Inside Celestia’s Lemongrass Upgrade: Key Features and Enhancements
Exploring the new features and Improvements in Celestia's Lemongrass Upgrade: Enhanced Security, Cross-Chain Functionality, & Seamless User Experience.
Celestia’s first major upgrade is here, Lemongrass!
Lemongrass introduces several key improvements and features, which aim to enhance the DA layer’s functionality, security, and overall user experience. In this article, we’ll break down each of the new features, explain the associated Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPS), and explain why they’re important.
Overview of The Lemongrass Upgrade
As mentioned, Lemongrass marks the first major upgrade for Celestia, scheduled to deploy on the Arabica testnet this month, Mocha Testnet thereafter, and finally on Celestia Mainnet Beta in early-mid September.
Lemongrass includes 5 total CIPs:
CIP-6: Price Enforcement
CIP-9: Packet Forward Middleware
CIP-10: Coordinated Upgrades
CIP-14: Interchain Accounts (ICA)
CIP-20: Disabling the Blobstream Module
Now, let’s break these all down and explain their importance 👇
CIP-6: Price Enforcement
CIP-6 introduces Minimum Price Enforcement, which establishes a global, consensus-enforced minimum gas price for all transactions on Celestia. This means the community, through governance, decides the minimum amount of utia (Staking Denomination: 1 TIA = 1,000,000) required for each transaction.
& don’t worry, through chain abstraction (more specifically, gas abstraction) end-users won’t need to worry about any gas payments in the future (*knocks on wood).
Benefits of CIP-6
Transaction Prioritization: The gas fee acts as a bidding mechanism. When the network is congested, users willing to pay higher fees get their transactions processed faster, ensuring that high value transactions, deemed by the user, are included in blocks during times of high demand.
Spam Prevention: By requiring a minimum fee for each transaction, the chain discourages users from spamming the network with a large number of low-value transactions. Since each transaction incurs a cost, attackers would have to spend a significant amount of resources to flood the network with transactions, making a DDoS attack more expensive and less feasible. Put simply, there are only so many transactions you can spam on the network, before running out of funds to cover gas costs.
Stable & Predictable Pricing: Rollups themselves can better predict transaction costs, enabling more reliable financial planning.
Prevention of Fee Manipulation: Because the global minimum fee is established via community governance, validators can't undercut each other or make off-chain deals, ensuring fairness.
Overall, CIP-6 ensures that both rollups and end-users benefit from stable, secure, and predictable pricing on the Celestia network.
CIP-9: Packet Forward Middleware
CIP-9 introduces Packet Forward Middleware (PFM), enhancing Celestia’s existing Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, or in other words, improving how Celestia communicates and shares information with other IBC chains. For those unaware, IBC is a protocol for trustless communication between chains, used all across the Cosmos ecosystem, but now making its way to Ethereum and other chains through teams like Union and Polymer.
What CIP-9 does is enhance Celestia's existing IBC capabilities by integrating the Packet Forward Middleware (PFM). This middleware adds advanced routing and handling features that improve the efficiency, reliability, and user experience of cross-chain transactions. All while maintaining token fungibility, ensuring tokens maintain their properties across multiple chains.
Before PFM, Celestia supported basic token transfers between chains within the IBC ecosystem. After the upgrade, Celestia will support advanced, multi-hop capabilities, allowing tokens to be routed through multiple chains seamlessly.
Imagine a user, Alice, wants to swap ETH on Chain A, for TIA on Chain B. Without PFM, she would need to handle each step manually, which is time-consuming and complex. With PFM, she can initiate the swap, and PFM handles the entire process, routing the tokens through any necessary chains. All the while, token fungibility is maintained.
Let’s look at an example scenario:
Alice wants to swap Token X (ETH) on Chain A for Token Y (TIA) on Chain B. The DEX she is using supports Token X (ETH) and Token Y (TIA) but requires routing through Chain C (an intermediary chain) to complete the swap.
Without PFM: the swap would require multiple manual steps, with Alice potentially needing to handle each transfer separately.
With PFM: Alice initiates the swap on the DEX, specifying Token X (ETH) on Chain A and Token Y (TIA) on Chain B, and PFM handles the routing. It sends Token X (ETH) from Chain A to Chain C, and forwards Token X (ETH) from Chain C to Chain B, swapping it for Token Y (TIA).
From the perspective of Alice, she experiences a seamless token swap without worrying about the underlying complexity of cross-chain transactions. She initiates the swap and receives Token Y on Chain B.
Ultimately, CIP-9 enhances the efficiency of cross-chain transactions, enabling developers to build more advanced and efficient cross-chain dApps, while end-users enjoy a smoother, more seamless cross-chain experience.
CIP-10: Coordinated Upgrades
This one is a bit easier to understand. CIP-10 introduces a new way to coordinate network upgrades in Celestia, ensuring smoother transitions between different versions of the network software.
First, some context about how Celestia hardforks (upgrades) are handled.
Essentially, you need coordination between the Celestia Labs team, and Celestia validators “on what they need to do in order to be ready for an upcoming hardfork” (download the new software, or upgrading your nodes).
Following this Lemongrass upgrade, or any major upgrades in the future, the old Celestia network will not be compatible with the new, which is why validator coordination is important.
So how will the Celestia validators know when to upgrade, or when the upgrade has occurred? That is essentially what this CIP is about.
Previously, upgrades were handled by setting a specific block height for when the upgrade would occur - “on Block #1,000,000 every validator must upgrade their nodes in order to keep producing blocks for the chain”, for example. Validators had to manually update their nodes by this block height, which could lead to issues if they weren’t properly coordinated.
This is what we’ll see with the Lemongrass upgrade.
After this Lemongrass upgrade, or once CIP-10 is officially integrated into Celestia, future upgrades will use an on-chain signaling system where validators indicate their readiness. Specifically, once 5/6 (approximately 83.33%) of the total voting power signals readiness for the new proposed version, the network is considered ready to upgrade.
Network upgrades can be complex and risky. This new upgrade protocol will ensure that a sufficient number of validators are ready before transitioning to a new version of the network, minimizing disruptions and risks of network halts.
CIP-14: Interchain Accounts
CIP-14 brings interchain accounts to Celestia, enabling one chain to control an account on another through IBC. This is one of the features a lot of the community is excited about, as it plays a big role in one of the biggest use cases for TIA, liquid staking.
How ICA Works:
There are two main actors to keep in mind:
Controller Chain: The chain that creates and manages accounts on another chain. It sends commands to the host chain (e.g., Celestia acting as a controller chain).
Host Chain: The chain where the account is located and is managed by the controller chain. It executes the commands received from the controller chain (e.g. Stride).
As the host chain, Celestia can control which messages ICAs are allowed to execute using an "allow list." While ICAs have broad flexibility, their primary use has been in liquid staking.
Liquid Staking Providers (LSPs) allow users to stake their TIA tokens while retaining liquidity through a liquid staking derivative (like stTIA on Stride). This offers a dual advantage: users can continue earning TIA staking rewards while using the underlying value in other DeFi applications. However, it comes with risks like added protocol layers or reliance on third-party trust in multisig setups.
LSPs can accumulate a significant portion of the network's staked tokens. If these tokens are delegated to only a few validators, it can lead to the centralization of voting power and decision-making within the network. Therefore, it's vital that Celestia’s LSPs align with key principles like decentralization, trust minimization, and community governance.
By implementing ICA, Celestia can support protocols like Stride in offering decentralized, trust-minimized liquid staking services that align with the community’s values. Practically, this means that users on Celestia can manage their staking activities on Stride without relying on a centralized entity. For instance, a user could stake TIA on Stride and receive stTIA (staked TIA) while still managing all related actions - such as delegation, rewards collection, and unstaking - directly from their Celestia account.
Users benefit from a more seamless experience across different chains. They can interact with multiple chains without needing to manually manage accounts on each one. This makes using cross-chain applications much simpler and more intuitive.
CIP-20: Disabling The BlobStream Module
Lastly, Celestia’s Lemongrass upgrade will implement CIP-20, which focuses on removing the old Blobstream module from Celestia, as it has been replaced by the more advanced Blobstream X. For those unaware, we broke down Blobstream X in a previous issue, here.
According to the official CIP-20 page, this is part of an ongoing effort to clean up outdated or unnecessary components from the system. While this change won’t directly impact end-users, it’s an important step in optimizing the overall system. Removing outdated components helps ensure the network runs smoothly and efficiently.
Conclusion
The Lemongrass upgrade is a major step forward for Celestia, not just in terms of technical enhancements, but also in how it positions the network for future growth. Each CIP is strategically designed to address specific challenges and opportunities.
CIP-6 is a crucial move towards maintaining stability and fairness in pricing, which is essential as more rollups and applications start using Celestia. CIP-9 enhances cross-chain communication, a feature that will become increasingly important as blockchain interoperability grows. CIP-10 makes upgrades more efficient and less risky, a necessary evolution as the network scales. CIP-14 introduces a groundbreaking feature with Interchain Accounts, paving the way for more complex and decentralized applications. Finally, CIP-20 is a necessary housekeeping step, ensuring the network remains lean and optimized.
We hope you found this Lemongrass breakdown helpful, and are now well aware of what Celestia’s first major upgrade entails.
🧱✨