Celestia Aims to Revolutionize Blockchain with 1 GB Blocks

After several years of development, Celestia's Mainnet Beta went live last year. Since then, an early ecosystem has taken form, with developers deploying the first 20 rollups and Celestia blobs representing 40% of total data published, according to the Celestia Blog.

Scaling to 1 Gigabyte Blocks

The core objective of Celestia's roadmap is to scale to 1 gigabyte blocks, massively increasing data throughput for Celestia’s rollup ecosystem. Unlike traditional blockchains that optimize a 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 to scale existing ecosystems like Ethereum or as their own sovereign networks.

Several technical innovations are paving the way to 1 gigabyte blocks. These include a content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, optimizing CometBFT block propagation, internally sharding nodes, and an improved data availability sampling protocol. With these advancements, Celestia aims to deliver the capacity of many Visa networks in parallel, unlocking previously unviable on-chain applications like verifiable web apps and fully on-chain gaming.

Verifiable by Anyone, on Any Device

Celestia is focused on making its blockspace verifiable by anyone, on any device. The community is working to make light nodes run in web browsers, enabling applications deployed in Celestia blockspace to be verifiable by anyone. An early version of the light node in the browser is already available, built by Eiger at Lumina.rs.

Roadmap Overview

The roadmap is structured into three main workstreams:

• Abundant Blockspace: Achieving 1GB blocks to scale to a large number of diverse rollups, even for throughput-hungry use-cases like many Visa-scale payment networks, fully on-chain games, and high-throughput DeFi. This includes optimizing the consensus network and improving the data availability network to allow for larger blocks while lowering resource requirements.
• Verifiable Blockspace: Ensuring that blockspace is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, on any device. This involves bringing light nodes to every device and enhancing their security.
• Frictionless Blockspace: Removing any friction for rollup developers and end-users. This includes improving interoperability between rollups, enhancing the developer experience, and scaling ecosystems by streaming Celestia’s data attestations to another L1.

Community and Governance

The Celestia community drives all updates and initiatives through the Celestia Improvement Proposal (CIP) process. This open process allows anyone from the community to weigh in and participate in discussions. More information about the CIP process and current in-progress CIPs can be found on their GitHub page.

Stay tuned for more updates as the Celestia community continues to innovate. Join the discussion and contribute to Celestia’s future today!