Glossary 
| Track | Initiative | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consensus | --------------------- | Optimization of Celestia’s consensus layer for maximum throughput. This enables larger block production through improvements to both bandwidth utilization and gossiping protocols of the mempool and block propagation. | --------------------- |
| Data blobs | Key building blocks for submitting large amounts of data to Celestia and making use of abundant blockspace. | Completed | |
| Erasure coded data root | Erasure coding the block and committing to the block data in the data root in erasure coded form makes data availability sampling (DAS) possible, which mitigates data withholding attacks. | Completed | |
| Content addressable mempool | A bandwidth-efficient transaction gossiping protocol. It reduces the amount of duplicate transactions gossiped by each node. | Testing | |
| Compact blocks | Compact blocks contain unique identifiers for all transactions in a block, rather than the transactions themselves, reducing the bandwidth required to gossip a block. | Implementation | |
| Coordinated start time intervals | A protocol to ensure that the average block times remain consistent regardless of the size of the block. | Design | |
| Faster CometBFT block propagation | An initiative to identify and address bottlenecks in the P2P networking and gossiping implementation. Focuses on improvements to bandwidth utilization by increasing throughput and ability to quickly distribute block data during consensus. | Research | |
| Node sharding | Node sharding allows block-producing nodes to process data blobs in parallel without costly peer coordination. | Upcoming | |
| Data Availability | --------------------- | Improving Celestia’s data availability layer to enable sampling and reconstruction of larger blocks, while lowering resource requirements for various node types. | --------------------- |
| Data availability sampling (DAS) network | The DA network enables DASing, allowing probabilistic verification of block data availability without needing to download the entire block. | Completed | |
| Blob pruning | Blob pruning allows light nodes to prune samples, while full and bridge nodes prune blocks older than 30 days, improving storage requirements. The standardized data expiry time informs rollups and applications of data accessibility duration and helps light nodes identify which blocks they likely store. | Testing | |
| More efficient DAS: Shwap | Shwap (share + swap) is a messaging framework that enhances sampling efficiency in Celestia’s DA P2P network, reducing storage requirements by up to 15 times and providing a scalable solution for data retrieval and synchronization. | Implementation | |
| Reduced storage: Header trimming | Reducing header size and improving syncing efficiency saves storage space while reducing the time and computational resources needed for a node to join the network. | Design | |
| Namespace partial nodes | Namespace partial nodes store and serve data for specific namespaces, enabling rollup full nodes to act as archive nodes for their application’s historical data blobs. | Upcoming | |
| Uniform partial nodes | Uniform partial nodes store and serve data for a subset of the entire chain uniformly. This allows them to configure the amount of storage they want to contribute to the network. | Upcoming | |
| Light nodes on every device | --------------------- | Light nodes use cryptographic techniques to enable any user to directly verify the correctness of Celestia while remaining small enough to run in the background on any device. | --------------------- |
| Rust light node | Celestia’s rust light client that compiles natively to wasm. | Completed | |
| In-browser/ WebAssembly light node | Rust implementation of Celestia’s light node, Lumina, which allows anyone to directly verifiy Celestia in the browser and mobile. | Implementation | |
| Node instant sync | Backwards header sync enables quicker online status and verification by checking header hashes, saving syncing time and compute resources. | Design | |
| In-wallet light node | Embedding the Celestia light node into wallets | Upcoming | |
| Light node security | --------------------- | Celestia’s light nodes use advanced techniques to enable data verification with significantly lower resource requirements. The goal is for the network to only rely on an honest minority of light nodes which have the ability to collectively reconstruct block data rather than an honest majority of validators. | --------------------- |
| Bad encoding fraud proofs (level 3 LNs) | Bad encoding fraud proofs (BEFPs) allow nodes downloading full rows or columns of erasure-coded blocks to generate short proofs of bad encoding. This ensures light nodes don’t have to trust block producers for correct erasure coding, maintaining data integrity. | Completed | |
| Light node observability (level 4 LNs) | DAS light nodes can collectively reconstruct a block if block producers withhold any data. For that to be feasible there needs to be a sufficient light nodes. Light node observability indicates the number of light nodes on the network, helping the Celestia community to make informed decisions on block size adjustments. | Implementation | |
| Robust P2P reconstruction (level 4 LNs) | P2P block reconstruction allows all DASing nodes to contribute to fully recovering block data, even if adversarial block producers try to withhold it. | Research | |
| Celestia L1 state transition proofs | State transition proofs for the Celestia state machine enhance security guarantees for light nodes and reduce resource requirements for partial nodes. Light nodes no longer rely on the block-producing committee for state transition validity, and partial nodes do not need to verify the Celestia state. | Upcoming | |
| Celestia L1 data root correct construction proofs | Data root validity proofs ensure the correct construction of the Celestia data root, eliminating the need for BEFPs while providing the same security guarantees. | Upcoming | |
| Private sampling (level 5 LNs) | Private or unlinkable DAS mitigates the selective disclosure attack, where early light nodes mistakenly believe an unavailable block is available due to selective responses from the block producer. | Upcoming | |
| Streaming assets from anywhere (Lazybridging) | --------------------- | A roadmap to allow rollup developers to quickly onboard assets and liquidity and ensure seamless interoperability between rollups. | --------------------- |
| Packet forward middleware (PFM) | An extension of the inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol that enables multi-hop IBC transfers and path unwinding. | Lemongrass upgrade | |
| Interchain accounts (ICA) | Enhances interoperability with external chains. ICS-27 specifies a cross-chain account management system built on IBC, allowing one chain to control accounts on another, enabling liquid staking and other uses. | Lemongrass upgrade | |
| ZK accounts | Allows Celestia to have an expressive verification environment for creating validating bridges that can withdraw and deposit assets to a rollup. By adding ZK verification capabilities, this can be achieved without adding a smart contract environment or a virtual machine. This would allows users to send funds to arbitrary ZK programs, including rollups. | Research | |
| Rollup devEx | --------------------- | Making for a seamless, performant, and reliable rollup deveveloper experience. | --------------------- |
| Canonical v1 blob API | A specification with a reference implementation for a rollup developer-facing API, informed by user feedback, as a second iteration on the current pre-launch API. | Design | |
| Namespace programmability | Namespace programmability allows users to customize behavior and rules within specific namespaces. This enables rollup users to set conditions for posting blobs, such as size, number, and uniqueness. | Upcoming | |
| Transaction UX: dynamic base fee | A fee system that allows users to more accurately specify their fee preferences, while preventing unnecessary over-paying. | Upcoming | |
| Fee burning | Dynamic fee burning, similar to EIP-1559 on Ethereum, burns non-priority transaction fees. This protocol change would alter the economic model and require approval from the Celestia community and governance. | Upcoming | |
| Separating sampling from finality | Separation of DASing from finality allows consensus to produce small blocks quickly with instant finality. These small blocks can later be combined into a larger erasure-coded block verified via DAS, ensuring fast block times while keeping light node resource requirements minimal. | Upcoming | |
| Blobstream | --------------------- | Blobstream brings ZK light client attestations of Celestia to any ecosystem, enabling them to scale with high-throughput L2s and L3s. | --------------------- |
| Arbitrum & Base L3s | Deployment to Arbitrum One and Base Sepolia testnets and mainnet. | Completed | |
| Ethereum L2s | Deployment to Sepolia testnet and mainnet. | Completed | |
| Mina zkApps | Deployment to testnet and mainnet. | Implementation | |
| Bitcoin L2s and L3s | Deployment to testnet and mainnet. | Design | |
| Solana L2s | Deployment to testnet and mainnet. | Upcoming |