Celestia's Mocha Testnet Goes Live with Ginger Upgrade, Doubling Data Availability and Enhancing Governance

Celestia has just announced that the Ginger upgrade is now live on its Mocha testnet. Exciting news, right? They’re planning a Mainnet Beta launch for December.

The Ginger upgrade brings a feature called “The Doubling.” This feature boosts Celestia’s data availability throughput by two times. How? By reducing block times from 12 seconds to just 6 seconds. This means faster transaction finality, making the user experience much smoother.

One of the key aspects of this upgrade is community governance. With this, the block size can increase to a maximum of 8MB every 6 seconds, which is about 1.33 MB/s. That’s a significant improvement.

Now, let’s look at some of the important changes. The upgrade includes several Celestia Improvement Proposals, or CIPs. One notable update is in celestia-app V3, where they’ve introduced a new congestion control algorithm called Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR). This algorithm, developed by Google, will now be the default setting.

CIP-21 is particularly interesting. It introduces “authored blobs.” These blobs now include the signer’s address in their metadata. Validators on the Celestia network will verify that the signer matches the address that paid for the blob. This eliminates the need for rollups to separately retrieve and process PayForBlobs (PFB) transactions. In simpler terms, it makes the verification process more efficient.

Next up, CIP-24 modifies the gas scheduler. It allows certain variables, like GasPerBlobByte and TxSizeCostPerByte, to be changed only through a network upgrade. This change aims to stabilize transaction costs, making them more predictable. Plus, it simplifies gas calculations, allowing for offline methods without needing network queries before each transaction.

CIP-26 outlines changes to block time and timeouts, which are now controlled by the application version. The block time is cut down from 12 to 6 seconds in V3. This change is designed to increase network throughput and reduce transaction finality times. Also, the mempool’s ttl-num-blocks parameter has increased from 5 to 12. This ensures 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 per block during the PrepareProposal stage. These limits help prevent long block processing times by capping the number of transactions in each block. The goal? A processing time of 0.25 seconds per block on the recommended validator configuration.

Finally, CIP-28 establishes a 2MiB (2,097,152 bytes) limit on individual transaction sizes for Celestia. This limit applies at all stages of transaction processing, including CheckTx, PrepareProposal, and ProcessProposal. It’s a consensus-breaking change aimed at avoiding issues with large transactions, even with bigger block sizes like 8 MiB. This also paves the way for future increases in block size and decreases in block time, further boosting throughput.