Rene Reinsberg I Celo's Return to Ethereum | Pragma Paris 2023

foreign [Music] two more demos to go and then our final interview for the day there's another big announcement that you may have seen this week and that announcement is celo moving to ethereum L2 a lot of you kind of saw a lot of you were curious about how that's happening so what I want to do is just bring the person that is going to talk to you directly about why they chose to do this thing so without further Ado please welcome Renee from Cello to share their Insight on what made them do this welcome [Applause] thanks Karthik and thanks for the great event uh excited to be here let's see all right tell us return to ethereum uh that begs the question why return um now what I want to do here is I want to talk a little bit about uh the cello journey and actually go through some of the stuff that we've seen built on on cello since mainnet went live three years ago and then at the end go into a little bit of the architectural choices uh so some of you may have seen uh this this forum post have been up over the weekend and it's actually been really well received within the community we've gotten a ton of feedback uh here so far this week um if you haven't checked it out please go to the go to forum.seller.org to take a look and I want to um yeah I want to maybe start for those of you who um spend most of time in the ethereum community you haven't come across cello to give a quick overview what motivated us to build cello and what's being built on cello and with Salo with this proposal of cello turning into a layer two what are the things that um you know as an ethereum developer you can build maybe uniquely on cello right now that you can't build any wealth and I'll start with what I think is most important with uh resolve these things which is really the mission this is what got us to start cello and what I think attracted a lot of the initial Builder on cello to to our ecosystem and that's uh you know salomon's purpose in Esperanto and that's that's really this building was purpose and building for everyone and when seller was conceived uh you know this is going back five six years at this point we actually started building on ethereum but quickly realized there were a few things that at the time uh weren't you know weren't there to um to fulfill this vision and I give a few I give a few examples here so and this is again taking us back to 2017 2018 and and even into sort of mainnet launch 2020 uh seller launched as a proof of stake chain the first proof of stake evm so fees on on cello to date have been less than a cent uh the immediate finality which is really important for a lot of payments application that we've seen a human-centered design so imagine when you want someone who has never heard of crypto uh to you know who has received maybe a payment and stable coin into a wallet you want them to then be able to use that if they now have to get eat or get get any other sort of layer 1 token that adds a lot of complexity and so one change we introduced uh was to have actually let users pay for gas uh with with any token and you know stable coins being a very popular loose case for a use case for that and that has really been one of the factors to really make especially an experience on mobile much simpler and then sustainability I think we you know when kind of going to the drawing boards we saw a chance to apply a lot of regenerative principles in into building cellulance that starts with you know um yeah having a carbon negative chain and offsetting the the carbon footprint but actually goes a lot deeper when we look at the refi stack that's come together on cello in terms of enabling really any application on cello any product any user experience to have a regenerative element and I'll give some examples to that so here are a few use cases here are the few of the things that people have been building on building on cellular what's driving a lot of adoption on cello right now good dollar is a a really interesting project that's gifting money into into existence used by over 500 000 people that once a day go to an app and claim uh the good dollar token and then are able to use that in their community on a Marketplace and it's it's really interesting it's been a really interesting way to actually bootstrap adoption for crypto and now we're seeing other projects leverage that distribution for introducing their projects right so um really kind of Bottoms Up approach to onboarding people to web stream this is a different project impact Market actually also started from sort of a cash transfer direct giving um approach by letting anyone donate to any community in the world and having the mantri having the money transparently be distributed directly to end users non-custodial wallets they recognize that because they've they've bootstrapped this really valuable set of communities around the world and I think over 60 000 people have onboarded to that they have a unique data set to actually offer micro credit and so just a few weeks ago have started to offer micro credit and this is not like someone over here is maybe getting usdc and then turning that into like local Fiat and distributing it for credit but this is actually the whole value chain right from the the focused institutions that fund micro credit all the way to the individual receiving the credit in their non-custodial wallet and making a repayment in the wallet which is really powerful because it allows all that data to be tracked on chain and provide insights into how well that's going Grassroots economics is another interesting example um and and some of these are interesting too because they predate crypto so these are um projects that have thought about bringing these kind of new regenerative projects to life and they're now taking advantage of Webster infrastructure to actually uh scale it up so Grassroots economics it's been existed over 10 years in Kenya they initially started with paper vouchers people just trading basically paper vouchers and you can think about it if you're a small business you're offering your service right that service has a value so why not use that as kind of a complementary way to exchange value in a community um fast forward to today their their life on on salomonet and uh this is a sort of snapshot of where each of the dots is a small business and I think this is all kind of just khalifi region in Kenya right now and the the lines are transactions between these businesses so you can click on it you get uh drop directly into the cello block Explorer and you can sort of you know really see Real World Adoption of this technology coming to life so very powerful now this is this is something maybe more foxy can relate to um I love soccer um nfts I thought were interesting but also I I didn't really personally um you know and you know sort of see maybe the immediate utility uh what Plastics has done here is something really interesting they've launched an nft collection together with FC Barcelona where each nft is actually tied to one ton of plastic offsets so FC Barcelona was really interested to basically create kind of a mechanism to well first of all offset the plastic usage that happens during games but then also time over time also create a market around similar to maybe some of you have seen voluntary carbon markets right sort of a price for for carbon recovery and um it's really beautiful because their fans now not only buy an nft from FC Barcelona but they're actually having a positive impact in the world so I thought really interesting to combining the sort of just you know technical primitive of an nft with sort of that real world impact and that's possible because on cello there's a rich refi stack of assets of real world assets like voluntary carbon credits like plastic offsets that any application can use and and build with and these are some of the examples that um and many of them have just launched in the recent months and weeks but have really um yeah just dramatically accelerated uh adoption um um of cello so if you go to this is the nansen chain Paradise dashboard you sort by active addresses uh salary right now is growing very fast and not only growing fast but also if you look at address retention is looking really strong which really speaks to you know these are being use cases that drive um you know ongoing on-chain usage now you could say Okay Renee nice work you know you pick the one chart that looks great if you if you go further out so if you say you go to six months uh we're we're still in the top spot so um yeah it's been it's been really exciting to see and we're um I think expecting to continue to see this because a lot of these applications are growing just week over week months over months and are touching more and more people uh so yeah this is a little bit of where we've come from some of the choices we've made and uh this this sort of topic of layer 2 has come up repeatedly over the years but until now um you know the the core team at Sea Labs who made this proposal uh didn't really see an architecture that would have allowed us to keep a lot of the things that make cello special today like low gas fees in such a setup and so really through some of the more recent Innovations like eigen da it is actually possible to you know have a an architecture with very low transaction fees as people and seller have come to love but also you know tap into the longer term benefits of having East security and sort of that trustless bridge to eat now if we if we look at this architecture one thing that particularly um I think has been getting folks excited here in Paris this week is uh this sort of you know basically way of leveraging the existing cello validator set to become decentralized sequencers so validators are becoming sequencers and you have this decentralized sequencer design which um you know for us is something we can bring to Market very quickly because we've done a lot of work around some of you may be familiar with plumo the ZK Auto like client architecture which for us was something we we started working on a while back because we really wanted to make you know applications work on mobile you know easier and that's something that can actually now come and support this work around the decentralized sequencer so again this is a proposed design there's lots of conversations happening and so also anyone here who has strong technical views on you know maybe things we should consider please go to The Forum leave us a comment or come check with me after some of our colleagues and yeah look I just want to share I'm super excited to be here we're at the hackathon this weekend as well hopefully some of these use cases inspired you to build something that has that kind of real world impact and we're excited to build with you thank you