Dear Celo Community,
We are thrilled to announce that the Celo Layer 2 testnet, Dango 
, is now live! Initially announced for summer 2024, we are excited to share that we have successfully forked and upgraded the Alfajores testnet to the new Celo L2 testnet. This new testnet is based on the current state of Alfajores and will operate alongside it while infrastructure providers (e.g. RPC providers, indexers, and oracles) become acquainted with the L2 codebase. Once infrastructure providers are ready, we will be in a position to begin upgrading each testnet (first Alfajores and then Baklava) after which we will be ready to upgrade the Celo mainnet via a final hardfork and governance proposal.
About the testnet
We have ensured that all smart contracts, accounts, and balances from Alfajores are preserved through state migration to the Celo L2 testnet. Historical data remains accessible via the RPC API, making the transition seamless—simply update your RPC URL. Unless your dapps are dependent on deprecated transaction types, all existing functionalities should continue to work; for instance, wallets like Valora can switch to Dango by updating to the new testnet RPC provider.
The main focus of Dango is demonstrating a successful state migration with operational continuity, and building a robust foundation for future developments. We’ve adapted the OP stack to support Celo features, resulting in an OP-based testnet that follows the Celo protocol and supports all existing Celo L1 features including fee abstraction (paying for gas with tokens), one block finality, CELO token duality (the ability to interact with CELO natively and via the ERC20 interface), staking rewards, and ultragreen money. Please note that the new testnet’s chain ID remains the same as Alfajores, ensuring seamless functionality but introducing the possibility of replay attacks where transactions could be replayed between Dango and Alfajores.
Dango uses EigenDA for data availability which is in contrast to the OP Mainnet, which writes transaction batches to L1 in the form of calldata or, more recently, EIP-4844 blobs to commit to the transactions included in the canonical L2 chain, Celo uses EigenDA as an alternative data availability layer to minimize transaction fees. EigenDA is a data availability store created by EigenLabs and built on top of EigenLayer. With EigenDA, transaction data is stored off-chain by EigenDA operators, while only data availability commitments used for verification and subsequent data retrieval are stored on the L1, significantly reducing data availability costs and L2 transaction fees. The Celo Dango testnet uses the EigenDA Holesky testnet.
Sequencing on the Dango testnet is currently operated by cLabs as we work towards decentralization, a final goal on our roadmap.
Changes
The prior gingerbread hardfork introduced breaking changes by announcing the deprecation of CIP-42 and Legacy Celo transaction types, which will no longer be supported on Layer 2. More details on this can be found here.
One of the great benefits of being an L2 is the native bridge, allowing WETH and ERC-20 tokens to be bridged between Ethereum and Celo. While CELO remains the native token on the Celo L2 chain, there is a need to transform it into an ERC-20 token on Ethereum to maintain the possibility of joining the Superchain. This transformation leverages OP’s custom gas token feature, which necessitates that token minting occurs on Layer 1. Consequently, an ERC-20 CELO token will be created on Ethereum, maintaining the same total supply of 1 billion tokens, which will be locked by the bridge.
Conclusion
We invite you to participate in testing the Celo L2 testnet. To get started, visit the Dango Faucet, explore the Dango Explorer by Blockscout, try out the native bridge with Superbridge and check out the How to Guide. Additionally, you may check out the detailed Cel2 Specs and view answers to common questions on the Dango FAQ page.
The cLabs Team