According to Cointelegraph, Celestia, a layer-1 data availability network, has released a technical roadmap aimed at scaling its block size to 1 gigabyte. The announcement, made in a Sept. 5 blog post, outlines the network's goal to significantly increase data throughput within its rollup ecosystem. Blocks, which are bundles of transaction data on the blockchain, are central to this initiative.
Celestia's focus on expanding block size is part of a broader industry effort to enhance blockchain scalability, reduce transaction costs, and improve data storage and retrieval efficiency. The network competes with other protocols like EigenDA, Avail, and Ethereum's mainnet. With 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia claims it will surpass Visa's transaction processing capacity, which stands at approximately 24,000 transactions per second (TPS). This advancement could enable new onchain applications, such as verifiable web apps and fully-onchain gaming, which were previously considered unfeasible.
On the same day, EigenDA announced a partnership with cloud platform Conduit to temporarily increase its block size from 2 megabytes to 16 megabytes. This move aims to reduce operating costs for layer-2 scaling chains by eightfold. Additionally, Ethereum's Dencun upgrade in March introduced 'blobs,' temporary offchain data stores designed to lower costs for layer-2 scaling networks like Arbitrum and Base by avoiding the need to post large volumes of data directly onchain.
Since May, Celestia has been gaining market share from Ethereum, rising from around 20% to approximately 40% as of July 31. Unlike Ethereum, Celestia is not limited by execution layer overhead or state bloat, allowing it to scale throughput beyond current monolithic constraints. Despite these advancements, Ethereum is expected to remain the dominant settlement layer in Web3 due to its decentralization, stablecoins, and total value locked (TVL), according to Blockworks' data analytics manager, Dan Smith.
