Celestia Unveils Voyager for AI Payments, Citing 21 Million TPS Benchmark

Celestia Labs unveiled Voyager on Oct. 29, a blockchain architecture for payments by AI agents that it says sustained more than 21 million transactions per second in a single-node test.

Voyager is still in development: Celestia says it is “taking Voyager towards production.” It is an application-specific execution layer designed to use Fibre, Celestia's target="__blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ">acquired Sovereign Labs in July to add execution-layer expertise and calls Voyager the first product of that effort.

“We are no longer just providing raw blockspace, we are building the tools to turn that blockspace into useful execution to solve real problems,” Voyager co-author Nick White wrote on X.

Voyager is designed to publish every transaction to Fibre, which recently opened a direct upload route to Celestia validators. For TIA holders, the relevant mechanism is paid data publication: Celestia target="__blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ">Fibre charges for uploaded data separately from the settlement transaction fee. Production use would matter through paid uploads, rather than through the benchmark transaction count itself.

What the Benchmark Covers

Celestia says random transfers among 100 million accounts averaged 21.2 million transactions per second over five hours, peaking at 21.6 million. Execution ran on one CPU core, while the node used about 48 GB of memory. In Voyager's design, separate ingress machines check signatures before batching transactions for execution.

The benchmark does not include replication to other machines, state roots—the cryptographic summaries of blockchain state—or real-time transaction-status queries at that volume. The published summary does not specify the processor model or full hardware configuration, or establish end-to-end consensus and networking performance. Celestia promises a technical deep dive into the setup.

Stellar's Project Thruput preview provides a competing but different test. It reported 7.02 million payments per second across eight execution machines within one validator, using ERC-20 token transfers among just 100 accounts. Its benchmark repository says three additional hosts handled support functions and that consensus and the mempool were excluded.

The figures are not a like-for-like speed ranking: Voyager uses built-in payment logic across a much larger account set, while Stellar measures smart-contract execution under heavy account contention. Stellar says its preview is live on FutureNet. Celestia lists replication, state roots and queries as Voyager's next work and plans deeper technical posts in the coming weeks.