Mezcal, A New Vision For Celo

[roman]

@YazKhouryTest I always respected you for being outspoken and I was open about sharing some frustrations that you were feeling as well. But this whole campaign is far from constructive to me at this point and the hostility in the language used is absolutely unacceptable. You, @techboiafrica and others act as if you are representing the whole community in a fight against mighty multisig-holders with bad intend. This is simply not true - you are representing a subset of community members that aggressively dismisses critical feedback from other community members with good intend like @papa_raw and myself. Celo is not a dictatorship and that applies to you guys as well.

Let’s make sure funds from the community are used in the best interest of the entire community - not a subgroup of that community. This is what I signed up for when I voted yes on the original treasury governance proposal. You should be actively seeking critical feedback on how these funds are getting used instead of talking down on everyone that does not share your view on this.

When is the next Ocelot community call / could you share an invite here? I would like to join and speak face to face. Also, I happy to jump on a 1:1 @YazKhouryTest if you are up for that. Let’s start building back bridges together instead of burning them down further.

[YazKhouryTest]

Yeah feel free to DM me on telegram it’s the same handle as my Twitter. We can hop on a call and discuss this further.

[techboiafrica]

Respectfully Roman I think Yaz and I are frustrated by Eric’s misrepresentation because it continues a culture of gaslighting that happened to us while working at the foundation and we are witnessing somebody try and rewrite history.

This culture of abuse is, of course, something completely different and should be made public in a different manner and should not color a debate for the community, however, we are human, and noticing the same patterns causes reactions.

You are right Roman we have always been vocal, the reason there is a tension here is due to the fact that a large part of the community stands with us, it isn’t a small subset at all but many are scared to speak out since their funding comes from the foundation or they have been wronged by the foundation in the past - if you want to talk about toxic imagine that - ecosystem teams afraid to speak up or former celo core afraid to rock the boat. that isn’t what a decentralized community is supposed to be.

Respectfully this language around (small subset of the community) is what’s used by the foundation insiders to continue to believe they are the strongest voice of the community and anything they do is in the best interest of the community.

Papa Raw, Eric Nakagawa, and Alberto definitely do not represent this majority community but since two of them work for the foundation they are not questioned about it as we are.

[datboi]

Chiming in here in support of the Mezcal proposal and general approach the Ocelot team is taking here. Radical experimentation must be taken to maintain the long-term viability of the Celo Ecosystem for $CELO holders.

I saw @techboiafrica referring to “stagnation” and I believe that characterization is completely accurate. The DeFi For the People initiative I think is exemplary of poor execution and the (unilateral) massive appropriation of foundation funds without taking the community’s thoughts or desires into account. As a result, ecosystem growth has been slow and/or retractive in some places.

In regards to the long-term vision Ocelot is laying out – taking the burden of consensus engineering off the plate of cLabs and the Celo Foundation is a great way to free up existing talent to work on issues concerning the application layer that push the mobile-first mission. However, the Ocelot team should refrain from dictating roadmap to these entities, simply because while it’s great to have buy-in there it’s not strictly required – what matters most is the deliverables and how they drive forward the mission.

I would be remiss to avoid addressing the double-standard here – it’s kind of astounding. It’s pretty clear that the Celo Foundation has been operating on the assumption that their word is law, and any dissent is met with “decentralization” gaslighting. I for one am incredibly bullish on the idea of a parallel effort, with distinct governance, that seeks to execute on the mobile-first mission first-and-foremost.

seeks to execute on the mobile-first mission

This is what the topic of this thread should be. Instead, the detractors here are resorting to tone policing, a typical straw man that is often used around here to nullify critical arguments.

The Mezcal proposal brings up two key points around the decentralization and mobile-first narrative:

• The fact that Plumo took years to be released, but it is still far from a production release and any sort of widespread use in mobile devices.
• The fact that Valora, as an independent entity, is moving towards a more centralized model for phone number attestation.

Neither of these have been addressed in any meaningful way by any employees of cLabs or the Foundation – what is your plan to address this and put light clients in the hands of users? When will this be executed on?

Having Ocelot laser-focused on executing this mission is extremely bullish for the ecosystem as a whole (to reference the terminology I have been seeing on twitter around this initiative). The fact that individuals are willing to take a risk and rock the boat shows me that they truly care about the mission. It’s simultaneously clear to me from the outside looking in that the Foundation and cLabs team don’t have a clear direction here – it’s all they can do to keep things moving on a day-to-day perspective.

The last thing we should address here is that the “Celo Community” exists far beyond this captive forum which the Celo Foundation has full moderation rights over. This is why I am excited to hear about the Ocelot community calls, which provide an environment where individuals can speak freely without (completely valid) concern of censorship.

To address @Yaz 's question directly:

do you think an incentivized and canary testnet on Celo is a good idea?

Emphatic, YES! Anything that gets operators continuously involved and engaged in network operations and “radical experimentation” is fantastic. Kusama was a great move for the Polkadot ecosystem, and likewise a canary network would be a great move for the Celo ecosystem.

I am happy to run a validator on the Mezcal testnet so that @papa_raw doesn’t have to allocate engineering resources there

To the moon! WAGMI

[roman]

I appreciate the self-reflection and context @techboiafrica. There is clearly a history of conflict that I have almost no knowledge about and that contributed to this being such a heated discussion. Be assured that I am committed to publicly condemn any sort of hostile and toxic behaviour/language that I observe in this community and couldn’t care less about where it comes from.

To jump on the self-reflection train here as I think to heal, we all should - this is a fair point:

@techboiafrica

Respectfully this language around (small subset of the community) is what’s used by the foundation insiders to continue to believe they are the strongest voice of the community and anything they do is in the best interest of the community.

I actually do not have sufficient information to judge how large this community subset is at this point and will now post under my original tweet that the use of the word “small” was premature. I can see that my impression about the size of this subset might be biased by the fact that I interact with a specific group of folks on a day-to-day basis that likely is not representative of the entire community. Please consider this possibility yourself as well.

@YazKhouryTest and I will chat on Tuesday morning and I really hope we can find a more collaborative tone and keep old conflicts from spilling over into community discussion in the future. I am certainly a fan of radical experimentation and believe that non-political, open disagreement is absolutely healthy and necessary. But I also stand by m opinion that the way this whole initiative was presented felt hostile and did not live up to the standards and values that we should agree on in this community.

[diwu1989]

1. Why do people say that maintaining consensus on Celo L1 is expensive? What is actually expensive about Celo L1 consensus, it feels to me like the validators work fine, and the economic cost of running a validator is trivial compared to the rewards.
2. How do I sign up to be a validator in the new test net?

[gabrielllemic]

I’d like to provide a reflection here going all the way back to the very start of this thread. From my perspective, it’s also reflective of a significant amount of the culture I’ve personally witnessed and experienced with Celo.

There is a strong & detrimental tendency to bothsidesism. There is this forced and false balance, harmfully treating situations as if “opposing” sides present equally valid arguments. The consequence is that you’re left with spaces full of attempts at maintaining some false pretense of civility, especially in the face of trolling, misrepresentation, and the like.

The very first reply comment here is, in fact, the instigating source of this conversation. Paparaw later claims a ground of “civility” and “productiveness”. But based on the starting comment and its impact, this is simply not the case:

“An unwieldy proposal” , “doesn’t play well with the reality of the blockchain ecosystem as it exists today"

This was a disingenuous action to make an effort to engage in sincere dialogue. It is textbook form of sealioning, which is itself a textbook form of online harassment. It was inflammatory and in bad faith, intentionally done to troll and elicit a strong response, perhaps a distressed one. It’s done to provoke, inflame, and meant to be disrupt by inviting bad conflict.

The condescension then even further continued: “this does not help your position”… there is no defense necessary here, because there is no valid critique. Why is it the case that the expected dynamic is a defense for such trolling?

I personally had disengaged with any further conversation with this person when they chose to imply the Ocelot group as arrogant on Twitter. A group of 11 people, many with invaluable historical context on Celo – vast majority of whom are badass women, queer/non-binary/LGBTQIA+ folks, and people of color. Called “arrogant”, by a cis white male.

And we’re to allow that “both sides” have meritorious grounds for consideration? I’m sorry but no.

The first comment in fact very clearly showed that they did not read enough of the post itself to fully comprehend, nor the Ocelot tweet announcing intentions — they seem to have seen viral takes and didn’t click through to the substance. The evidence for this is even before the inflammatory quips with the comments around Ethereum and Interchain — it is clear this comment is not addressing the testnet, and frankly doesn’t show that the author fully understands the further plan for it.

@techboiafrica & @YazKhouryTest 's rightly asserted dignity and attempts to provide the further resources/material for an informed point-of-view are met with even more hostility, further concern trolling + misrepresentations, one other example being that the entire endeavor is too “technocratic”. The Ocelot group alone counts engineers, analysts, creatives, designers, marketing people, founders, cryptographers, regulatory advisors, economic experts, the list goes on…. not to mention many fellow web3 community folk — engineers included — who’ve expressed their support for and are excited for a project like the Mezcal incentivized testnet, and it’s future plan.

Here there don’t seem to be any attempts to moderate forums like this for the very clear & damaging behavior; to the contrary the mode of behavior from Celo foundation/cLabs representatives seems to be that of propping up the trolling.

Which is why it’s also very incorrect (as well as frustrating) to see others comments claiming an alleged aversion to feedback — it is simply not so, and has never been the case.

And in this case, there has been in fact no critical feedback, no valid critique to be seen on merits.
We invite critical feedback, in fact we welcome dissent even more so. But based on substance with merit. Not on certain folks being bothered that this was somehow “unsanctioned” by the Celo foundation and all affiliated powers-that-be.

The Celo foundation’s “community” is not the only source of legitimacy for Celo. And that’s also true for all the feudal affiliates — cLabs, Valora, et al. This is an existential issue that everyone in orbits around the Celo project should be reflecting upon. I commit myself to doing so as well.

I will also have to echo some of the other comments here in that there definitely seems to be an asymmetrical burden of proof on community projects vs foundation-driven / sanctioned efforts, spanning from the Climate Collective to the entire endowment of CELO that it controls on the network.

I hope this can be addressed and rectified. I look forward to it being seen through for the entire Celo community’s benefit.

[Nadiem]

It is a pity we all have missed the chance to meet and talk in person at the Celo Connect. I have the feeling meeting in person could heal wounds much faster. We are humans if we want to build a community we need to feel close to each other. Maybe we need a gathering that focusses on the emotional and human side of what we try to achieve. I guess the Connect serves another purpose.

A second thought, can we engage a neutral, professional moderator that helps us for some time to have a non-destructive communication?

[papa_raw]

Ocelot folks – if you have some underlying trauma or bad blood with the Foundation, please take it up with them. This entire proposal and your team’s responses feel like you presupposed a fight was coming.

The context I can see here is a key contributor of your team @Yaz had a conversation with @rene_celo and from there was encouraged to create a community fund worth millions. He did so. Fast forward and now the Foundation are the “bad guys” in your respective community. I don’t know what to say here – typically the bad guys don’t encourage and support folks the way they seem to have with you. In all honestly I don’t really care – I’ve been mostly involved in this ecosystem in the last six months and your histories aren’t my concern. I view the Foundation very favorably because they seem to be reasonable, well-articulated people. I don’t feel the same about your team at the moment.

For someone who is doing a hell of a lot of work at the app and ecosystem-building layers currently, I have a right to understand completely when a “vision” for Celo is put forward. I will ask questions. I will continue to ask questions in the upcoming months and I would love if those questions would get answered without snark.

Do note that if the Foundation put forward a “vision” as well I would ask similar questions if I was confused by it or wanted more information. I don’t exactly live in fear of speaking my mind. This was a point @techboiafrica emphasized.

Let me take my previous prompts and distill them into questions for you:

(1)

This feels like an unwieldly proposal at first glance that doesn’t play well with the reality of the blockchain ecosystem as it exists today, but I’d love to hear if I’m missing something here.

Why Celestia? Why not play more towards Ethereum or Interchain? What is it exactly about this platform architecture that is superior to other architectures, keeping in mind the social/ecosystem dynamics here? How is the culture on their side of the ecosystem, generally?

(2)

That being said, having their opinion on this would be great, I think, as they are a key actor as well: dismissing them as some mere centralized actor ultimately eschews the herculean level of effort they put into making Celo succeed.

What does the Foundation think about your “vision”? Their opinion might not matter to you, but it matters to me, and a lot of other people too. If you didn’t frame this as a “vision” to start I probably wouldn’t care, but I want to fully understand when a “vision” is put forward for a blockchain that my folks are building on.

(3)

Typically, given the level of engineering manpower required for such an initiative, most projects would opt for a Snapshot, poll, or other governance signal before even starting, to save themselves the cost. Given that Snapshot is now available on Celo, why not open an instance, to save yourselves the potential time and energy it will take to run this testnet?

Why are you not doing this? Why do you not want to collect early signals about your vision to build legitimacy for it later down the road, given the sweeping changes you seem to be proposing? How much engineering talent and how much of the grant fund is being put towards this single initiative? Are there separate budgets for the Celestia part and the incentivized testnet, or is it a single budget?

I leave it to @gabrielllemic @Yaz @techboiafrica to answer these questions.

[YazKhouryTest]

1. Celestia provides what is known as a solution to the data-availability problem that impacts all L1s as they grow to provide space for more block size and more transactions. As the block size grows, costs of maintaining nodes becomes more expensive. One solution is sharding, but unless you as a shard maintain full nodes for every other shards in existence (which defeats the point of sharding because you want to run nodes at a cheaper cost), then you will run into the data availability problem with light clients. Celestia solves this by decoupling consensus and validators from the execution layer and relying on many light clients to sample the data in the data-availability layer. The links I shared with you are very good explainers and I am happy to explain this in more details and the benefits for Celo.

You can totally go with Interchain and Cosmos, you will have the benefits of IBC and built-in bridging. Celestia is based on Cosmos tech with data availability layer added, and the Cosmos ecosystem is very excited about Celestia. I can even invite some members of that community to come comment here on their thoughts on data availability.

Settling on Ethereum is also a viable option as a solution. The issues I see there which is known is that sharding doesn’t solve the long-term data availability solution. The links I provided you earlier in the thread help explain it. You can still mix 2 solutions, settling on Ethereum as a rollup and also using Celestia for data-availability.

The current narrative on different architectures is that it’s being split between modular architecture and monolithic ones. Modular architecture decouples a lot of components of the blockchain stack in order to allow for larger scalability. Monolothic architecture is what exists today, like Ethereum and Solana, where all the different components of blockchain architecture happen on 1 layer (consensus and execution).

2. I invite the Founders to comment on the proposal. I don’t see how us saying we have a vision for Celo is a bad thing though. I would love to know what’s the vision and roadmap for Celo’s blockchain architecture. I am not focusing on the ecosystem here, because the ecosystem is growing and is awesome. But, on the key point of blockchain vision, what is it? All we see is vague points on working with Mysten, which is building an amazing architecture for their own blockchain Sui.

3. I am open to pass whatever architecture Mezcal ends up doing through governance. What I am not clear about is why it’s needed to start Mezcal as a testnet. Mezcal will just be Baklava with incentives. Long-term architecture decisions can be put up through governance on the path Mezcal takes as a rollup. By then, we will have a clearer proposal on the best architecture for Mezcal. I also welcome alternative proposals to be submitted so the community can decide on them. I just don’t see why it’s needed to actually start Mezcal as an incentivized testnet, since for the first 2 years, it will just be Baklava testnet + incentives. We have only scoped out the incentivized testnet part so far from engineering resources. Like I said, the vision on long-term rollup plans is still being scoped out and the community is also invited to comment on the architecture once that’s ready. Let’s just start with the testnet which will be increasingly beneficial for the entire Celo community, from dapps being built, to testing new governance mechanics to eventually thinking about blockchain architecture.

[downer]

The community approved Ocelot with significant support from the Celo Foundation for the purpose of elevating underrepresented voices and geographies. This proposal is to use those funds for self dealing. Why is this conflict of interest not discussed or even disclosed?

I find it difficult to consider technical merits of this proposal when this is a) clearly against the founding charter of Ocelot and b) not disclosed transparently and c) alternatives to Celestia are not presented.

[Zed]

I have the exact same concerns. For me the technical merits are secondary to what appears to be a conflict of interest that is abhorrent at a moral and ethical level. There are safeguards against this in every industry and profession - our industry should be no different.

I am also deeply concerned if other funds are being misappropriated against what was initially represented to the community when Ocelot was created. The fact that this proposal has gotten as far as it has without being checked indicates to me that the other members on the multi-sig need to take ethics training.

Before anything else happens, all the individuals in the multi-sig should attest that they do not have conflict of interest with any entities to which community funds are being disbursed. Celestia should be removed from consideration as a testnet partner until all conflict of interest concerns are resolved.

[Tomer-Ba]

ok spent sometime reading the research paper, and trying to understand what is the proposal here.

1. bassiclly this is not a “new vision” this is something else - if you want to start a new blockchain on Celestia why not just do it? what’s the advantage of trying to move an existing system?

2. I’ve have read the oclet proposal, and really don’t understand the connection between what was written there and this proposal, how did it happen that the change of focus on community money happened?

3. This thread (not the post) is unhealthy and aggresive, i will recommened some of the people discussing here to schedule some zoom time to ease the conversation.

4. talking to platny of people from the community (mainly people building companies on celo) this is not very aligned, as people came to celo to build on an enviorment of cutting edge techonologies (which yes takes longer to adopt) and not on another L2.

also, this feels very detuch from the oclet post I read , how did it happen that Mezcal became the main focus?

[bcamacho]

The proposal by Ocelot seems to be more for self-interest versus for the Celo ecosystem/community.

Ocelot took time to strategies announcements during the Celo Connect conference in Barcelona, which appears more like a jab at the Celo Foundation and cLabs—next, crashing the after-party event to seed doubt within the community.

These actions are questionable regarding intent. Is the intent really for the greater good of the Celo ecosystem/community?

[YazKhouryTest]

Thanks for sharing your feedbacks, some of you who I consider part of my Celo family and honestly surprised you would presume things such as self-dealing with the Mezcal network. A lot of us have poured blood and sweat into Celo to generate and grow its core activities and it’s no coincidence that Ocelot truly values the mission because some of its members hail from emerging communities and refugee backgrounds. The only thing that matters is long-term transaction costs staying cheap on Celo. This is the most important thing to fulfill Celo’s mission.

On the specific question on self-dealings, if anything, the distribution design should also be radical, like the majority of the distribution going to the community fund.

On the question of whether Mezcal fulfills one of the 4 driving principles of Ocelot: the community fund granted to Ocelot is purposefully focused on radical experiments, and as such is very well-suited to granting funds for the experiment with Mezcal testnet as a similar concept of Kusama on Polkadot.

On the specific point of transparency, Ocelot is nothing but transparent on spending and what projects have been funded. You can view it on the website here under Funding or a direct link to the Notion.

The community approved Ocelot with significant support from the Celo Foundation

This statement is technically false, because the Foundation doesn’t vote on governance proposals anyways.

On alternatives to Celestia, like I mentioned earlier you can use Cosmos or ETH2, but you are still going to run to scaling issues. How does Celo run as a protocol for a century is the question we all should be asking.

If the community in the forum feels strongly against an incentivized test for Celo like Kusama did for Polkadot, then we absolutely won’t pursue it with the community fund granted to Ocelot. The intent isn’t to cause a split in community, but to at least make everyone think that some things such as scalability are super important. We need to think about the long-term growth of Celo.

[diwu1989]

@YazKhouryTest

As the block size grows, costs of maintaining nodes becomes more expensive

Is this the high Celo concensus cost that you’re talking about? The compute & storage cost to store the chain history + state?

Those costs are quite trivial… The current block chain history is only ~50GB of so, even if you 1000X this, it’s only 50TB of storage, the vast majority of which will be in the freezer, which I can store in 18TB HDD that cost only 300 bucks each.

As for the current state, you wouldn’t need more than a single 1TB NVME to handle that, which is also only 100 bucks.

Compute cost is also quite cheap because CPU single thread performance has been increasing drastically in recent year and core counts have been scaling very fast as well with modern Epyc CPUs.

I’m not debating that the cost will increase, but the increased costs are honestly trivial for a proper validator or someone who actually runs production full node infra globally.

Validators for the Celo network, at its current size, cost only about 100 bucks / month to run if you pick the right data center, and even those nodes provide enough headroom for the chain to 10X.

On alternatives to Celestia, like I mentioned earlier you can use Cosmos or ETH2, but you are still going to run to scaling issues.

What exactly is the scaling issue you’re trying to solve? Is it processing transaction per block? or is it amount of data that can be stored on the chain?

[diwu1989]

If you’re mostly concerned about resource requirements for scaling light clients, those are kind of a pointless goal to solve for in my opinion because:

1. your every day John Doe just wants to connect to Forno / Anchr / xyz public RPC and do his Valora tx on the mobile phone
2. John Doe just want to use an app, he doesn’t care about light client / full client / validator / what not
3. your more technical Jane Doe who actually wants to play with the network is gonna sign up for Figment / Alchemy / what not cus that developer experience beats the heck out of trying to run a light client
4. your more professional operators are gonna need to run their own dedicated global full node infra anyways to do all of the mento trading / arbs / liquidations / etc… economic activity, and for them, $$$ infra costs are just cost of doing business and easily absorbed by margins

[brian]

Thanks Yaz. I think this reply highlights a disconnect between the intent for Mezcal and how Mezcal was initially announced/marketed/discussed.

If I had seen “Mezcal: A new incentivized testnet for radical experimentation” as the headline, and a post about how we need to be thinking about scale early, how we want to try things like a modular architecture, how this is like Kusama, etc, I’d guess you’d be hard pressed to find anyone against such a proposal.

However, what I saw was “Mezcal, a New Vision For Celo”, a post about how Celo won’t survive as an L1, a vision to move it to Celestia (who you happen to work for now), followed by some aggressive/surprising behavior from Ocelot members here and other places.

Two very different messages that will get two very different responses.

I think this disconnect is driving the heated commentary here, and I’d propose this discussion would be more productive if we separate the Mezcal incentivized testnet discussion (which I guess most people, myself included, would be very excited about) from the “what do we do about future scale” discussion. The latter needs a lot of focused, healthy, respectful debate from people across the Celo Community and I worry that mixing these together as “Mezcal” will be counterproductive to your goals.

[techboiafrica]

@brian, can I ask if anyone has any intention of analyzing the actions of Celo foundation employees or a key member of the newest foundation sanctioned DAO (papa_raw) who have posted here and smeared us both on this forum and publicly on Twitter?

We are just expected to field wild allegations of misuse, and self-enrichment against us - we were among the most passionate of core team employees 2 months ago - this treatment is wrong.

Furthermore, these same mud-slingers haven’t seen any of our specifics around the scope of the project and are freely allowed to assume the worst of us - and none of you are saying anything. So to judge us for behavior that seems surprising while ignoring the trigger seems wrong and unproductive.

For us, the continued apathy towards how we have been treated by people who we had counted among our friends at the foundaton is what’s more surprising.

Yes, like you, we had hoped to talk about the technical merits of this experiment and we have repeatedly tried to focus the discourse back in this direction and have found it nearly impossible. Especially focused on trying to make folks aware that any migration to an L2 wouldn’t happen for a very long time and the testnet is in fact an experiment.

As for marketing, that’s what it was, marketing. I witness Celo and other blockchains use headlines and hyperbole for clicks on a regular basis especially Celo when talking about “helping people in poor communities” - I don’t think we should get punished in the community forum for simply marketing our vision in the same fashion that everyone else does

[techboiafrica]

Confused why the default of this community has been to assume a multi-sig of 11 people is controlled by @yazanator. This is a huge red flag for the state of this communities discourse, when you and papa_raw talk about conflicts of interest you need to directly back it up.

How is a mult-sig of 11 people not the ultimate safegaurd against tyranical rule of 1 person.

Folks, Celestia is one of the most promising projects in crypto, they are going to be useful to various ecosystems in various ways. For you all to punish Yaz in the court of public opinion for simply having a job with Celestia and being on a multi-sig of 11 people is wrong and ethically disgusting.

Celestia is a cool project. Yaz is one of the most talented dev rel people in the game. They hired him, that’s it. This is a textbook smear campaign that I can’t stand by and watch be carried out against somebody I deeply respect and consider a brother.

It’s also becoming apparent that many of you never read our orignal Ocelot charter nor kept up with updates posted here, on mirror or twitter. Nothing about this plan is new and has been discussed for months. So for @downer and others to say it isn’t in line with the original charter is false and i encourage you all to go read our charter and direct your attention to the radical experimentation section and the core infrastructure section. This is a huge misrepresentation and the narrative you all are trying to shape around us somehow taking the money and changing our minds is an unhinged public accusation and we have the right to take issue with that.