Hi Henry!
I appreciate your thoughtful response. I’ll address your questions below:
a) The core purpose of this grant is to ensure that the Celo treasury is returned the money that is being spent on cLabs public goods funding for L2 protocol development. There are no strings attached. We want the Celo community to decide on how this money would be used, and it should be treated similar to any other funds currently in the treasury.
The future of Celo is bright and we believe in your collective ability to effectively allocate capital to fund the most impactful initiatives.
b) CEL2 on the ZK Stack will enable the full community of Celo validators to operate CEL2’s decentralized sequencer, with the additional ability to allow validators to run a zkPorter Data Availability layer if interested. Either design can use CELO staking for security.
The ZK Stack will be decentralized such that it is indeed easy to bring in existing validator communities that would like to run their own stack.
Keeping Celo’s consensus mechanism is definitely possible. We are aware that Celo plans to make a decision to change its consensus design in the transition to CEL2. However, as we have mentioned regarding the consensus design of the ZK Stack, it would likely be easier for Celo to simply use the implementation we will have live rather than making changes to its own to support the ZK Stack. This maintains core requirements like single-block finality, inheriting Celo’s validators, and CELO staking, without extra engineering overhead or costs.