeasible on-chain applications such as verifiable web apps and fully on-chain games.
Verifiable by anyone, on any device
Celestia is focused on enabling anyone to verify the block space on any device. The community is working to enable a lightweight node to run in a web browser, allowing anyone to verify applications deployed on the Celestia block space. An early version of the browser lightweight node has already been built by Eiger at Lumina.rs.
Roadmap Overview
The roadmap consists of three main work streams:
- Rich block space: Achieving 1GB blocks with multiple rollups to scale for high-throughput use cases such as many Visa-scale payment networks, full on-chain gaming, and high-throughput DeFi. This includes optimizing the consensus network and improving the data availability network to allow for larger blocks while reducing resource requirements.
- Verifiable block space: Ensuring that block space is verifiable by everyone, everywhere, on every device. This includes bringing light nodes to every device to enhance security.
- Frictionless block space: Remove friction for rollup developers and end users. This includes improving interoperability between rollups, improving developer experience, and expanding the ecosystem by streaming Celestia’s data attestation to other L1s.
Community and Governance
The Celestia community drives all updates and initiatives through the Celestia Improvement Proposal (CIP) process. This open process allows everyone in the community to provide input and participate in the discussion. More information about the CIP process and the ongoing CIPs can be found on the GitHub page.
Stay tuned for more updates as the Celestia community continues to innovate. Join the discussion and contribute to the future of Celestia today!
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