Hey Celo Community 
As a response to the recent publication of the 2023 cLabs roadmap, the Primitives team is committed to providing further transparency on 2023 team-specific objectives. The following provides visibility into key focus areas our team will be focused on in the 1st half of 2023:
- Staked Celo v2
Launched last year, StakedCelo, a liquid staking protocol organically accrued 1.3M+ in staked assets by over 2,500 unique addresses. In particular, StakedCelo is used by other protocols which integrate the staking of Celo in their value chain (e.g., Spirals which is the largest user of StakedCelo to date).
Amidst initial traction, cLabs is committed to continuously refining StakedCelo to address enhancement opportunities. Through feedback we’ve gathered over the past few months, we’ve compiled a list of features to add in the pending launch of StakedCelo v2. New features including:
- User voting on Celo governance with their stCELO
- User ability to select which validator group to vote for (this allows users who have a particular opinion about a validator group express this in the protocol, in parity with direct staking)
- Increased protocol scalability (Until now any one account could only vote for up to 10 validator groups, a limit introduced in the core contracts - which limits the amount of reward generating votes that can be cast from one account. We’ve removed that limit and leverage this new functionality in StakedCelo to vote for an unlimited number of validator groups.)
After completing an extensive audit, these changes are targeted to be both deployed to mainnet and accessible via the StakedCelo front-end in Spring 2023! As the deployment is based on updated core contracts, which have to undergo audits as well, the fully functional version will be deployed on testnet only a couple of weeks before the mainnet release.
With StakedCelo and other primitives, cLabs is committed to prioritizing the primitives that best serve developers needs. We really welcome suggestions and feedback. If you’re a developer interested in building on or contributing to StakedCelo, we really welcome suggestions and feedback!
- Refining CELO tokenomics
We’ve been working on leading discussions to enhance CELO tokenomics for the broader good of the Celo community (see e.g., forum posts here and here). The increase of the minimum gas fee threshold has already been deployed to mainnet with CGP 83, thus strengthening the network and laying the groundwork for ultrasound Celo.
Over H1 2022 our team is focused to:
- Introduce proposals to burn the base portion of transaction fees for currencies including CELO, cUSD, cEUR, etc.
- Enable more tokens to pay for gas.
- Further improve tokenomics (adopt an Ethereum compatible EIP-1559 implementation, reduce the time in which the network is at the gas minimum by revising the gas auction mechanism).
Stay tuned for some exciting updates here!
- Providing a top-tier developer experience
Fulfilling the cLabs mission of “making Celo the leading platform for ReFi builders” requires a top-tier developer experience. In particular, this entails ensuring that high-priority EVM developer tools work seamlessly on Celo. With so many tools currently available though, the next step to serve the community comes in providing a clear set of recommendations around which tools to use for different types of use cases, developer types, etc. Together with the DevTooling team, the Primitives team will focus on further simplifying the process of identifying the right tools on Celo docs to seamlessly build, launch, and scale your project on Celo.
Additionally, we want to make it even easier for developers to leverage the unique features of Celo which can provide great UX if provided to users. See example below:
| Scenario | Proposed Solution | |
|---|---|---|
| Paying for gas with different tokens | → | Support gas payment for different tokens via Metamask Snaps |
| Accessing existing core building blocks (e.g.Celo identity) | → | Modularize Celo’s core contracts github repo, which currently unifies code from governance, identity, Mento and more. |
Stay tuned for more updates on both the blog and forum. We’ll continue to keep the community updated as we learn more and start building. In the meantime, feedback is always welcome - please leave comments and share your thoughts, and we look forward to a meaningful collaboration with all of you as we work towards helping the Celo ecosystem thrive!
The Primitives team: @soloseng, @pahor, @montera82, @martinvol, @matt