Thank you Tobi for your thoughts and participation. I really encourage more of you to join our community calls and allow us to talk in person.
There are a number of technical points we worked on with the web3 community during our whiteboarding session with about 50 people in Amsterdam many expressed they had never been excited about Celo before. Many of these design ideas directly address @marek before. Many of these design ideas directly address Marek’s questions regarding how Mezcal would function on Celestia and for Celo and what the direct benefits are. We had a lot of participation and quite a few devs hoping we would include them on the build itself.
However, I am confused by Marek’s negative take on the first two stages. He correctly states that the first two stages of Mezcal would be focused on onboarding and growing a developer ecosystem around Mezcal… he stops short of saying that this community would be also focused on scaling the Celo mission but this is what would happen and is directly the plan.
This is exactly what we intend to do… and It’s not clear to me why these two stages won’t bring value to the Celo ecosystem according to Marek?
Celo has notoriously struggled to attract 10x developer talent (unicorn builders) a huge reason why is our lack of radical experimentation and our lack of product clarity (not treating our stablecoins as products - NEAR will be taking over the space within the next 6 months you heard it here first) and our repeated history of copy/paste ecosystem growth.
10x devs want to establish design space standards and the only way to do that is to work in radically experimental spaces like Mezcal. So just to address Marek saying Mezcal’s ecosystem development wouldn’t bring value to Celo…Why? Why in an industry that continuously proves it rewards those that are bold and create space for radical experimentation…why would you say this would bring no value to Celo?
Average monthly developers on Celo is shockingly low and nobody in this community is actually talking about it (seriously people check it out). Converting our current testnets like Marek suggests would do nothing for growth considering we would be pulling from an already small pool of builders. With this celestia plan we propose to meet the 10x devs where they are and convert them to the Celo mission. These are opposite approaches. The Celestia community is vibrant and the energy of builders is strong we will benefit greatly by giving this energy an outlet via Mezcal and the Celo mission.
We are subdued with promises of million dollar hackathons and 100 million dollar ecosystem funds (Defi For the People) that we are told will “bring in degen builders and make Celo the defi for good ecosystem” (hockey stick growth around the mission) …except this ecosystem fund was run by the foundation business team and all it did was get Celo investigated for insider trading and lead to continuous promises peddled regarding huge eth projects eventually coming to Celo - this ecosystem fund and other attempts like it have been copy/paste attempts from other communities and they have not worked at all for Celo when it comes to consistently bringing in new people, money and devs…
We are proposing an experiment that nobody has ever done directly designed at attracting 10x developers to the Celo mission and all the while focused on scaling said mission… and one of the founder’s is saying “this will not bring any value to Celo”
The opportunity cost of not attracting 10x devs is staggering and obvious to us, this reality will continue to perpetuate and will directly continue Celo’s history of losing out on the next big waves in the crypto space.
Rejecting an incredibly cheap experiment designed at hedging against that reality is the wrong choice and I challenge the community to please think outside the box and the rhetoric around REFI, Defi For the People, saving the rainforest - all these promises require a strong, robust, creative and hyper talented developer army. Celo does not have this. So who will build this future Celo sells?