Celestia Labs has achieved a significant milestone in blockchain scalability with the introduction of the Mammoth Minitestnet. This proof-of-concept network has delivered initial results showcasing 88 MB blocks and an average data throughput of 27 MB/s, a substantial improvement over the current throughput of Celestia’s Mainnet Beta.
These results mark a critical development in the broader pursuit of 1GB block sizes, providing a real-world demonstration of the scaling potential that could transform how data is handled across decentralized ecosystems.
The Vision Behind Mammoth Mini
The Mammoth Mini testnet is an essential component in Celestia’s roadmap to address long-standing challenges in blockchain scalability. The current Mainnet Beta operates with 2 MB blocks every 12 seconds, translating to a data throughput of 0.167 MB/s. Mammoth Mini, however, pushes that boundary significantly, reaching 27 MB/s—a leap that represents over 160X the throughput of Celestia’s launch configuration.
The implications of this breakthrough are far-reaching. Achieving 27 MB/s positions Celestia on track toward handling 1GB block sizes in the future, enabling the infrastructure to process not just financial transactions but also complex decentralized applications.
With these throughput levels, the network could support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, making it possible to run multiple Visa-scale payment networks in parallel. Furthermore, this advancement opens up new possibilities for applications like verifiable web apps and fully on-chain virtual environments, laying the groundwork for future innovations.
Innovations Powering Mammoth Mini
Several technological innovations are behind the performance of Mammoth Mini, all of which were designed to address specific bottlenecks in Celestia’s existing system.
Compact Blocks: Optimizing Data Propagation
One of the primary drivers behind Mammoth Mini’s performance boost is the implementation of Compact Blocks. Traditional block propagation involves broadcasting the full transaction data to every validator in the network. However, as block sizes increase, this process becomes inefficient and bandwidth-heavy.
Compact Blocks, originally proposed in BIP-152, streamline this by transmitting only transaction identifiers, rather than the full data set, if nodes already possess the required information in their mempools.
This method significantly reduces bandwidth consumption and accelerates block propagation, particularly as the network scales. In essence, Compact Blocks allow nodes to pre-download transaction data before it is validated, leading to much faster dissemination across the network and greater overall efficiency.
Vacuum!
For Compact Blocks to work well, validators need to have similar transaction data already stored, which requires their mempools (their databases of unprocessed transactions) to be in sync. This is where Vacuum! comes in. Vacuum! helps keep validators aligned by sending out Validator Availability Certificates (VACs), which are signals that tell the system which validators have the same data.
This allows validators to share data more efficiently, speeding up the whole process of creating and verifying new blocks. By doing this, Vacuum! ensures that all parts of the network are ready to process data quickly and without delays.
Fast Blocks, Slow Squares (FBSS)
Another key improvement is the introduction of Fast Blocks, Slow Squares (FBSS). Currently, in Celestia, the creation of blocks (the packages of transactions) and data squares (which help make the data easier to sample and verify) are tied together. This slows things down because both processes have to happen at the same time.
FBSS separates these two tasks, allowing smaller, faster blocks to be created while the larger data squares are built separately. This change could lead to block production times of less than a second, bringing much faster transaction speeds to the network.
By separating block construction from square formation, FBSS significantly reduces the time required to produce blocks, without sacrificing the security or reliability of data sampling. While FBSS is still in its experimental phase, its successful simulation in Mammoth Mini highlights its potential as a key feature in Celestia’s future scaling efforts.
Optimizing the Celestia State Machine
The state machine is the part of the blockchain that processes and verifies transactions. Previously, it wasn’t a limiting factor in how fast data could be processed, but as Celestia pushes for greater throughput, inefficiencies in the state machine become more noticeable.
Mammoth Mini includes several improvements to make the state machine more efficient. For example, the system no longer needs to repeat the same transaction process multiple times within a single block. These optimizations help free up processing power and allow the network to handle more data.
Mammoth Mini’s Implications for 1GB Blocks
Mammoth Mini is an important step toward Celestia’s ultimate goal of 1GB block sizes, a key milestone in scaling the chain. Achieving 27 MB/s data throughput demonstrates that Celestia is well on its way to making this a reality. Many of the technologies tested in Mammoth Mini—such as Vacuum! and FBSS—are moving from the research phase to real-world testing and refinement.
Celestia’s developer community plans to gradually introduce these improvements into the Mainnet Beta in 2025. As these innovations become more stable, they will be rolled out across the network, enabling Celestia to handle massive amounts of data and support new applications that require high performance and speed.
Mammoth Mini has shown that Celestia’s vision of 1GB blocks is within reach. The combination of innovative solutions like Compact Blocks, Vacuum!, FBSS, and state machine optimizations offers a glimpse into a future where Celestia can scale seamlessly to meet the needs of diverse, data-intensive applications.
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