Season 1 CICLOPS Retrospective

Governance
1

Celo Infrastructure for Chain Lifecycle Operational Support

July–December 2025Proposal https://forum.celo.org/t/celo-infrastructure-for-chain-lifecycle-operational-support-season-1-ciclops-2/11925

Summary

Season 1 marked the first full governance season in which CICLOPS operated as Celo’s infrastructure support and coordination mechanism following its launch in December 2024.

CICLOPS was established to ensure that the critical infrastructure the Celo network depends on every day, including explorers, indexers, bridges, oracles, wallets, and upgrade coordination remains reliable, continuously funded, and able to scale alongside the protocol.

To contextualize this spending, running a blockchain at scale requires significant funding. Beyond protocol development, the ongoing infrastructure costs including monitoring, indexing, oracles, data availability, bridges, and more represent a substantial baseline budget for any live chain.

While precise totals vary widely by design and usage, real-world engineering estimates suggest that even basic blockchain projects and associated services often cost tens of millions of dollars annually to develop, deploy, and sustain once you include cloud services, high-availability nodes, and third-party integrations. In that context, the budget allocated to CICLOPS reflects the baseline cost of operating reliable, production-grade infrastructure for Celo as an Ethereum L2.

Following Celo’s transition to an Ethereum L2 in March 2025, CICLOPS supported the stabilization, scaling, and continued upgrade of the network during the July–December period, helping ensure reliable operations and prevent infrastructure risk from becoming a bottleneck for users and builders.

This retrospective provides a high-level overview of CICLOPS activities during Season 1. While we aim to be transparent, some financial allocations, vendor details, and contract-level information are not included at this stage due to standard partner confidentiality requirements and ongoing internal documentation. Additional detail will be shared where possible.

Background & Motivation

CICLOPS was created to address a structural need within the Celo ecosystem: ensuring that critical infrastructure is supported in a consistent, coordinated, and sustainable way. Specifically, CICLOPS was designed to provide a path for:

  • Funding and maintaining essential network infrastructure

  • Coordinating vendor relationships under a unified structure

  • Ensuring reliable uptime and operational readiness during major protocol upgrades

Season 1 followed Celo’s L2 transition and coincided with a period of rapid technical progress, multiple hardforks, and increased user activity, all of which placed sustained demand on core infrastructure.

Season 1 Achievements

Maintained Core Infrastructure Across the L2 Transition

Throughout Season 1, CICLOPS ensured uninterrupted operation of essential network components as Celo operated and evolved as an Ethereum L2, including explorers, indexers, bridges, oracles, and wallet-related infrastructure.

These systems remained stable during major milestones such as the OP Succinct Lite activation, and the EigenDA v2 rollout, periods that historically represent elevated operational risk for any network.

Category Examples of Vendors
Explorers, Monitoring and Transparency E.g., Celoscan
Infrastructure category E.g. T1 US-compliant & regulated stablecoin infrastructure provider used by major brokerages and fintechs (announcing Q1)
Oracles & Indexers E.g., Chainlink, The Graph
Wallet Support, Account Abstraction & Infrastructure E.g., Ledger, Gnosis Safe

NB: The names listed above are intentionally not exhaustive. They are included to provide clarity on the infrastructure components required to operate and scale Celo as an Ethereum L2. As noted earlier, many partners are not listed due to standard partner confidentiality. Where services are referenced, agreements have been structured to meet these operational requirements while remaining cost-conscious, with pricing often secured at discounts of up to 80% compared to comparable market offerings.

Supported Upgrades and New Infrastructure Needs

Operating as an Ethereum L2 introduced new architectural requirements and operational considerations.

CICLOPS worked in coordination with cLabs, Celo Foundation teams, and ecosystem contributors to scope, evaluate, and support infrastructure additions required to safely operate the network in this phase. This included identifying gaps early, onboarding new categories of infrastructure support, and ensuring readiness ahead of protocol changes rather than reacting after the fact.

CICLOPS further streamlined centralized negotiation and contract administration for multiple infrastructure providers, producing clearer service expectations, more predictable renewal cycles, and reduced coordination overhead for internal teams.

As network usage increased, CICLOPS supported a broader range of infrastructure categories and ensured capacity kept pace with actual network usage rather than lagging behind growth.

Funding Overview

Season 1 authorized CICLOPS to request up to $3M cUSD equivalent, held in CELO.

  • 90-day CELO average for calculation: $0.3242

  • CELO equivalent: 9,254,340 CELO

  • Funds were disbursed gradually across Season 1, with an initial tranche of up to 50% for timely execution

Funds were allocated based on infrastructure criticality, uptime requirements, and alignment with Celo’s L2 roadmap.

All CICLOPS contributors continued to serve in an oversight and operational capacity without compensation. Funds were used exclusively for infrastructure, direct to vendors, not personnel.

Challenges & Lessons Learned

  1. Resource Volatility: CELO price fluctuations reduced the effective value of reserves, making long-term planning more complex.

  2. Emerging Infrastructure Demands: The shift to L2 and growing user base created new infrastructure needs faster than anticipated.

  3. Need for Predictable Cadence: Aligning CICLOPS cycles with governance seasons will help prevent mid-season funding gaps.

  4. Improved Transparency Pathways: Additional reporting tools and dashboards would create greater visibility for the community in future seasons.

Looking Ahead to Season 2

Season 2 is expected to focus on:

  • Strengthening reporting and transparency around CICLOPS-managed infrastructure

  • Continuing decentralization of procurement and oversight processes

  • Ensuring capacity for the next phase of MiniPay scale

  • Supporting infrastructure aligned with the Tokenomics Initiative and Celo’s long-term roadmap

  • Maintaining a strategic buffer for urgent or unplanned needs

CICLOPS remains a critical safeguard for the resiliency, scalability, and long-term sustainability of the Celo network.

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Thanks for the update. It is well understood that every blockchain requires technical infrastructure to operate reliably. However, not all infrastructure is equal. There is a meaningful distinction between critical, must-have components without which the chain cannot function, and “nice-to-have” developer or UX tooling (and everything in-between) that improves experience but is not essential for chain liveness or security.

To reason clearly about necessity and risk, infrastructure should be tiered based on chain liveness and security impact:

  • Tier 0 (Chain-critical):
    Sequencer, Data Availability (EigenDA). These are existential dependencies and are already operated or coordinated by cLabs and funded via protocol mechanisms such as transaction fees.
  • Tier 1 (Access-critical):
    Public RPC (Forno), free explorers (CeloScan, Blockscout), and other free-tier services that ensure basic network access and transparency. Forno is largely already supported by cLabs.
  • Tier 2 (Ecosystem-critical):
    Oracles and indexers. These primarily serve specific applications (e.g. DEXs). While important, they are not strictly required for base chain operation and could reasonably be subsidized by primary consumers such as Mento rather than the general treasury.
  • Tier 3 (UX / DX enhancements):
    Wallet integrations (Ledger, Safe), premium indexing services (The Graph), and additional paid RPC providers. These are valuable, but largely benefit a subset of users and builders rather than the network as a whole.

This distinction matters because the report does not explain which tiers account for the majority of the $3M spend, nor why treasury funds are being used to subsidize Tier 3 services that only a small percentage of users rely on.

This sets the tone: this is complex and expensive, trust us. While broadly true at an industry level, it implicitly frames scrutiny of the $3M allocation as naive, without actually justifying why this specific amount was required for this specific set of services.

Upfront transparency is especially critical because the treasury runway is not infinite. At some point, the protocol may no longer be able to subsidize every category of infrastructure under CICLOPS. When that happens, trade-offs will be unavoidable. Without clear visibility into costs, criticality, and alternatives, the community cannot meaningfully participate in those decisions or plan for an orderly transition.

This raises a related governance question: has an open Request for Proposals (RFP) process been considered for infrastructure procurement? Many ecosystems use RFPs to surface competitive pricing, alternative providers, and clearer scopes of work. How does that approach compare to the existing, more centralized Celo Foundation–run committee model, and what safeguards exist to ensure competitive selection rather than default vendor continuation?

I don’t want to flog a dead horse, but there is a certain irony in allocating treasury funds to subsidize additional free or paid RPC providers after community-run RPC infrastructure was previously decommissioned by major stakeholders. Other ecosystems are moving in the opposite direction, introducing RPC marketplaces that allow community operators to provide these services competitively and sustainably. Celo itself pioneered this idea early on, only to abandon it. Meanwhile, other chains are refining and operationalizing the same model to reduce centralization, lower costs, and better align incentives. This raises the question of whether current spending decisions are optimizing for short-term convenience at the expense of long-term decentralization and ecosystem resilience.

With respect, this is where transparency breaks down.

Concealing vendor identities prevents the community from vetting conflicts of interest, verifying that services are actually being rendered, and assessing whether vendors are related to CICLOPS, the Celo Foundation, or affiliated entities. Even in private corporate environments, NDAs typically protect pricing and contractual terms, not the existence of the relationship itself. In publicly funded contexts, it is standard to disclose vendor identities and at least spend ranges per category, even when exact pricing is confidential.

If a service is critical enough to be paid from the communal treasury, it should be important enough to be disclosed to the community.

The claim that:

is similarly problematic. Without knowing which vendors were engaged, what services were in scope, or what market benchmarks were used, this claim is unverifiable. As presented, it functions rhetorically to pre-empt cost criticism rather than to inform governance.

Taken together, this sets a concerning precedent: a small, unelected (albeit likely well-intentioned) group exercising control over millions in treasury funds, disclosing only what it chooses, and justifying opacity through appeals to confidentiality and complexity.

CICLOPS is positioned as a safeguard for the network, yet this report moves in the opposite direction: toward centralized discretion without corresponding accountability.

The Celo community should not oppose infrastructure spending. It should demand that such spending be auditable, governable, and meaningfully transparent.

7 Likes
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Hi @yomfana , thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and feedback. Not all infrastructure is created equal; however, the tiers you’ve listed may be subjective. While sequencer and data availability are critical to the chain, the infrastructure and partnerships that enable developers to build on Celo are also necessary for the ecosystem’s long-term sustainability.

This topic was discussed during last week’s governance sync, where Rene outlined the need for any blockchain or Layer-2 to have a wide breadth of building blocks - from oracles to composable lending markets - to make the network useful and appealing to broader audiences. In today’s crowded environment, an L2 will be quickly overlooked if it lacks components facilitating real-world usage and accessibility.

Earlier this month, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Quereshi echoed these sentiments on Unchained, outlining an approximate $20M annual minimum cost for a blockchain to maintain indexers, block explorers, bridges, etc. As Haseeb explains, these features are necessary to drive meaningful adoption.

Deal terms often require confidentiality, but Celo infrastructure and services providers are listed publicly. You can reference the Celo ecosystem page (https://celo.org/ecosystem), and the “day one partners” announced following Celo’s successful L2 migration for a near-comprehensive list. Announcing new partnerships and highlighting existing ones is a key function of the Celo Foundation’s marketing and communication team.