Celo's L2 Proposal: Building The Perfect L2 for Mobile Payments - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

hey everyone it's wonderful to be here my name is Merica I'm one of the co-founders of cello and it's a real treat to be here in Singapore I was actually born in Singapore many many years ago so it's really wonderful to be back here and today I'm going to be talking about um Cello's L2 proposal and what we're doing to make it the perfect L2 for building Mobile payment applications and if you like this talk let me know on Twitter my handle is Merrick underscore and I wanted to start with an interactive question so I wanted to ask folks here how many people and answer honestly raise your hand if you regularly use web3 applications so not just trading not hodling you're using a self-custodial wallet and you're regularly using web3 applications so who here is doing that okay I'm seeing maybe about a quarter of the folks in the audience raising their hand that is a low amount given uh the folks who are Independents today and that makes me sad and it also makes vitalik sad shown here in the form of a cat Emoji because as we know there is no Emoji yet for vitalik but hopefully soon and it makes us sad because this is the future that we want right we want people rushing into the house of web 3 super enthusiastically waiting at its door until you know Black Friday the doors open and people rush into to the Best Buy but you know the reality is this is what things look like today right just a few people who raise their hands having all the fun in what looks like a best bat a Bed Bath and Beyond that's about to go bankrupt right uh we need to do better and so one way to think about cello is cello is a platform that's trying to change this we're trying to make it really easy for people to build these delightful and easy to use applications that anyone in the world can use and probably the best example of that today as of honestly yesterday is Opera Mini pay so this was just announced yesterday in Berlin blockchain week um Opera announced that within the mini browser so this is a browser that has 500 million downloads uh over 100 million users uh you can now use mini pay which is a self-custodial wallet that's focused on stable coins everything is stablecoin based and so the idea behind it is it's designed to be really easy to use for anyone in the world even if you're not crypto literate and it's running on cello and it's using all of the features that we've worked so long and hard in the seller ecosystem to provide to make it easy to build these delightful experiences and so you might be asking well what what is it about seller that made Opera pick Sello as their platform of choice and I would say it's a number of things first and foremost we are a scalable uh really efficient uh evm compatible layer one that is transitioning to become a layer two and we're really dedicated to ease of use so much of what we do is focused on building these really easy to use uh experiences for end users and that means mobile uh because after all there's seven billion Mobile smartphone devices out there in the world if you want to reach normies if you want to reach people who need um what self-custody and self-sovereignty provides you need to be building for mobile and you need to be building in a way that's easy and accessible for folks and so that means being able to pay for transaction fees in token so being able to pay in stable coins and so that's a core feature of Sello even without account abstraction even just using EOS you can pay for gas with tokens on cello and then finally as a cherry on top one of the really nice things that seller provides is this ability is is the fact that it's carbon negative so you may have heard that cello is becoming the home of refi and that's because three years ago there was a governance vote a Community member proposed to make cello a carbon negative chain which means that every day using block rewards cello buys carbon offset credits programmatically to offset the emissions that the platform's producing and you know this focus on ease of use this focus on mobile it's been really paying off uh even though we're in a bear Market uh there's been a lot of uh usage of the platform a lot of product Market fit being found in the last six months we've seen a lot of new users being onboarded a lot of new active addresses coming onto the chain we've surpassed the highs from the last bull market and if you compare us to other chains if you go to nonsense and look at their chain Paradise page and you sort by active address percent change then you'll see that cello has grown by 550 percent outpacing all of the other chains that nanson is tracking so this is really exciting and this is all coming on the heels of this proposal to turn cello from an L1 into an L2 we're calling it cell two and we propose this sea Labs I should say proposes to the broader Community earlier in the year in July UI and the community was very enthusiastic both the cello and the ethereum ecosystems all seemed very enthused we had an auntie and governance vote for it and the proposal passed with 99 support and so now we've been busy working on executing this proposal to again turn Stella from a evm compatible layer one into an L2 that with a real focus on ease of use and so for the rest of this talk I wanted to just talk a little bit about what makes cello um like what is in this L2 proposal design you know it's really quite I would say unique in the L2 space there's a lot of ltus now the list is growing dramatically but many of them look quite similar and we think that the cello L2 design is quite differentiated and so I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about what makes it different from the other l2s and I think in large part what makes it different is that we are transitioning from an L1 and that we have some existing constraints some constraints that have created goals for us as we think about the design for this L2 and I would say there are two really major goals now the first goal is to maintain cheap gas fees so a lot of use cases on cello are payment focused Community currency focused micro credit focused Universal basic income focused and these use cases need low gas fees fees that have to remain less than one cent per transaction if we were paying 10 or 50 cents per transaction as is common for other l2s those use cases would probably not be able to survive on cello and so a real goal for us as we do this transition is to keep gas fees cheap and so to do that we've partnered with eigenlayer which is really exciting who here knows about eigenlayer okay a few people uh maybe even more people know about eigenlayer than use web free dapps on a regular basis so that's pretty uh impressive uh so eigenlayer for those of you who aren't familiar with it uh it's you can think of it as a Marketplace of trust um so in ethereum validators take eat in order to have the privilege of running a validator um and in doing so they're bringing trust to the ethereum network and eigenlayer basically allows those validators to restake their Eve to sell that trust to run other services not just validating but other potential services and because there's a lot of validators in the ethereum ecosystem there's a lot of trust there's a lot of these folks with hats um and one of the first service that eigenlayer is bringing to the platform is eigenva so eigen d a is their Flagship middleware it's you can think of it as bringing Bank sharding to the ethereum ecosystem uh perhaps one to maybe even more years ahead of when dang sharding will reach mainnet and so that's really exciting because dank sharding is really bandwidth efficient uh which means that it's also ultimately much cheaper when it comes to data availability and so it's a really efficient and elegant way of doing data availability uh which we can start using today through eigenlayer and that means that we can do data availability significantly cheaper than other l2s which will then drive gas fees down to below that one cent per transaction level that we're targeting so that's the first goal covered the second goal is one around decentralization so cello is a robust layer one that's been running for three years it's decentralized it has a really great community of folks who are operating all of the nodes we have solo stakers we have some really great companies as well Google is now validating as a recently Google cloud is running a validator we have folks like coinbase and also Deutsche Telecom and some other really amazing institutions and it would be a real shame to throw all of that away and just run a centralized sequencer and so one of our goals is to maintain this level of decentralization and transition these validators into a decentralized sequencer decentralized sequencing has been really popular as of late a lot of people are talking about it and so we're really excited to bring our expertise and consensus to the L2 world and transition our production grade consensus protocol that's been running for three years with only one production incident to the L2 landscape and offer it as a public good so we're really excited about that as well and then finally the third goal and for those of you paying attention you might have noticed wait a minute that doesn't look like the number three and you're right it's the only Emoji I could find for the number three uh but perhaps more importantly as someone just pointed out over here I said only two goals at the beginning of this talk and that's right uh because as is common with big complex software engineering projects you frequently realize as you're doing the work that oh wait a minute there's this one extra thing that we didn't think about that we really need to address and for us that is one block finality socello's really focused on ease of use and most normies expect that when you sign a transaction and you get it into the blockchain that it will remain there they do not expect chains to reord and this is really important and so one of the nice features of cello offers today is one block finality and we want to maintain that as we transition to an L2 and it turns out that this is somewhat unique um most l2s don't offer this today and to do so we work hard to come up with the design that uses slashing and basically economic guarantees to effectively prevent sequencers from sequencing two transaction bundles at the same block height that could then result in a reorg but it turns out that this isn't the only thing you need to do and this by the way is something that we're doing today already as an L1 if validators equivocate on a particular block or on two blocks at the same block height they will be slashed and so this is something that we can bring really easily to the L2 but it turns out we need to do some additional things specifically as it relates to the chain interacting with the L1 and that means delaying all Force transactions and delaying all the deposits by 12 minutes so that we can get cash for FFG to finalize those transactions and prevent any reorgs on the L1 from affecting the L2 so what does this mean for uh all of uh you guys for all of the users of products on top of cello uh well it means applications that look and feel more like centralized applications that aren't compromising on self-custody aren't compromising on decentralization but are just really easy to use and so one really amazing application that I encourage you all to check out is velora velora shares a lot of similarities to Opera Opera Mini pay but is available in Singapore Opera Mini pay is launching right now in Nigeria and so until it's available here and in the countries that you're from highly recommend playing around with velora instead it really has a lot of the same functionality the same focus on ease of use but if you are interested in learning more about Opera which you know I would imagine many of you are given that this is a you know really massive company a really uh well uh distributed product that is launching this amazing product uh I have this one really short video here that I wanted to end with so enjoy and there was supposed to be audio but it didn't work uh so I can just uh voice over here so you can create accounts directly with Google which is really exciting it's easy to cash in they're leveraging Fiat connect which is an amazing way to cash in and you can send value to phone numbers and pay for those transaction fees in stable coins and so it looks like a P2P wallet that's centralized but it's fully self-custodial fully running on crypto rails the fully decentralized so it's really exciting so that's all the time I have thank you so much and I'll be around if you have any questions