Modular blockchain network Celestia announced that the Ginger upgrade is now live on its Mocha testnet, with plans for a Mainnet Beta launch in December.
Ginger introduces “The Doubling,” which immediately boosts Celestia’s data availability throughput by 2x. This is achieved in V3 by reducing block times from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, enhancing the user experience with faster transaction finality. The upgrade also lays the groundwork for community governance, which will enable an increase in block size to a maximum of 8MB per 6 seconds, or 1.33 MB/s.
Key changes with Ginger include several Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs), along with an important non-consensus update in celestia-app V3. This update introduces Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), a new congestion control algorithm developed by Google, as the default setting.
Ginger 
is now live on Mocha testnet
Ginger delivers The Doubling.
2x throughput 
12s 
6s single-slot finality
Unlocks 1.33MB/s 
pic.twitter.com/XelmpG8UOz
— Celestia (@CelestiaOrg) November 15, 2024
What Changes Are Coming To Celestia?
In particular, CIP-21 introduces “authored blobs,” which include the signer’s address in the blob metadata. Validators on the Celestia network now verify that the signer matches the address that paid for the blob, eliminating the need for rollups to separately retrieve and process PayForBlobs (PFB) transactions. This improves the efficiency of the verification process by allowing rollups to directly check the signer field of the blob for authenticity. Meanwhile, CIP-24 introduces a modification to the gas scheduler, setting variables like GasPerBlobByte and TxSizeCostPerByte to be changeable only through a network upgrade rather than on-chain governance. This change is designed to stabilize transaction costs, making them more predictable. It also simplifies gas calculation by allowing offline methods without requiring network queries before each transaction.
Furthermore, CIP-26 outlines changes to the block time and related timeouts, now controlled by the application version. The update reduces block time from 12 to 6 seconds in V3, which aims to increase network throughput and reduce transaction finality times. Additionally, the mempool’s ttl-num-blocks parameter is increased from 5 to 12 to ensure consistent transaction behavior with the faster block time. CIP-27 sets limits on the number of PayForBlobs (PFBs) and non-PFB messages that can be included in each block. The proposal establishes soft limits of 600 PFB messages and 200 non-PFB messages per block during the PrepareProposal stage. These limits are designed to prevent extended block processing times by capping the number of transactions processed in each block, with benchmarks targeting a 0.25-second processing time 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 will be enforced at all stages of transaction processing (CheckTx, PrepareProposal, and ProcessProposal), making it a consensus-breaking change. The rationale behind this limit is to avoid issues with propagating large transactions, even with larger block sizes like 8 MiB. It also provides room for future increases in block size and decreases in block time to further boost throughput.
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