Celo Community!
It’s a big week for upgrades to the Celo platform.
The governance proposal to deploy Contracts Release 10 (CR10) has passed and been executed, meaning a whole range of upgrades to Celo’s Core Contracts.
And tomorrow, the Gingerbread Hard Fork is due to activate, with a quorum of validators already switched to blockchain release 1.8.0. (if you’re a node operator and haven’t yet upgraded, please consider doing so ASAP!)
To celebrate this hard fork we invite the community to a livestream watch party to witness the Gingerbread countdown together at 17:15 UTC. Join the watch party here!
So what does this hard fork, combined with CR10, offer the Celo community? We’ve detailed key changes below:
-
Enhanced Scalability – Gingerbread enables further block gas limit increases and higher throughput, ensuring the network’s fees remain low, even as demand surges (e.g., with institutional adoption such as MiniPay launched by Opera). Watch out for future proposals to raise the block gas limit!
-
Transaction Fee For Good – Gingerbread changes the way transaction base fees are processed so that every single transaction for any app contributes to positive climate action. Now, 20% of these fees will be redirected to a new Green Fund (GF), while the remaining 80% will be burned, aptly named Ultragreen Money.
-
L2 Transition Preparation – Gingerbread will simplify and clean up the protocol to further align with Ethereum in the network’s proposed transition to an Ethereum L2, further encouraging seamless interoperability between Celo and Ethereum. This includes removing infrequently used features and precompiles. Additionally, Gingerbread will have a new transaction type that enables a more Ethereum compatible way to pay for gas fees in ERC20 currencies. The intention is to provide support for this transaction type on the L2, allowing developers an extended migration window from now until the L2 launch.
-
Vote Delegation & Other Governance Improvements: CR10 allows CELO owners to delegate governance decisions to another account. This enables more composability and use cases such as large investors delegating voting decisions to university clubs, which has become prevalent throughout the industry. Additionally, this will fix various smaller issues related to on-chain governance, for example updating the upvote function and fix the dequeuing function for expired proposals.
These updates encompass crucial enhancements in consensus mechanisms and smart contract execution, ultimately bolstering the overall dependability of the Celo platform. Technical details can be found here.
The Gingerbread Hard Fork and the associated CR10 release represents a significant milestone in the Celo community’s progress towards becoming an Ethereum L2, and we are thrilled to have the community accompanying us on this exciting journey!