Celestia's Ginger Upgrade Promises Enhanced Throughput and Faster Finality

Celestia is set to introduce the Ginger upgrade, marking a significant advancement in blockchain technology with enhanced data availability and transaction speed. Following the Lemongrass upgrade in September, this new iteration, celestia-app v3, promises a twofold increase in data throughput, achieved by cutting block times from 12 to 6 seconds, thereby improving user experience with quicker transaction finality.

Key Features of the Ginger Upgrade

The Ginger upgrade, anticipated to activate at Arabica height 2348907 on November 5, 2024, will roll out to the Mocha testnet in November and the Mainnet Beta in December, according to Celestia Blog. It introduces several Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs) that are expected to refine the network's efficiency and governance.

Incorporating BBR for Enhanced Network Performance

An important non-consensus change in celestia-app v3 is the default activation of BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time), a congestion control algorithm. This shift is poised to significantly boost throughput by mitigating packet loss issues prevalent in traditional congestion control methods, a necessity for real-life peer-to-peer networks.

Detailed Changes with CIPs

The Ginger upgrade encompasses several CIPs, including:

• CIP-21: Introduces "authored blobs" with verified signers, streamlining the verification process.
• CIP-24: Implements versioned gas scheduler variables, stabilizing transaction costs.
• CIP-26: Controls block time and related timeouts by application version, halving block time to 6 seconds.
• CIP-27: Sets soft limits on PayForBlobs (PFBs) and non-PFB messages per block to enhance processing speed.
• CIP-28: Enforces a transaction size limit of 2MiB, ensuring efficient gossiping of transactions.

Impact on Celestia's Ecosystem

The Ginger upgrade not only aims to double throughput but also lays the groundwork for future scalability, allowing block sizes to increase up to 8MB within a 6-second interval. This development is crucial for maintaining high performance as the network scales.

For further information on the Ginger upgrade, including technical details and update procedures, stakeholders are encouraged to consult the official Celestia documentation.