Hi everyone! We shared cLabs’ proposal for the long-term roadmap of Celo, focused especially on the Celo blockchain. We’re calling this Celo 2.0 as it represents to us a significant next chapter in the development of the platform.
To get to this, we’ve spent literally hundreds of hours talking to founders and developers building on Celo, projects considering moving to Celo, as well as builders of all kinds of rollups, bridges, and ecosystem tools. We read a lot of papers and prototyped a bunch of promising new tools.
This post sets out some thinking behind key priorities and design choices. It’s just the beginning of the chapter. We are going to follow up in the coming weeks with more detailed near-term roadmap proposals for the Celo blockchain, Celo core contracts and primitives including stCelo, developer tooling, and more.
We are very excited about it, but I’m sure there are ways we can explain it better, and ideas we can add to it. We would love to hear your suggestions and feedback. Your buy-in is extremely important to us, since none of this happens without validators choosing to adopt hard forks and governance proposals passing, and developers choosing to build on Celo.
Feel free to reply in this topic, join us on the next Governance Call, or reach out to talk 1:1. Appreciate your time!
Deep alignment with the Ethereum Roadmap
+1 on this, diverging from ETH EVM compatibility would be a non-starter, need to be EVM equivalent
Horizontal scalability by making Celo an incredibly rollup-friendly chain
-1 on this, rollups already exist on ETH (Arbitrum, Optimism, etc…) and they already have massive user adoption & locked ETH & traction. Heck, there’s even talks of specialized L3s that launch roll-up on top of the L2s. If someone were to launch a rollup and pick a base L1, I think TVL and existing user base size will be a huge deciding factor, so I don’t think Celo can be competitive there. For example, a rollup on top of Celo vs a rollup on top of Eth would be taking on an additional risk of betting on Celo’s future adoption.
Making Celo the fastest EVM L1
+1 on this one, let’s experiment with the consensus algorithm WHILE maintaining full EVM equivalence. This stuff makes me excited and want to apply to be a Celo validator.
Refining CELO tokenomics, and rewarding contributors
+1 Celo has been trading sideways.
Providing a top-tier developer experience
+1 Developer & app gravity is important. Celo is a great place to dev and build out ideas due to low cost, and already having Uniswap3 and Curve. Bring Aave V3 over and it will be closer to the ideal dev playground.
If you build the most attractive dev EVM playground, then ideas can get built and launched on Celo first, before going cross-chain and getting deployed multi-chain. Keeping transaction cost low and throughput high is going to be key to this!
Powerful building blocks for wallets and applications
+1 bring Chainlink over as a building block
On a side note about Mento:
Mento assets that track the US Dollar, Euro, and Brazilian Real make stable-value transfers simple
cUSD is constantly trading at a decent discount to $1, almost always at 0.996 or lower, it would be good to push this closer to 0.999 by lowering the friction to bringing the peg to 1. Mentally, I wish I can treat 1 cUSD as equivalent to $1, but we can’t treat it as truly dollar equivalent currently. Please make the cStables stronger and better pegged.
And going more deeply on the point about Mento, agree with the Stable.value transfers.
You should take a look also at this proposal, coul be another horizon to explore with stables, and $cCOP is very easy to backup, would love to have your thougths in the post.
Rollups don’t need to exist only on a single chain. We are working with a number of L2 teams who are already thinking about multi-chain strategies, and are thinking about deploying L2s to Celo. Just as with apps, often deploying to multiple chains is additive. There a wide range of reasons why a project joins an ecosystem. Some rollups are more like “appchains”, some are general-purpose, and each project probably weighs different factors differently. From a technology perspective, we set out a bunch of things that can make Celo attractive to rollups, and I’m pretty excited about some of them.
I think of rollups as a general approach to horizontal scalability for an L1, and for giving developers in an L1 ecosystem who have use cases that push the boundaries of the regular EVM the control and flexibility they need. It’s critical for us to have plans for how to grow Celo beyond being the fastest EVM L1, because it is going to be very tough to scale a single EVM indefinitely. The alternatives to that are sharding and a mesh of chains connected by light-client bridges, and neither have as strong security properties as rollups.
On your point about Mento, I’ll CC @roman@Markus on that!
we recently introduced a 20M one-to-one cUSD/USDC pool which now allows everyone to buy and sell large amounts of cUSD at par. So even if at some CEXs cUSD drops below 0.996 occasionally, there should now always be the alternative to buy or sell at par at Curve. Additionally, we are launching an entirely revamped version of Mento next week (see Mento Core Contract Upgrade #1 - Multi Collateral Mint). This upgrade allows to directly redeem against non-CELO reserve assets like USDC in larger quantities and can be expected to tighten the price range of cUSD significantly. The same goes for cEUR and cREAL for which we aim to add cEUR/USDC and cREAL/USDC pairs in the new multi-collateral Mento setup very soon (like 4 weeks from now) .