May the Fork Be With You Why Celo is the ETH L2 You're Looking For | Marek Olszewski, Pragma Taipei

[Music] All right. Next up, we are ready for Mark to tell you all about Cello's transition to beginning the mal 2. So, please give Mark a big round of applause. Oo, thank you, Cartik. Good morning.

It's really wonderful to be here today. Uh once again, my name is Marik Schevsky. I'm one of the co-founders of Cello. And today we're going to be talking about Cello's transition to an L2. Uh and why I think that Cello is the Ethereum L2 that you are looking for.

Um yeah, if you like this talk, uh definitely come um chat with me afterwards. I might be in a bit of a rush. So if you can't catch me, um I'm available on Twitter, my DMs are open. Happy to also chat there. Do we have our slides?

Ah, perfect. So um you know despite the name of this talk uh may the fork be with you why is the ethl 2 you're looking for um the talk is done in a Zelda style primarily because we think that this is a um a good metaphor for Cello's journey. We've been working on Cello this transition to become an L2 for the last I would say almost two years. Uh, and so it's not unlike uh Link uh waiting through uh forests and rivers uh to get to his final destination. Any Zelda players here?

Anybody played Zelda growing up? Cool. Okay, I think you guys are going to like these visuals then. Awesome. So, last week something very special happened.

Anyone want to make a guess? Any guesses last week? Yes, in the back. That is right. Uh so last Wednesday, Taipei time, uh Cello transitioned from uh a longunning um L1, an EVM compatible L1 to a OP stack and VA based uh L2.

Uh it's super exciting for us. We've been working on this, as I mentioned before, for almost two years. Uh, and it's been definitely quite the journey uh, porting all of Cello's features and all of what makes Cellos unique uh, over to Optack uh, and bringing it to Ethereum. You know, we started um, in Ethereum way back when when we first started building in Cello. And so for us, this is like a big coming home moment.

Uh, and we're just really, really, really excited. And then last week, we had a a hard fork viewing party uh, which was really quite lovely in San Francisco. uh Vitalik was gracious enough to come and and speak and you know while he was speaking I was uh nervously uh looking at the countdown clock I was very nervous uh you know we've been working on this for quite a while but this was a unprecedented you know first of its kind moment and a lot of things could have gone wrong and so I was uh as you can see from this uh Gibli rendering it's the only one that I'm going to put today I know you've seen a million of these but I couldn't resist I had to at least one in. Um, and you know, this was nerve-wracking primarily because, um, you know, we were upgrading through a hard fork, but it wasn't just any hard fork. Uh, we, uh, we like to think of it or we liked to think of it as a hard hard fork.

So, two rocks and a fork. And the reason it was so hard was because we were actually changing the client that the network was uh running on at that block. So usually when you do a hard fork, you're just upgrading your client version. People go and they just upgrade the client version. The client supports both the old uh chain and the new one and then folks can just go to sleep and they don't have to think about it.

In our case, people had to actually stay awake and change the exact client that they were running at the exact point of that hard fork. And so obviously a lot of engineering work went into making sure that the clients um could read each other's chain data and could actually uh operate in this way. Um but still it was you know very nerve-wracking. Um and we uh did just an insane amount of work to make sure that this would go off without a hitch. Um we eliminated 365,000 lines of code.

Um, when you look at the diff between the old Cello L1 client and GU and then the new Cello L2 client and GE, uh, this is of course really good because it makes us even more compatible uh, with Ethereum today, but it also makes us much more nimble uh, than we were before. Uh, we also moved the uh, native Cello asset from the Cello chain to Ethereum. So now uh with the introduction of a native bridge uh cello on the L2 is actually bridged version of Cello which now lives natively on Ethereum. And so uh all of this happened again last week. Uh it all went very very smoothly and it went in part very very smoothly uh because a lot of our partners uh really did their part.

you know, um we're very very blessed to have worked with all of these amazing folks who um wanted to to be day one launch partners uh for the L2 migration. Uh that meant that they actually stayed up super late uh and and made that transition if they were running uh full nodes. Um so these are all the folks who committed to upgrading within uh one day. And we're really really excited to see, you know, all of the check marks next to all of these names today. Uh it's just been such a incredible community effort and we're very very grateful for all of these folks for uh coming through.

Um one this upgrade maybe was easier for some than for others, right? So if you were running an actual full node, then certainly you had to, you know, upgrade the client and and make sure that everything was working correctly. Um, but the real goal for us, the reason that we worked so hard and long on this was we wanted uh this to be really easy for our end users and for people building on top of Cello that weren't running any infrastructure of their own. So this is a tweet from Meda over at Uniswap. Um she was very um gracious to to tweet this um and you know it's just an incredible testimonial for how easy the upgrade was for some.

Uh, so it says that as a DAP that's integrated with Cello, I'm pretty impressed with how the L1 to L2 integration went. We didn't have to redeploy any of our contracts. We didn't have to change any of our infra dependencies. We just sat back and everything just worked. Huge props to the team.

You know, we couldn't have hoped for a better testimonial um from anyone, let alone Uniswap um for, you know, how easy this was for them. And, you know, this was very, very heartwarming. uh certainly made uh me um question why I was even nervous in the first place uh leading up to the hard fork. The other thing that we did that um I think you guys might appreciate that we were very very excited about uh is we um had a governance proposal for what we're calling the great celloh happening. Uh so the great cell of happening is our um version of course of the Bitcoin happening where we cut our inflation rate by half and we were able to do this because we were realizing the promise of being an L2 and we can now pay a lot less for security than we were paying before because we're effectively inheriting security from Ethereum.

And so we no longer have to pay kind of our validators, our stakers as much as we were paying before. And so we had this nice governance proposal uh to cut our inflation down to to just 1% now annually. So we're pretty stoked about that. That just just uh happened. Uh this was a governance proposal that passed a little after the hard fork.

And so you guys are actually the first to hear about it in a talk. uh and we're just really really um you know excited to be uh realizing this uh dream of again being an L2 where you you can really operate much more cheaply than um as an L1. So that's a quick update on the hard fork itself but I promised you five reasons that Cello is the L2 that you're looking for. Anybody here planning on participating in the hackathon uh this weekend? Perfect.

Amazing. So you guys are thinking, okay, there's all these bounties. Uh what do I want to how do I want to stack them? What chains do I want to deploy on? So I wanted to give you guys five reasons uh that you should consider Cello.

And the first reason um is uh that it is both really fast and affordable. Um and so I mentioned this before um now is using optack but also IDA and its use of IENDA is really what allows us to keep transaction fees really really low. Um we've worked really hard over the years. Cello's actually been running for um almost five years now and over that entire time frame we've been able to keep transaction fees extremely low. Um, so just to give you an example, a typical ERC20 transaction on Cello, even if you pay for gas with that same token, which in effect means that there's multiple ERC20 transfers that have to be executed by the EVM.

Um, those costs on the order of less than a tenth of a cent on Cello. uh we've been able to maintain that for again almost five years even on uh days of extreme load back when the inscription craze um hit um you know all the chains uh including Cello Cello was one of the few chains that didn't go down but it was also I think the only chain that didn't raise gas fees and so that cheap gas fee um the chain had enough throughput to be able to maintain that cheap gas fee um even with 21 million transactions in that one day. The other thing that's really nice, and this is new as of this new uh upgrade, uh Cello now has 1 second block times, which is pretty exciting. Uh we used to have 5-second block times. Uh now we're five times faster.

Um you can build some really snappy applications with 1 second block times. And so if you're interested in in offering just really good UX to your end users, you want things to feel really really snappy, then you know, we have a chain that that works really well for that for you. Number two, Cello is where the stable coins are at. So Cello has over 15 stable coins right now that are natively deployed on Cello. Um we have um USCC and USDT.

In fact, we are the only L2 that has native USDT. USDT is of course deployed on a bunch of L1s. Um, but it is not deployed on any other L2 other than Cello. Um, we also have uh some amazing stable coins by a protocol called Mento. Um, and and many others.

For example, there's two Euro stable coins by Mento and Angle Protocol. There's two Brazilian real stable coins. There's two Colombian peso stable coins on the chain as well as a um a Filipino peso, a Kenyan shilling, um a um I think as of recently also a new stable coin for Ghana. Uh and then Mento has a governance proposal right now that's out with plans to launch five new stable coins uh in the next month. And so by the end of the month, we're going to have 20 stable coins.

I think the last talk really emphasized building things that are real. um really focusing on capital efficiency uh looking at stable coins. So if you guys are at all interested in in building in this space then you need a robust portfolio of stable coins um that you can interact with and Cello offers exactly that. Number three users, right? Who wants to build something uh and then have nobody use it, right?

Anybody like that idea? No. Um, right. You want to build where the users are at, and that's where I think Cell really shines. Uh, Cello has two really popular wallets uh on the chain.

Um, one is by Opera, the browser company. Anybody use Opera as a browser at any point in time, either on desktop or mobile in the last 30 years? They've actually been around for a while. Yeah, lots of people. Um and so Opera has launched Mini Pay fairly recently uh which is a stable coin only wallet uh that is built directly into uh one of their browsers Opera Mini.

It's also available standalone on Android and they have a test flight for iOS. Uh and it's uh it's really neat. It's uh you can only custody stable coins on it and so it really leans into those real world use case type activities. Um, and they have a really nice uh DAP u browser experience that autoconnects uh your DAP so users don't have to press the connect uh button uh and it always does clear signing. And so if you want to build a DAP that uh only operates with stable coins um that you know could be uh offered to all of Opera's Opera has 500 million monthly active users that they're promoting Mini Pay to uh then um um then Cello is a good chain to build that on.

Um likewise Aora you can think of Aora as kind of mini pro. Uh so Valora allows you to custody other assets not just stable coins. It does of course allow you to custody stable coins and pay for gas with those stable coins. And so it has those same um ease of use features as mini but then layers on you know additional functionality. Uh it's it's a crosschain wallet.

It has a really great crosschain swap experience and and once again a really good DAP browser. And across both of these, oh um before I get to that, um one thing that I think is interesting is both Minipay and Valora are really focused on P2P payments. That's kind of their primary initial use case that they've really worked on nailing. Um which means that both of them verify phone numbers as part of onboarding uh so that people can send value to people in their contact list uh really really easily. And this means that the users who are using Mini Pay, number one, they're not and velour, they're not there for speculation, right?

They're there because they have real world use cases that crypto um stable Coinbased payments are solving for them. And two, because they're verifying their phone numbers, we know that they're not civil accounts. These are all real users uh who are not creating, you know, hundreds of wallets to to farm some airdrop. And so if you are interested in reaching these users um across both of these wallets right now there are 8 million uh such users um you know certainly by web 3 standards this is a large large number and it's growing very very quickly. Once again I mentioned that opera has 500 million monthly active users across all of their uh offerings and they're very aggressively promoting mini pay to all of these users.

So I would expect these numbers to grow uh really really dramatically. Okay. Number four, AI. So earlier this year uh Cello launched uh CXAI uh which is Cello's AI initiative. You can learn more uh by going to a.

sello.org. But effectively it's a partnership with some of the best uh AI projects in crypto today. um folks like Eliza Goat, eternal AI, Olas, um Gaia, GT Protocol, Langchain, Meta, GPT, and and actually a whole bunch more than this, uh have all partnered with Cello to make it really easy for folks to build AI based projects and AI agent-based projects on Cello. Um and so if you're at all interested in doing something AI agent related, uh then definitely definitely check us out.

Uh again, we have these great partnerships. We've been we had an event two days ago where with a workshop where we were teaching folks how to build these agents. Um we're just really investing heavily in this. We're very very excited about what AI agents and crypto together can offer. Especially when you add um folks like again 8 million plus uh real world users who are using crypto for solving real problems.

We think the combination of these two things can be really really exciting. And number five, the final the final reason why we think you should come and build on Cello is um identity. Uh so yesterday uh at ETH Taipei I shared uh a little bit about self protocol uh which um came out of a partnership between self labs which spun out of the cell foundation and the open passport team uh and together uh we launched uh self self.xyz XYZ uh which is a new uh ZK passport protocol that allows you to prove without a third party and in zero knowledge that you have a valid passport, a valid physical passport. And so this allows you to uh effectively uh prove that you're not a sibil.

Uh it allows you to prove that you're not on the OFAC list. It allows you to prove that you're over a certain age without revealing your age. It allows you to do really interesting uh proofs uh while maintaining your privacy in a way that is fully decentralized. Right? So there's no uh third party that's looking at your passport data.

We're using purely math looking at the cryptography that exists um uh inside your biometric passports. Biometric passports have little microchips in them that can be read through NFC and then we're effectively proving the signatures that are in there in zero knowledge on chain without a counterparty. And so if you have an idea, maybe you want to do something around airdrop protection, maybe you want to prove uh that uh you're not an AI agent, maybe you have a wallet recovery use case, uh sanctions list, uh screening use case, or maybe you want to do something fun in the memecoin space, uh where you want to, you know, reward people on their birthdays or reward people based on their hair color or anything that's on someone's passport page, you know, self-protocol is here for you and and going to help you do that. And so, you know, we're sponsors uh this weekend. Uh if you're at all interested in in learning more about building on Cello, definitely come talk to us.

We'll have a booth. We'll have t-shirts. We'll have um these EAC t-shirts um to give out as well. So, come by. And of course, we have some bounties uh $10,000 in uh prizes for building on Cello.

Uh but if you include the $10,000 uh dollars that also self-protocol is contributing, then that's you know upwards of $20,000 available and up for grabs. So definitely definitely come talk to us. We're excited to work with you. We're excited to share more about uh what we're doing. Thank you so much.

[Music]