@celestia has published details of the engineering behind Voyager, its design for a high-speed payments chain. Celestia ($TIA) says the architecture reached 21 million transactions per second (TPS) in benchmark testing, and that the same design will later be opened to exchanges and margin trading.
One Core, No Contention
Many blockchains aim to increase speed by distributing work across multiple processor cores. Voyager takes a different approach: it handles every balance update on a single core, preventing tasks from competing for the same data.
According to Celestia's engineering blog, Voyager's first full benchmark processed a sustained 21 million transactions per second across 100 million accounts over five hours. Throughput averaged 21.2 million TPS and reached a peak of 21.6 million. ChainCatcher reported that the execution ran on a single CPU core, with node memory of around 48 GB.
Fetching data from memory is the main bottleneck. Voyager addresses this by looking up to 32 transactions ahead and loading the data each needs before execution. Saving and publishing the data are separate stages and do not block one another.
ChainCatcher has reported other design details. Celestia says Voyager divides payment processing into independently scalable threads, ensuring that the thread updating balances is not blocked. KuCoin News reports that payment logic is built in rather than handled by a general-purpose virtual machine. State is kept in a flat table, and each transaction is published to Celestia's Fibre data availability protocol, allowing outside parties to replay it and verify that payments were executed correctly.
Limits of the Test and What Comes Next
The benchmark was conducted in a controlled environment. ChainCatcher reported that testing used a single node and did not include state root computation, cross-machine replication or real-time state queries at the same scale. Phemex noted that the result reflects isolated testing, not live network throughput.
Voyager is not yet live. Celestia confirmed that the execution layer remains in active development and has not been deployed on its mainnet. KuCoin News quoted the company as saying it is "taking Voyager towards production." Celestia has also said the design can extend to multiple cores and Voyager instances, while sharding storage across more disks would raise the current storage limit.
Celestia describes Voyager as payment infrastructure for agentic commerce, in which automated agents pay for content, data and services on demand. Fibre, the data publication layer Voyager uses, has already launched on mainnet. Voyager is the first execution-layer product since Celestia acquired Sovereign Labs.
Sources
Celestia Blog: Introducing Voyager, Hyperscale Payments for Agentic Commerce
ChainCatcher: Celestia Launched the Payment Architecture Voyager
KuCoin News: Celestia Unveils Voyager for AI Payments
