Hi @alchemydc,
Thank you for the engaged and reasoned dissenting feedback here. Personally, I can’t tell you what a relieving breath of fresh air it is to see, as well as the sentiments expressed prior starting to shift here.
I hope you’ve been well since we got to interact with the Plumo setup. I, too, have deepest respect for the brilliant team of cryptographers behind Plumo’s design, and am so excited for them to enjoy the fruits of such hard work. I am certainly rooting for Plumo, and the question myself and many others are asking is why hasn’t it been demoed on Valora yet?
“The proposal focuses primarily on Plumo and Phone Verification as reasons to move towards Celestia.”
The post focuses on these points as they’re reasons to reconsider monolithic L1 architectural decisions, not as reasons to move like you’ve described. It is a subtle but key distinction.
“We should not use Celo Ecosystem Treasury funds to [xyz]”
With utmost respect, this and related points are antithetical to the whole point of why the treasury exists — in simplest terms, the decisions of what treasury funds should be used for are the purview of the multisig (and ours counts 11 brilliant people). That’s the whole point, because it’s the treasury, and not the community fund.
We created the treasury with the consented premise that the multisig has agency. It’s the same agency that was afforded to the Celo Community Fund 1 project, the same agency that the Celo foundation or Flori Labs utilizes when they opt to be held accountable to the community — all of whom made or make funding decisions a priori with no such analysis nor scrutiny.
For those who’ve expressed curiosity, the budget for Mezcal is not finalized and we first need to do further scoping. When that’s done then we would share the precise costs with the community, as we’ve always been happy to do. Right now, the working estimates for the testnet amount to ~5% of the treasury, which is about the same ratio as the ~5.5% total for grants Ocelot has committed so far. Again this is still preliminary and in an ongoing scoping process — and thanks to our collective relationships we’ve been thrilled to have a priority engagement for getting the testnet built.
“We should be leveraging the Celo Ecosystem Treasury to make incremental progress on the things that we know need improvement.”
My understanding of this sentiment is that your position affirms a more conservative approach to distribute funding. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and please correct me if that read of mine is wrong. But this is not why Ocelot was created. While I respect your stance, it is not the approach we adopt, nor is it the kind of approach our commitment by requesting the treasury consists of — plainly, it is not our mandate. And the agency we should be afforded means that we should be able to adopt a more moderate or even radical approach to value generation.
This is a very important point that I want to reiterate here for emphasis. Whether the Mezcal testnet is funded by the Ocelot treasury or not, this approach is part-and-parcel of the mandate, spirit, and goals for Ocelot in general.
I, too, have been part of the Celo community for around 3 years now. And many people who I care about and respect deeply have been around here for even longer than me. Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve been sounding this drum since the day I joined Celo. The decentralization drum. The Celo protocol was created — and it’s also the story we have been continuously told — to not be run by just its same original “powers” nor dependent on the original team. And in that same vein, the Ocelot ethos is anchored around these same values. The charter of Ocelot is open source, decentralized community, emerging regions, and radical experimentation.
And an experiment, like a testnet, like this one, falls under the scope of radical experimentation (as some others have likewise keenly noted). We believe this to be a worthwhile experiment. Especially with a currently monolithic L1, radical experimentation is needed to scale the mission — because we need innovative projects that raise the bar and push the space forward.
This is the zeitgeist of our industry.
Because lastly, this also allows us to be thinking about something that we all haven’t necessarily touched on here yet, which is opportunity cost — if something is exciting to the wider web3 community as a whole, something that went organically viral, then that is a good vector for something that would be appealing to them to build on Celo. So here we have a prime opportunity for including and appealing to people who would’ve or would be part of the Celo community from wider web3, but right now, are not.
but I ultimately see this as a decision between the following: do we believe that Celo stablecoins will scale faster as a layer 2 on Celestia or with Mysten Labs’ upcoming upgrade (eta end of year). Do you think this is an accurate distillation of the core decision we must make?