Celestia Launches Voyager Payment Chain with 21 Million TPS for AI Agents

Author: Celestia Labs Research Team

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Shenchao Overview: As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves from generative chat to autonomous agents, the human internet is quietly transforming into a high-frequency interaction network dominated by hundreds of millions of AI agents. These agents frequently call APIs, purchase computing power, and match transactions—all requiring millisecond-level responses and ultra-low-cost micropayments. However, existing blockchain architectures almost invariably succumb to congestion, paralysis, or skyrocketing fees when faced with throughput demands of millions of transactions per second.

Celestia, a pioneer in modular blockchains, has officially unveiled its long-developed groundbreaking scaling architecture: Voyager. Official benchmark tests show that Voyager achieves an astonishing peak throughput of 21 million transactions per second (21M TPS), capable of effortlessly processing over 1.8 trillion on-chain microtransactions in a single day. At its core, Voyager decouples payment execution from consensus data availability, eliminating the heavy state overhead of traditional smart contract virtual machines, and is specifically designed with a parallelized, lightweight state machine for peer-to-peer, minimalistic transfers.

The release of this breakthrough technology marks a definitive shift in blockchain scalability narratives—from “thousands of TPS for human traders” to “tens of millions of concurrent transactions for machine-driven economies.” The DeepChain TechFlow translation team has provided a line-by-line literal translation of Celestia’s official technical whitepaper-length article, offering an in-depth breakdown of Voyager’s underlying architecture, sharded state machine mechanism, and performance benchmarking details.

In the rigorous benchmarking environment of a laboratory, the new blockchain architecture Voyager achieved an astonishing 21 million transactions per second.

This is Celestia’s hyper-scale payment network, specifically designed for the next-generation internet commerce dominated by autonomous AI agents.

The fundamental paradigm of how the internet operates is undergoing a transformation. The primary interactors on the network are rapidly shifting from humans seated in front of screens to AI software agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities.

These intelligent agents will autonomously perform complex tasks on behalf of human users or institutions, including planning itineraries, automatically procuring cloud computing resources, managing multisignature vaults, and identifying optimal arbitrage opportunities across decentralized markets.

Unlike humans who occasionally click a few times on a webpage, tens of millions of agents performing coordinated tasks generate hundreds of millions of micro-request calls. This creates an unceasing demand for machine-to-machine micropayments.

Imagine the strain on existing traditional financial channels and public blockchain infrastructure when hundreds of millions of AI agents frequently purchase data fragments, pay for inference compute by token, or invoke paid search APIs—all within milliseconds.

Figure: The gap between traditional human financial networks and AI agent micropayments in terms of concurrency scale and settlement latency

The traditional financial system is designed around human biological rhythms. Credit card settlements take two to three business days to finalize, and bank wire transfers can take several days.

More critically, traditional payment gateways impose fixed per-transaction fees (e.g., $0.30 plus 2.9%), making microtransactions under a few cents economically unfeasible.

Meanwhile, most existing general-purpose Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains are also unable to handle this task. They are constrained by single-threaded sequential execution bottlenecks, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), causing gas fees to skyrocket during sudden spikes in on-chain traffic.

An ideal payment chain designed for commercial agents must simultaneously meet three essential criteria: near-infinite throughput scalability, transaction fees approaching zero, and rock-solid verifiable finality.

Diagram: Voyager deeply decouples its minimalist transfer state machine from Celestia’s underlying data availability (DA) layer.

Voyager achieves a leap to millions of TPS by doing extreme "subtraction."

Traditional blockchains, in order to accommodate complex smart contract states and Turing-complete logic, require nodes to maintain large, cumbersome state trees. However, in payment scenarios, 99% of operations are simply straightforward account balance additions and subtractions.

Voyager simplifies the underlying transaction execution logic into an extremely lightweight state transition function and archives state on Celestia’s high-throughput data availability (DA) foundation.

Diagram: Light nodes can instantly verify payment settlements via Data Availability Sampling (DAS) without downloading full blocks.

At the consensus level, Voyager introduces a highly parallel sharded state verification mechanism. Account balance changes are divided into independent execution channels, completely eliminating lock conflicts from cross-contract calls.

Leveraging Celestia’s innovative Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology, light clients can verify with extremely high confidence whether a payment has been securely confirmed by the network, by downloading just a few kilobytes of sampling proofs.

Chart: End-to-end high-concurrency stress test performance scores of the Voyager lab cluster in a multi-node distributed environment

To test the upper limits of capacity under extreme conditions, the development team built a test network consisting of hundreds of independent nodes on cloud server clusters distributed globally.

Test results show that Voyager maintained a stable write rate of 21M TPS, with end-to-end single-slot confirmation latency controlled at the millisecond level, and no memory leaks or fork delays occurred in the network.

Translated into daily settlement volume, this performance means a single network can smoothly handle up to 1.8 trillion real transactions per day—tens of times greater than the combined processing capacity of all existing credit card networks worldwide.

Ultra-high throughput is not just a string of numbers to show off—it will fundamentally reshape the underlying economic model of digital commerce.

When the cost of a single transaction is reduced to one ten-millionth of a cent, business models once unimaginable become fully viable: tipping article authors per character read, paying in real time per second of audio playback, and automatically charging per millisecond of GPU memory usage.

Most importantly, a unified ledger based on open cryptographic protocols enables AI agents trained by developers anywhere in the world to connect and trade with each other on day one, without requiring permission or a bank account.

The launch of Voyager represents a significant step forward for Celestia’s modular ecosystem toward application-specific extension layers.

In the upcoming development phase, the engineering team will focus on deploying the decentralized sequencer network to production and integrating natively with leading global AI frameworks and agent orchestration tools.

The great journey to build the economic foundation for machines has just begun, and Voyager is fully underway, fulfilling its vision of connecting hundreds of millions of autonomous agents.