Celestia Launches Voyager: 21 Million Transactions Per Second, a Payment Chain Built Specifically for AI Agents
Author: Celestia Labs Research Team
Compiled by: TechFlow
TechFlow Preview: As artificial intelligence accelerates from generative conversation toward autonomous agents, the human internet is quietly evolving into a high-frequency interactive network dominated by hundreds of millions of AI agents. API calls, compute purchases, and trade matching between agents often require millisecond-level responses and ultra-low-cost micro-payment support. However, when facing throughput demands of millions of transactions per second, existing blockchain architectures almost invariably fall into the quagmire of congestion paralysis or soaring transaction fees.
Modular public chain pioneer Celestia has officially announced its meticulously developed heavyweight scaling architecture: Voyager. Official benchmark tests show that Voyager achieved an astonishing peak throughput of 21 million transactions per second (21M TPS), easily supporting over 1.8 trillion on-chain micro-payment settlements within a single calendar day. Its core essence lies in completely decoupling payment execution from consensus data availability, abandoning the heavy state burden of traditional smart contract virtual machines, and creating a parallelized lightweight state machine specifically designed for peer-to-peer minimal transfers.
The release of this breakthrough technology marks a formal transition in the blockchain scaling narrative from "thousand-Tier TPS aimed at human traders" to the "tens-of-millions-level ultra-large-scale concurrency era for the machine agent economy." TechFlow assembled its translation team to provide a complete, section-by-section direct translation of Celestia's official whitepaper-style long-form article, deeply dissecting Voyager's technical foundation, sharded state machine mechanism, and performance benchmark details.
In a laboratory's rigorous benchmark testing environment, the brand-new blockchain architecture Voyager delivered an astonishing result of 21 million transactions per second.
This is a large-scale payment network custom-built by Celestia for the next-generation internet commerce led by autonomous AI agents.
Dawn of the Agent Internet Era
The operational paradigm of the internet is undergoing a fundamental dimension shift. The primary interactors on the network are rapidly transitioning from humans sitting in front of screens to AI software agents capable of autonomous decision-making.
These intelligent agents will autonomously represent human users or institutions to execute complex tasks, including independent itinerary planning, automated procurement of cloud computing resources, management of multi-signature vaults, and searching for optimal arbitrage opportunities across various decentralized markets.
Unlike humans occasionally clicking through web pages, tens of millions of agents executing collaborative tasks generate hundreds of millions of ultra-small call requests. This gives rise to the demand for unceasing, ultra-micro payments between machines.
Consider what pressure existing traditional financial channels and public chain infrastructure would face when hundreds of millions of AI agents frequently procure data snippets, pay for inference compute by the token, or call paid search APIs within millisecond timeframes.
A New Era Demands a Brand-New Underlying Payment Rail
Figure: The gap between human traditional financial networks and AI agent high-frequency micro-payments in terms of concurrency scale and settlement latency
The traditional financial system is designed around human biological rhythms. Credit card settlements require two to three business days to finalize clearing, while bank wire transfers can take even longer.
More critically, traditional payment gateways charge a fixed flat fee per swipe transaction (e.g., $0.30 plus 2.9%), effectively rendering sub-cent micro-payments economically unviable.
Meanwhile, most existing general-purpose Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains are equally incapable of bearing this burden. Constrained by single-threaded sequential execution bottlenecks such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Gas fees skyrocket linearly whenever sudden on-chain traffic spikes.
An ideal payment chain built specifically for agent commerce must simultaneously meet three hard requirements: near-infinite horizontally scalable throughput capacity, near-zero per-transaction fees, and rock-solid verifiable finality.
Voyager's Core Working Principles and Technical Architecture
Figure: Voyager's deeply decoupled architecture linking a minimal transfer state machine with Celestia's underlying Data Availability (DA) layer
The secret behind Voyager's ability to achieve a leap to tens-of-millions-level TPS lies in executing extreme "subtraction."
To balance complex smart contract states and Turing-complete logic, traditional blockchain nodes are required to maintain massive, bloated state trees. In payment scenarios, however, 99% of operations are merely pure account balance additions and subtractions.
Voyager simplifies underlying transaction execution logic into extremely lightweight state transfer functions, and archives states based on Celestia's massive Data Availability (DA) throughput foundation.
Figure: Lightweight nodes can instantly verify payment settlements via Data Availability Sampling (DAS) without downloading full blocks
At the consensus layer, Voyager introduces a highly parallelized sharded state verification mechanism. Different account balance changes are partitioned into independent execution channels, completely eliminating lock conflicts from cross-contract calls.
Leveraging Celestia's proprietary Data Availability Sampling (DAS) technology, lightweight clients only need to download a few kilobytes of sampling proofs to verify with extremely high certainty whether a payment has been securely confirmed by the entire network.
Benchmarks: A Performance Leap of 21 Million Transactions Per Second
Figure: End-to-end high-concurrency stress test performance benchmarks for the Voyager lab cluster in a multi-node distributed environment
To test the upper limits of load under extreme conditions, the R&D team deployed a test network composed of hundreds of independent nodes across globally distributed cloud server clusters.
Test results indicate that Voyager maintained a steady continuous write rate of 21M TPS, kept end-to-end single-slot confirmation latency within the millisecond range, and exhibited no memory leaks or fork delays.
Converted to daily settlement volume, this performance means a single network could smoothly handle up to 1.8 trillion actual transaction settlements per day, exceeding the combined processing capacity of all existing global credit card networks by dozens of times.
Enabling Seamless On-Chain Interaction Between Every Market and Agent
Ultra-high throughput is not merely a string of numbers for bragging; it will fundamentally reshape the underlying economic models of digital commerce.
When the cost per transfer is driven down to ten-millionths of a cent, previously unimaginable business models will become fully reality: tipping article authors by read character count, paying in real-time by audio playback second, and automatic fee deduction per GPU VRAM usage millisecond.
Most importantly, a unified ledger based on open cryptographic protocols allows AI agents trained by developers worldwide to connect and conduct trade with each other on day one without needing to apply for permissions or open bank accounts.
Future Evolution Roadmap and Ecosystem Planning
The birth of Voyager represents a solid step forward in Celestia's modular ecosystem moving toward application-specific expansion layers.
In the upcoming development phases, the engineering team will focus on advancing the production deployment of a decentralized sequencer network, launching native integrations with globally mainstream AI frameworks and agent orchestration tools.
The grand voyage of building an economic foundation for machines has just begun, with Voyager carrying the vision of connecting hundreds of millions of autonomous agents, sailing toward the future at full speed.