Love all of these thoughts.
On the liquid staking side, cLabs is actively working to bring stCELO to mondo.celo.org so that we can do more with liquid staking.
Regarding the decentralized sequencing roadmap, here’s the quick update we’ve been sharing during the bi-weekly validator calls:
We continue to be excited about Espresso, primarily because by leveraging a sequencing service that’s shared across other Ethereum-aligned chains, Celo can benefit from the network effects that come with adopting such a service. Espresso is currently focused on two products: economic finality and, longer term, censorship resistance.
Since Espresso is prioritizing economic finality for now, the initial integration (slated for Q1) will mainly focus on bringing ~1–2 second economic finality back to Celo after the L2 transition. The goal is to continue making Celo an amazing place for payments and real-world use cases, where fast finality is extremely important (since half of each trade tends to happen off-chain and cannot be rolled back if the on-chain half is reverted).
The longer-term plan, which is subject to change as it’s further out, is to leverage Espresso’s PBS roadmap, which will use auctions to give third parties the right to sequence a block (by paying the centralized sequencer). This would effectively decentralize sequencing because anyone could bid for the right to produce blocks if the centralized sequencer were to censor transactions. Importantly, this would not require another consensus layer on top of the one Espresso uses for finality, and critically, it would not redirect “good” MEV away from the Celo community to Espresso’s validators.
It’s also worth emphasizing that Celo’s design today, especially after next week’s Jello hardfork, is already quite decentralized (as with any self-respecting L2). If the centralized sequencer censors transactions, anyone can simply bypass it by posting transactions directly to Ethereum.
All this is to say: our current validator set may not be strictly necessary for decentralized sequencing, aside from running Espresso nodes directly. Additionally, any implementation of auctions would be further out (subject to Espresso’s PBS roadmap). Once Espresso opens up its validator set beyond the permissioned group it has today, Celo validators will be able to register to validate on Espresso. In theory, we could also divert a portion of CELO rewards to these validators to complement their Espresso token rewards.
Let me know if this helps clear things up or if anyone has any questions.