Celestia’s Mainnet Beta has recently completed its first upgrade, introducing new features to enhance its consensus network. The data availability (DA) network is receiving its first significant upgrade with Shwap, which is now activated on the Arabica and Mocha testnets with version 0.18.2 of celestia-node.
Shwap is designed to make data availability sampling 12 times faster and reduce storage requirements by 16.5 times, enabling bigger blocks and smaller nodes. This upgrade is a crucial step towards achieving the Celestia community roadmap’s core objective: scaling to 1-gigabyte blocks.
Shwap: A New Era in Data Availability
Specified in CIP-19, Shwap includes a new messaging protocol and storage system for the DA network. This upgrade allows DA throughput to massively scale while keeping light node requirements low. High throughput DA accelerates existing crypto applications and enables new, unstoppable applications using any virtual machine.
Shwap’s enhancements also allow anyone to run an in-browser or in-wallet light node, paving the way for truly verifiable web applications. Following further testing, Shwap is expected to reach Mainnet Beta during November. The precise timing of network upgrades will be driven by the Celestia community.
Technical Innovations of Shwap
The DA network can be described as two protocols: one for circulating chain headers via go-header and another for managing block data in the form of a data square. Previously, the protocol and storage system were based on an IPLD-based protocol, which proved functional but unscalable, particularly with the goal of 1GB blocks.
Shwap introduces a new messaging framework and storage system that enhances sampling and data efficiency retrieval. It reduces full node storage requirements by 16.5 times and provides a scalable foundation for growing block sizes.
Furthermore, Shwap decouples core networking messages from underlying transport and protocol layers, allowing it to be stacked with lower-level protocols such as Bitswap, KadDHT, ShrEx, or custom protocols. This results in improved block data synchronization, accelerating data retrieval and reducing resource consumption.
With Shwap’s efficient data storage, ShrEx makes synchronization speeds 22 times faster, reducing sync time for full nodes on Mocha from seven days to just eight hours. Shwap dramatically improves data availability sampling (DAS) by integrating with Bitswap, reducing the process from seven round-trips to just one.
The Shwap upgrade enhances light nodes, particularly in terms of DAS efficiency. Light nodes can perform DAS 12 times faster and reduce sync time from 24 hours to just two hours. Additionally, Shwap optimizes sample storage, reducing the storage footprint for light nodes by 2.66 times, making them more efficient while maintaining network participation.
This upgrade is a significant step towards the community’s goal of 1GB block data squares, laying the foundation for future optimizations. The project has announced here in the blog post.
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