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Celestia Mammoth Mini Testnet Achieves 27 MB/s Data Throughput
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Celestia Mammoth Mini Testnet Achieves 27 MB/s Data Throughput

Celestia Labs’ Mammoth Mini testnet hits 27 MB/s, introducing innovations like Compact Blocks, Vacuum!, and FBSS to pave the way for 1GB blockchain scalability.

Prashant Swami

Prashant Swami

Technical Writer

November 2, 2024
5 min read
#Celestia#Blockchain Scalability#Compact Blocks#Vacuum Protocol#FBSS#Mammoth Mini

Celestia’s Leap Forward: Mammoth Mini Testnet

Celestia Labs has unveiled significant breakthroughs in blockchain data scalability with the introduction of the Mammoth Mini testnet. Built upon innovative protocol upgrades, Mammoth Mini has demonstrated a substantial leap—achieving permissionless data throughput of 27 MB/s.

Celestia currently supports block sizes of 2 MB per 12 seconds, or roughly 0.167 MB/s throughput. Mammoth Mini propels this upwards by a remarkable 160x, moving the ecosystem significantly closer to the ambitious target of 1 GB blocks.

Why Scale Matters for Celestia

Scalable block throughput unlocks several core applications:

Sequencers at scale: Enables massive improvements in rollup and layer-2 sequencer capabilities.

High-throughput applications: Facilitates development of fully on-chain virtual worlds and verifiable web applications.

Payment scalability: Empowers hundreds of thousands of ERC-20 transactions per second—akin to running multiple parallel Visa-like networks.

Technical Innovations Behind Mammoth Mini

Mammoth Mini introduces several foundational improvements that underpin this remarkable performance leap.

Compact Blocks: Accelerated Propagation

Standard blockchain networks transmit entire blocks across validators, causing high latency and bandwidth issues. Mammoth Mini utilizes a modified version of Bitcoin’s Compact Blocks (BIP-152) to reduce network load:

1. Only transmits transaction identifiers when nodes already hold transactions.

2. Facilitates pre-consensus data propagation, significantly accelerating consensus time.

Performance comparison:

1. Traditional propagation: entire transactions per block

2. Compact Blocks: minimal transaction IDs

Vacuum!: Coordinated Mempool Synchronization

Compact Blocks rely on synchronized mempools for optimal performance. The new Vacuum! protocol ensures synchronization via Validator Availability Certificates (VACs):

  1. VACs are cryptographic proofs indicating validators’ mempool content.
  2. Ensures consistent transaction selection pre-consensus.
  3. Dramatically enhances block propagation efficiency.

Impact of Vacuum!:

  1. Reduction in block verification latency.
  2. Higher validator consensus performance.

Fast Blocks, Slow Squares (FBSS) Explained

Celestia previously coupled block production with the creation of encoded data squares (used by sampling nodes). The FBSS strategy decouples these processes:

  1. Eliminates redundant processing.
  2. Minimizes repetitive hashing and fee calculation.
  3. Reduces block verification overhead significantly.

Mammoth Mini’s Performance Improvements

Performance Metrics

Table 1.1

Table 1.1

Looking Ahead: Towards 1 GB Blocks

Many of Mammoth Mini’s improvements, including Vacuum!, Compact Blocks, and FBSS, are advancing from research into active deployment:

  1. Short-term: Integration into Celestia’s public testnets.
  2. Mid-term (2025): Deployment to Mainnet Beta.
  3. Long-term vision: Robustly achieving and surpassing 1 GB block scalability.

Mammoth Mini conclusively demonstrates that Celestia’s vision for robust scalability and data throughput is within practical reach, reshaping possibilities for decentralized ecosystems worldwide.

The Mammoth Mini Container API

Mammoth Mini’s networking introduces structured Container messages for optimized block data handling across diverse use-cases:

Table 1.2

Table 1.2