Celestia’s Ginger Upgrade Doubles Throughput and Slashes Finality Time

🚀 Celestia Rolls Out the Ginger Upgrade

Celestia continues its momentum in modular blockchain innovation with the upcoming Ginger upgrade (celestia-app v3), scheduled for activation on Arabica testnet at block height 2,348,907 (expected November 5, 2024). Mainnet Beta is expected to follow in December.

This upgrade introduces several protocol changes focused on throughput, latency, and usability — all while paving the path for future scalability.

🔧 What’s Changing with Ginger?

The Ginger upgrade improves on Lemongrass (v2) by:

• Reducing block times from 12s to 6s, enabling faster single-slot transaction finality
• Doubling Celestia’s data availability throughput
• Setting the stage for block size scaling up to 8MB (1.33MB/sec)
• Requiring BBR congestion control by default for improved P2P data transmission

These changes significantly improve the user experience for rollups, validators, and full node operators.

📦 Included CIPs in Ginger

Ginger’s upgrade is defined by CIP-25 (meta) and includes six key protocol changes:

CIP-21: Introduce Authenticated Blobs

Blobs will now carry an embedded signer address, enabling rollups to directly verify authorship without separately parsing PayForBlob (PFB) transactions. This reduces overhead and simplifies trust assumptions for rollups.

CIP-24: Static Gas Cost Configuration

Transaction-related gas variables like GasPerBlobByte and TxSizeCostPerByte will now only be updated via network upgrades, not through on-chain governance. This ensures stable gas pricing and easier offline transaction fee estimation.

CIP-26: Block Time Versioning and Faster Finality

With this change, block production time is halved (6 seconds), and related parameters like timeout_commit are versioned. To accommodate this, mempool TTL is increased from 5 to 12 blocks.

CIP-27: Per-Block Message Count Limits

To avoid long processing times, Ginger introduces soft limits during proposal preparation:

Table 1.1

These values are tuned for 0.25s block processing time under recommended hardware specs.

CIP-28: 2 MiB Transaction Size Limit

Each transaction can now be at most 2 MiB (2,097,152 bytes). This avoids gossip issues and buffer bloat, particularly important as block sizes grow.

BBR Congestion Control by Default

BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip time) becomes the default congestion control algorithm. It maximizes throughput in lossy, high-latency environments by measuring RTT rather than relying on packet loss as a congestion signal. This change is crucial for decentralized, global networks.

🔍 Why Ginger Matters for Developers

The Ginger upgrade is not just about speed — it's about setting a robust foundation for modular scalability:

• Easier integration for rollups (via CIP-21)
• More predictable fee calculations (CIP-24)
• Future-proofing for scale (block size governance enabled)
• Optimized networking for real-world conditions (BBR)

Together, these make Celestia a stronger data availability layer for the modular blockchain stack.

📈 TIA Market Reaction and Outlook

Following the Ginger announcement, TIA surged 6%, climbing from $5.70 to $6.06. Analysts speculate the momentum could push prices toward $10, supported by the $100M raise in 2024 and ongoing infrastructure upgrades.

🛠️ What’s Next?

• Mocha testnet activation (mid-November)
• Mainnet Beta rollout (December)
• Potential community vote to increase block size
• Further testnet experimentation under the “Mammoth Mini” initiative

📌 Key Takeaways

• 🧠 Ginger doubles throughput and halves finality time
• 📦 Introduces transaction/message caps for better performance
• 🔐 Makes rollup integration smoother with blob signer metadata
• 🌐 Requires BBR for better bandwidth efficiency
• 🚀 Sets stage for higher scalability and modularity