Just wanted to quickly chime in here as there were a few questions asked that I know the answer to. This proposal pegs itself as a radical experiment that will help Celo with its mission. While I’m excited about experimentation and bringing new people in the the ecosystem, I’m struggling with two areas as they have been pitched:
Firstly, the repeated mention of Plumo and the Celestia light client makes it look like the proposal is proposing a solution that will work better for mobile phones than Celo in its current form. This is puzzling because as @alchemydc mentioned, the Celestia light client is not very light at all, certainly not light enough to use on mobile phones or web apps. So far, nobody has responded to this point other than @gabrielllemic who asked why Plumo hasn’t been demoed in Valora yet. The answer is simple: Plumo was only launched two weeks ago and I thought that demoing it on a web application (Celo Wallet) was much more powerful since mobile web apps are even more resource constrained than mobile apps. In addition to the more data heavy light client, by eliminating consensus on state roots, it appears that Celestia actually makes it harder to build decentralized mobile applications that can fetch and trustlessly verify chain state with merkle proofs. Now I’m not criticizing Celestia, I think it’s very interesting but it does look like its design choices are not as focused on mobile devices as the Celo ecosystem is. Given this, it does not feel like an obvious choice without more analysis.
Secondly, the proposal is proposing the following sequence of events:
Phase 1: Instantiate the Mezcal network with validators and a snapshot taken from Celo to help onboard the ecosystem and dapp developers to utilize the incentivized testnet.
Phase 2: Grow the ecosystem with incentives for developers to build on the Mezcal testnet first in order to test out new features. The Celo Reserve can also test the new tokens being deployed for diverse collateral.
Phase 3: The Merge, moving Mezcal Incentivized Testnet from an L1 to an L2 Rollup on Celestia. Phase 3 will take some time as it requires waiting on Celestia Mainnet to go live.
The first two phases appear to have nothing to do with Celestia and therefore may not add that much value to the Celo ecosystem and instead may even split attention away from the existing Celo networks. Usually, when you want to launch a new network with new features, you develop that new network before launching it, since it is much much easier to do so before it’s running. In this case, the development only happens in Phase 3 after Mezcal is live, requiring a difficult Merge operation that feels needlessly difficult to take on for a network that doesn’t exist yet. If having an incentivized testnet in the Celo ecosystem is the goal, then we already have two testnets to pick from that we could convert to take on an incentivized form.
Given these two points, it’s hard for me to understand the goals behind this proposal. If the goal is to radically experiment with new scalability solutions, I would be much more in favor of focusing on development and benchmarking before launching something. It would be great to use these benchmarks to compare the proposed approach with the current Celo roadmap that uses Narwhal for ordering transactions in a scalable manner.