Mezcal - GTM plan & update

Hi all, thanks to everyone for the informed feedback on Mezcal. I’d like to now address some points brought up here.

First, in terms of @Marek’s [response to use existing testnets like Baklava or Alfajores, we maintain that this is not an ideal path. We say this because in our view it feels very anti-community, as the token distribution on those testnets is unfairly angled towards cLabs and the Celo Foundation, rather than the community. As an example, cLabs owns the faucet account for Baklava, and also controls the entire Alfajores validator set. Mezcal instead aims to do a fair launch that should be community-first. It seems like Marek is open to the idea of experimenting for the other phases, so that is great to see!

On any plans related to the Celo Reserve, for now there is no scope to implement the stability protocol or Celo Reserve to be deployed on Celo’s Mezcal Testnet by Ocelot, though this would be welcomed as a project by contributors who deeply understand Mento. This provides ample testing ground for folks like the cLabs Economics team to experiment with faster proposals and quicker updates to the Celo Reserve, if they choose to do so. In fact, Ocelot would be happy to scope out contract work for any contributor who wants to deploy new ideas and feature works on the economics front. Given the recent issues with Terra, Ocelot feels these complex systems require expertise like that of the team that built Mento and they’re invited to participate in contributing.

On the overall Mezcal project, several things are very clear from the Web3 community in regards to the project:

  • Mezcal has the potential to attract 10x developers into Celo’s orbit. This can mean further contributions to the codebase as well as more folks discovering the Celo ecosystem.
  • Other feedback we got from supportive parties is that Mezcal is the ultimate “nerdsnipe”. The amount of brain power it can provide to Celo from wider Web3 is undeniable by the response it received and how the story resonated. Mezcal can provide the space to test a major thesis in Web3, in migrating an L1 to an L2. How it achieves this, will require community input and involvement. Ocelot has already done a whiteboarding session with the best Web3 engineering minds in Amsterdam on how a migration can work.
  • Mezcal also accelerates Celo’s mission and scalability in alternative directions to a more monolithic mindset with new modular tools and thinking. Transaction costs on Celo must be kept low, no matter how large the ecosystem grows and what that means relative to demand for block space. This is an awesome and incredibly long term responsibility and we believe Mezcal is a crucial step toward maintaining it. That’s how Celo achieves its mission.
  • Mezcal can also provide extra benefits on minimizing consensus-level burdens via shared security. It doesn’t have to adopt this as part of the path it chooses, but there is a clear benefit and burden lifted to Celo on focusing entirely on it’s mission and not on validator operations. Community will need to outweigh the benefits together.

Furthermore, we invite the community to see our [original CGP proposal and our intentions on targeted outcomes. We believe Mezcal helps push that path forward on delivering those goals. Radical Experimentation is again part of the spirit of Ocelot and is a cultural tenant we aim to foster within the Celo community. Mezcal is a radical experiment designed to help scale the mission of Celo. Radical experimentation discovers the conditions of prosperity. From there, anything is possible.

Ocelot clearly laid out intentions to energize a Kusama-like incentivised testnet for Celo, because we believe it’s a worthwhile space for dev teams and big-idea projects to tinker with and test their assumptions.

We consider Mezcal a project worth doing. This is a new paradigm-shift in Web3 and one that Celo’s community has an opportunity to lead. This is why we will begin funding this project while being transparent about the costs and collaborations that bring it to life. Ocelot is an independent effort, trusted by Celo’s governance participants who voted on the CGP that passed to do what is best for Celo within the mandates it created. Governance is one big experiment and decentralized governance is doubly so.
We are energized and humbled to recognize our place and role within this vibrant community and thankful to have earned your trust to do so. We are Ocelot, we won’t let you down.

Where’s the Git repo with the testnet client code for me to compile?
If there’s some rewards for early adopter testnet validator, that sounds pretty sweet.

1 Like