Dear Celo Community,
2025 was a year of deep execution for cLabs. The network completed its transition to an Ethereum Layer-2, delivered multiple hardforks, including the Jello Hardfork which dramatically increased Celo’s security, and scaled real-world usage to millions of users. H1 2026 builds directly on that progress, with a roadmap centered on meaningful milestones, including the Jovian upgrade, improvements to performance and security, and continued investment in the infrastructure this ecosystem depends on.
This post outlines cLabs’ H1 2026 roadmap, highlighting the protocol upgrades and infrastructure work we plan to prioritize in the first half of the year. It is shared to provide transparency into our priorities and to invite early community feedback.
Protocol Upgrades
Jovian (OP Stack Upgrade 17)
In H1 2026, cLabs plans to bring the Jovian upgrade to Celo, further aligning the network with the evolving OP Stack while maintaining Celo-specific design choices where appropriate.
Areas of focus include:
Execution layer (op-geth)
- Rebasing onto a Jovian-compatible op-geth version
- Improvements to the transfer precompile, including address warming and improved tracing
- Transitioning from Celo’s custom gas price floor to the OP Stack Minimum Base Fee mechanism, allowing for updates without additional hardforks and with less maintenance overhead
Consensus Layer (op-node)
- Updating op-node to a Jovian-compatible release
- Rebasing OP stack contracts to Jovian compatible versions
Fault proof stack (celo-kona)
- Update to a Jovian compatible version of kona
- Aligning transfer precompile behavior with op-geth
- Moving gas pricing behavior to match the OP Stack model
Some features introduced in Jovian were evaluated but intentionally excluded where they did not align with Celo’s goals.
Future Protocol Work
Following Jovian, cLabs plans to enable Fusaka on the Celo L2, contingent on the corresponding OP Stack upgrade. This work represents the next step in maintaining close alignment with upstream Ethereum changes while continuing to evolve Celo as a production-grade Layer-2.
Enabling Fusaka brings additional protocol improvements that increase compatibility with Ethereum and unlock new capabilities for developers and users. Expected areas of impact include the following EIPs:
- EIP-7951: Precompile for secp256r1 Curve Support
- EIP-7939: Count leading zeros (CLZ) opcode
- EIP-7823: Set upper bounds for MODEXP
- EIP-7883: ModExp Gas Cost Increase
- EIP-7825: Transaction Gas Limit Cap
- EIP-7934: RLP Execution Block Size Limit
Faster Finality & Pre-Confirmations
In H1 2026, cLabs will continue working with the Espresso team to integrate Espresso pre-confirmations into Celo, with the goal of delivering stronger and faster finality guarantees for the network.
Today, many downstream operators, such as bridges and exchanges, wait for blocks to be finalized on Ethereum before acting, which can introduce meaningful delays. Pre-confirmations enable these operators to receive an early finality signal within seconds, backed by an economic security guarantee, significantly improving responsiveness and user experience while maintaining a conservative security model.
This work focuses on:
- Leveraging Espresso’s consensus layer to provide fast, deterministic pre-confirmation signals
- Preserving compatibility with Celo’s existing derivation pipeline and OP Stack architecture
- Ensuring the system degrades safely and predictably under edge conditions
This effort builds on collaborative work with the Espresso team in 2025 and represents a concrete milestone toward improving confirmation latency for real-world applications. Additional technical details and rollout plans will be shared as implementation progresses.
Performance & Scalability
Investigating Throughput Increases
Celo today is cheaper than both MegaEth and Monad, and offers stronger security guarantees than both. To further compete with these high throughput chains, , we plan to continue investing in ways to increase throughput while preserving low fees and strong reliability guarantees. This includes both protocol-level changes and configuration improvements informed by real-world usage.
Protocol Security & Verifiability
As the protocol continues to mature, we’re focused on further strengthening Celo’s security and verifiability. This includes work to reduce trust assumptions where possible, broaden participation in fault challenging, and more clearly document and surface the system’s security properties.
Ecosystem Infrastructure
Valora Migration & Ongoing Maintenance
cLabs is actively working on migrating the Valora wallet from the former Valora Inc. company into cLabs’ stewardship and will continue maintaining and improving the product. Valora remains a critical wallet and on-ramp for the Celo ecosystem, and this work ensures its long-term sustainability of the wallet and alignment with the protocol’s evolution.
H1 2026 Timeline
The timeline below outlines the expected sequencing of work across H1 2026. Specific dates and milestones will be added as planning progresses and dependencies are finalized.
Q1 2026
- Jovian upgrade preparation, testing, and execution
- op-geth updates
- op-node and OP Stack contract updates
- celo-kona compatibility work
- Jovian hardfork, pending readiness and validation
- Faster finality and pre-confirmations integration work begins with Espresso
- Investigation into throughput improvements
- Ongoing Valora migration and maintenance
Q2 2026
- Post-Jovian follow-up work and stabilization as needed
- Continued work on faster finality and pre-confirmations with Espresso
- Security and verifiability improvements
- Reducing trust assumptions
- Broadening participation in fault challenging
- Improving clarity and documentation of existing guarantees
- Fusaka enablement, contingent on Jovian activation and the corresponding OP Stack upgrade
- Continued performance and scalability work informed by network usage
Closing
H1 2026 marks the next phase of Celo’s evolution, building on a year of heavy delivery with a focus on forward progress. This roadmap prioritizes concrete milestones that strengthen the protocol, improve performance and security guarantees, and continue responsible stewardship of the infrastructure the ecosystem depends on.
As always, we’re committed to shipping in the open. We’ll share updates as milestones are reached and look forward to continued feedback and collaboration with the community as this work progresses.
The cLabs Team