Celestia activates Fibre, enabling direct validator uploads for rollups

Celestia has activated Fibre on its mainnet, a data publishing protocol that lets rollups upload large blobs of data directly to validators rather than through the network’s standard data availability path, The Defiant reported on October 20.

The initial release supports blobs of up to 128 MiB and up to 200 Fibre submissions per block, with smaller uploads and a slower block cadence than the protocol achieved in testing. Fibre went live with Celestia’s v10 network upgrade, under which each bonded validator is expected to run a Fibre server.

Data moves offchain while commitments stay onchain

Under Fibre, clients upload erasure-coded blob shards to Fibre servers operated by validators and download data from them, so readers can rebuild a full blob from partial pieces, ChainCatcher reported. Celestia’s consensus layer records only payment information, blob commitments and validator signatures, which the project says allows higher throughput.

Each server’s storage budget is set by the stake of its associated validator. Celestia told validators to set up Fibre servers on separate machines from their validator nodes ahead of the upgrade, according to a network status notice posted October 14.

In an end-to-end benchmark with 120 validators, Fibre sustained 3.07 terabits per second of throughput. The mainnet launch gives rollups with large data needs, such as high-volume applications, an alternative to Celestia’s standard blob lane.