The Road to CEL2: Migrating to an L2 & Unlocking 1B Users | Rene Reinsberg - Celo Foundation

okay hello everyone good to be here I am uh going to do this in a bit of a two-part uh talk first part focusing on salo's transition to uh becoming in a layer two and the second part talking about the thing we've always been doing uh which is U onboarding real world's use cases and uh billions of people across the world that need access to this infrastructure uh so probably most people have seen this SP I heard this but yeah back in uh July at ECC claps the core team working on the C protocol made a proposal to the community about Salo migrating to become nl2 and it was met with overwhelming uh support and excitement and um you know from a high level perspective like what are some of the considerations and why why does this make sense why does it make sense now so in a nutshell um and maybe even some history on on on cello here we actually started building some of the very first stuff on ethereum but a lot of the things we were trying to accomplish in terms of the use cases we're looking to power like micro payments uh those weren't feasible on ethereum at the time and that led to the decision to fork ethereum and you know start what uh in the end was the first evm U proof of St proof of stake chain and uh with some of the recent developments in the space around ethereum scale uh you know around igen layer kind of proposing igen igen da uh there suddenly seemed a path for cell to maintain all of its really cool features which I'll dive on in a minute uh for these real world use cases but also be a part of uh the bigger ethereum ecosystem and not only help onboard people to to cell uh but really onboard uh people to the to the entire uh ethereum ecosystem and digital economy and so I mentioned igen da the other cool differentiator here from an L2 perspective is that we have a really strong validator set and community and you know this is really something that I would consider an asset um for for cell in the cell ecosystem and so the idea was kind of you know brainstorm to actually have those validators become sequencers and have a decentralized sequencer and so also from a from an architectural perspective um a really neat design now uh what happened and you know the best place to to go for uh for this is actually the cell Forum forum. c.org uh you know there's a lot of people working on ethereum scaling and many smart Minds in the broader space and and so it's actually turned into a very Lively discussion around the trade-offs between different stacks and what uh architecture uh you know cell should ultimately migrate to and so the CBS team has been working very hard um if you want to follow along the Forum is a is a really great place to see some of those updates and obviously work is happening in in parallel to uh to move us to becoming L2 the first heart Fork has already been completed um and so if you're not like the Forum type and you rather uh listen to uh a podcast uh you know kind of uh content on your on your phone in the gym I highly recommend al2 unplugged uh which had already had a set you can see it here of um really some of the thought leaders around ethereum scaling and some of the different um you know infrastructure uh protocols and providers uh so highly recommend that you know we're uh really at a point now where we're looking to make that decision um and obviously in a very thoughtful way but uh the priority is to have cell become an L2 as soon as possible but do it in a way where from a user from a d developer perspective uh that's happening in the in the best possible way so maybe one call out there because I've had a few conversations on the floor um there's no new chain right so for the existing developers and users there's no need to migrate to a different chain but it's it's an upgrade to the existing chain so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about well why we are here you know all this infrastructure is cool but what are we uh really trying to achieve at the end of the day and that since the very early days of cell has been uh about onboarding uh onboarding billions of users ideally let's start with a billion um and and how do we get there right um I think the key Insight early on as we were even with that ethereum wallet we had built uh taking that into different markets into different communities it became clear that there's a massive opportunity to actually build uh for mobile users you know webstream mobile and bring a lot of the experiences that uh people are building collectively here onto that that small screen and make it really accessible um I won't go into too much detail here but uh I'll share this there's uh a lot you can find also on on the Salo block around some of that user research and we're trying to do all of this in the open and sharing it out with the community uh that's ultimately building a lot of the applications right understanding what are the mental models you know when it for example comes to in uh in this example uh payments right how do you translate uh those mental models to this new web3 world um and so to tie this maybe to a particular example here uh you know this is was a um you know someone on on a user research trip in Nigeria who basically said look if I want to send someone money I just need to know their phone number right and so one of the early cell insights was to actually have a um a primitive protocol called social connect on cell that does a trustless mapping of phone numbers to wallet addresses and facilitates that uh from from happening right not in a centralized way but in a decentralized way uh yeah maybe I'll I'll skip over this you know I I'm I'm running a little bit low on time here but basically the uh if we if we take all these insights we've collected along the way and we've been now coming up on seven years of uh of building on on Sal uh there's a bunch of there's a bunch of features that I I really think today still differentiate Salo and I think attract a lot of Builders to the Salo ecosystem and um we've seen this even even recently with you know people probably followed inscriptions right and kind of scalability uh we had a day where sell cross 20 million transactions in a day but fees stayed low and you know they're typically a t of a scent um and sort of being below that half cent mark is really a critical barrier right for enabling a lot of use cases around micro payments around Community currencies and so if you're if you're someone who's building uh those kind of applications it makes a big difference whether you if the you know uh fees are uh ten of a cent or two three cents right so something that we we've always been very focused of and made a made an effort to maintain those low fees and also know that as uh throughput increases as transactions on the Chain increase that that low fee can can be maintained immediate finality uh very critical if you're uh thinking of you know any I mean Commerce use cases right peer-to-peer payments obviously you want to make sure there's that fast it and you know if you're especially if you're kind of transacting mobile to mobile right you're not like hanging out and waiting you know for a couple minutes till the transaction settles that's that's not going to work right and so we are uh now seeing examples of that I have some actually um show some projects and some give some example real world examples but for example opera launched a um wallet directly into a browser in Africa called mini pay and you know there's like stores in uh in Legos where people can go and pay with that wallet and of course you wouldn't want to have someone have a worse experience than they would today paying with a card or with their with their mobile phone uh we touched on social connect the Primitive um a little bit so this kind of idea of really um making uh or kind of creating sort of a more human centered approach thinking about okay what does it take to really abstract away the complexity of web stre while keeping the advantages of permission L and decentralized but uh enabling these use cases in a way that humans don't have to kind of uh carry the mental loads you know another example of that would be paying for transactions um you know in the in the currency that you're that you're sending right so usdc just uh came natively to to cell and so if I want to send five usdc to to Liz up here then you know I wouldn't want to now have to think about oh well do I have cell or you know in the of E of e to to pay for that transaction but just know that you know will come out of um out of the the amount I'm sending easy on and off ramping this one is uh near and dear to my heart like you know it's like I look back six seven years and I I think back to sort of the whiteboards we've had uh with the early team about like okay what are going to be like the really hard things to unlock you know sort of the use cases we want to see and this was not on my bingo card back then you know it's like all the ZK stuff that you're kind of worrying about like you know how to uh how to get the stuff work on mobile and then you know when it comes down to some of those really hard technical problems have been solved but we're we're still struggling with on and offrs so this has been a big effort in the cell ecosystem and it's it's really been a uh an approach where uh it's not one company it's not the seller Foundation who can solve this but it's organizations on the ground in Market that have the local licenses that have the local expertise to facilitate uh those kind of cash and cash outs and you know it's I was just showing this to someone earlier if you're in Kenya today and you want to onboard or offboard uh to Kenyan Shilling from impesa you can do that in under 30 second seconds uh was no fee and that's that's pretty incredible um but we need this everywhere in the world right every currency every Market every Community um and uh that's there's still I mean for Builders here that are just getting into the space um those are some of the meaty problems that will kind of actually un unlock a lot of the adoption we're still looking for I'll go this quickly this is some high level stats for folks new to cell uh so since uh mainnet launch over 350 million transactions over 100 million wallet addresses uh we just recently hit 1 million uh monthly users so that's great milestone still a bit shy of that 1 billion uh but working towards that um and one thing I'm particularly excited about is just the global reach of the the seller Community both Builders and uh and users um and that's something we're continuing to focus on uh that's also reflected that real world use case focus is reflected in onchain metric so if you look at daily active users and you know I mean this is year-to-year growth I mean this is you know in you know last year's bare Market still right so this is not more people just coming in to uh speculate on numbers going up or down uh but this is really kind of people coming in to uh you know use this technology for getting access to micr credit and um or payments and you know actually like I've been talking a lot about these use cases let's actually look at some of the examples here what are some of the projects that are building um on C today and that are contributing towards these metrics uh one little uh Alpha here so C is a Esperanto word and it means purpose uh so you know for us this is really building with purpose not just from a Sal Foundation qu team perspective and some of the you know early EOS system projects but really for people that are joining this uh or joining us on this Mission um it's something that's that's really important to us and I think it's really needed to unlock uh this this next stage of growth so I'll start with uh stable coins I think this is where the where the big opportunity is you know I think a lot of us know dollar stable coins and have thought about this uh or maybe used them but if you think about especially markets that have high inflation access to credit micro credit right you you probably don't want to take a loan out in dollars um uh when when you when you you know when you uh well actually most places maybe you not even have access to to a loan but let's say you have access right you would want that loan to be in local currency so that you're not just uh that you're not having to worry about also paying for the inflation on top of the interest rate um this is something where U Mento Sal native protocol um has been doing some really amazing work in creating a platform almost like a stable coin Factory for allowing projects all around the world to launch local currencies uh so really interesting and something that if I kind of uh you know look out over the next few years um you know I think we'll see really active onchain FX markets po sport markets hopefully soon future markets and that also brings new opportunities for um you know not just end users but longer term Enterprises to for example hatch their uh you know foreign currency exposure as they do crossb Commerce so something that today you know if you're uh you know I used to work in this World a long time ago and Morgan Stanley was in sort of fixed income Capital markets and you know we would work with some of the biggest companies around the world to help them manage that but if you're a small company let's go back to the example of you know Kenya Nairobi and you want to hatch maybe you're doing some sales into into Europe right and you want to manage that kind of currency exposure like good luck finding a bank that's going to do a cross currency swap with you so this is I think an area that today is very underexplored in web 3 but has massive potential um for folks that are new to the C system also like you know I'm want to show some of the products to experience this firsthand valora uh is a is a really great Mobile Wallet uh iOS Android um over a million users and lets you sort of first and see the beauty of many of these Primitives but then also experience some of the dabs that people have been building uh building on top of C uh I had mentioned mini pay so this is today only uh available in Africa um through the the mini browser um let's see if I can show you kind of a little clip here maybe I'll do a little voiceover so mini is installed on over 100 million or has over 100 million users across Africa and now within that browser you can basically activate the wallet which the wallet itself it's a 2 megabyte build so it's really also um you know a very unique product in that sense because many users are very conscious right of bandwidth and often you know go on like 10 100 megabytes plants and so to have the ability to actually have uh a wallet that they can easily turn on and then use for uh day-to-day payments but also to kind of you know as a gateway to this new digital economy uh it's something that's really powerful and has seen just tremendous growth um recently announced crossing a million users and you know the uh the applications that are sort of uh accessi through mini you know in C Sal ecosystem are are seeing that also in terms of the the usage so really exciting and really expanding also the people that are in web stre to uh you know a whole a whole new level and I think a big uh potentially very big contributor on that road to a billion users uh no uh okay another one uh good dollar um it's um one of the OG protocols in uh web3 and you know really really interesting primitive uh it's um kind of basic concept so once a day you go in you can claim uh a daily dividend daily Ubi if you want and uh then use the tokens you claim on for example marketplaces to buy things from the community and as a primitive it's interesting because you know everything is open permissionless and so people can build with good dollar right so if you're looking to actually launch something um you know this is a great way to actually leverage an existing Community very engaged Community to uh then have them use kind of your um your product each person you know is verified to be a unique human and so you have sort of that that guarantee right to avoid sort of you know just people kind of from spamming your uh your your your product right or kind of um uh and making sure that people that use your product are actually real real humans um I'll go through this pretty quick quickly I have a few I wanted to show you here uh impact Market who also started um in sort of the cash transf for Ubi space has expanded into a bunch of areas including learn and earn and allows people to actually earn tokens for learning about you know things that are relevant to them right so this could be obviously within web3 but also expand uh outside web3 and and something that I think really has to go hand in hand you know as we're as we want to onboard a billion users we also have to make sure we bring them along educate them about the possibilities uh of this of this new world uh Talent protocol this is a you know a really cool one if you're interested in webst three social and taking sort of like a unique spin here um the sort of current aration of the product lets Builders commit to goals and then share their progress and sort of create sort of that uh you know kind of in a way like positive peer pressure all right to help people um be more productive and be part of a community uh they're here also at East Denver with uh their team and a bunch of the fellows they're bringing together so uh definitely make sure to meet them but really interested to see web social to go beyond some of you know the kind of early social networks into these more specialized use cases that are um that are quite excited and leveraging the power of web3 uh Sylvie also here at e Denver just uh meeting with streamer earlier um has this big Vision to um basically help uh plant a lot of trees um and contribute bigly towards the the the you know our society's Milestones there but they're doing it in a way where people can uh plant a tree and uh you know kind of basically provide proof uh to the dab and then get paid sort of Milestone payments in stable coin uh for example through a wallet like like mini pay then claim claim those micro payments and this is interesting because if you think about like sending someone like a few cents right for like these different Milestones along the Journey of like a tree growing right it's not really feasible today with traditional Financial infrastructure like good luck sending someone 5 cents right um or like streaming payments kind of overtime that's just the the the cost of that the complexity to do that would be just enormous uh operationally and so really interesting kind of way of tying uh these kind of positive climate actions to um leveraging the benefits of uh web stre in this case cellos infrastructure um obviously more on the institutional side then you know people that are looking at uh tokenized carbon credits and and you know companies looking to kind of fulfill the ESG goals you have uh projects like flow carbon like tan uh that are playing in that space uh one other area I want to bring is microc credit Huma recently deployed on uh on cell and it's it's really exciting because again and this is ties also somewhat to the local currencies um I think this is kind of a really big untapped opportunity where web3 can really democratize access uh to credit um I also wanted to give one specific example and I'm okay two seconds uh ethic cup which is doing this has been doing this for coffee Farmers by basically letting coffee Farmers tap into Global Capital markets um through a really neat uh kind of um kind of infrastructure so everyone here could for example support a coffee Farmer in the global South uh and that's the end of it building with purpose building for all thank you very much have a great [Applause] day another round of applause for Renee awesome um so we are about to start a Break um we'll be back at 2:45 so go around check out some Booth new companies and uh we'll see you then