cLabs, a famous cryptographic developer working on the growth of the Celo blockchain project, has announced that it will use the operating framework offered by Optimism (OP Stack) to launch its own Ethereum layer-2.
Last July Celo had received the approval from its own community to migrate from an independent layer-1 to layer-2 of the second most capitalized blockchain in the world.
Now she seems almost ready to take the big step.
All the details below.
Summary
Celo’s blockchain migrates as Ethereum L2 based on the Optimism stack
The outcome of a governance proposal launched in July of last year is about to change the fate of one of the most closely watched projects in the crypto world: Celo’s L1 blockchain is planning to migrate to Ethereum’s L2 and has been working for many months to ensure that all work continues in the best possible way.
Yesterday finally cLabs, the organization that develops on Celo, has decreed that the default toolkit for building the second layer network will be the Optimism stack.
This is a well-considered decision, arrived at after an 8-month test in which the development team tested various software packages including Arbitrum orbit, Zk Stack, and Polygon CDK.
Currently, the OP stack is used by several Ethereum L2s such as OP mainnet, Base, Blast, Mantle, Zora, Manta Pacific, Metis, Mode Network, Aevo, Fraxtal, and others.
Even World Chain, the upcoming second-layer blockchain led by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, will use the Optimism package.
The Celo blockchain will make the first step towards the new infrastructure, called CEL2, during the summer of 2024, launching the testnet following community approval.
The features of the operating framework will significantly reduce the blocking time from 5 to 2 seconds, while simultaneously increasing the throughput of transactions by 50%.
We remember that Celo raised 30 million dollars in 2019 in a financing round led by VCs such as a16z and Polychain Capital, and then obtained another 20 million dollars in 2021.
The network currently boasts a TVL of 125 million dollars and supports many successful dapps like Uniswap and Sushiswap, as well as other native projects like Valora, Mento, and UbeSwap.
The vote for the implementation of the Optimism stack is now just a formality: once all the community calls have been held and the L2 chain launched in the summer, we could see a wave of new dapp implementations based on Ethereum.
The unstoppable growth of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem
With the upcoming introduction of the Celo blockchain, which will be based on the Optimism stack, the world of Ethereum layer-2 solutions continues to grow day by day.
After the inauguration of the “zero knowledge proofs” technology, which marked the birth of the so-called rollups, scalability solutions on Ethereum have started to emerge like mushrooms.
Until a few months ago, there were only a few sparse rollups, among which the most important were centered around the teams of Matter Labs, ConsenSys, Polygon Labs, Off-chain Labs.
Now we can count on a variety of second layer blockchains, precisely 48 examples as reported by L2beat, for a total TVL of 39.6 billion dollars.
This is a huge figure if we consider that the TVL of the Ethereum mainnet corresponds to just over 54 billion dollars according to DefilLama.
In order to manage the liquidity fragmentation across the 48 different blockchains, projects like Omni Network have even been created to unify the use of these resources.
With the introduction of the Dencun update, which greatly reduced the cost of fees on Ethereum rollups, the challenge to the scalability of the main layer has become increasingly concrete.
In some cases, the cost of gas has even been reduced by 99%, but leaving open the possibility of a return to high fees in the case of network management.
Currently, the cheapest L2s for token transfers or swaps are Arbitrum and Optimism, each requiring less than 0.01 dollars in fees, while on Ethereum the same function is performed at a much higher cost.
By the end of the year, Celo will probably become part of the Ethereum family, with obvious advantages in terms of liquidity.
As the world’s safest EVM L2 chain, it will be able to use the stage to attract a substantial amount of new users, as well as new interesting applications.
To stand out in the midst of the competition present in this niche sector, the Celo team will likely launch an incentive campaign.
Stay tuned for future updates to find out if there will be an opportunity to qualify for an airdrop, although Celo already has a governance token, or if there will be prizes up for grabs.
