Celestia unveils roadmap to 1-gigabyte blocks

Celestia, a layer-1 data availability network, unveiled a technical roadmap charting a path to scaling block size to 1 gigabyte, according to a Sept. 5 blog post.

The roadmap’s core objective is to “relentlessly scale to 1-gigabyte blocks, bringing a massive increase in data throughput to Celestia’s rollup ecosystem,” Celestia said. Blocks are bundles of transaction data grouped together on blockchain.

Celestia’s focus on block size reflects an industrywide push to enhance the scalability of blockchain networks by lowering transaction costs and more efficiently storing and retrieving data. Celestia competes with protocols such as EigenDA and Avail, as well as mainnet Ethereum.

With 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia’s capacity to process transactions would be several times greater than Visa’s, the protocol said. The card network processes approximately 24,000 transactions per second (TPS). 

“This unlocks onchain applications and capabilities that were previously considered unviable, such as verifiable web apps and fully-onchain gaming,” Celestia said.

Related: Celestia on pace to surpass Ethereum in data storage — Research

On Sept. 5, EigenDA partnered with cloud platform Conduit to temporarily increase its block size from 2 megabytes to 16 megabytes, according to a post on the X platform. Its goal is to reduce operating costs for layer 2 scaling chains eightfold, EigenDA said.

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March introduced “blobs,” temporary offchain data stores designed to reduce costs for layer-2 scaling networks—such as Arbitrum and Base—by bypassing the need to post large volumes of data directly onchain.

Celestia has been steadily gaining market share from Ethereum since May, starting at around 20% and rising to approximately 40% as of July 31, according to the data. 

Unlike Ethereum, “Celestia is not constrained by execution layer overhead or state bloat, enabling a roadmap to scale throughput beyond current monolithic constraints,” Celestia said.

According to Blockworks’ data analytics manager, Dan Smith, even if rivals displace its lead in data storage, Ethereum will remain Web3’s undisputed settlement layer for the foreseeable future.

“Ethereum remains dominant in decentralization, stables, and TVL, which is what a settlement layer needs,” Smith said in a post on X.

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