The main developer of the Celo blockchain has laid out a ‘framework’ for choosing a technology provider for its new layer 2 network on top of Ethereum, proposing to complete the evaluation by mid-January in what has become a surprisingly intense competition among some of the blockchain industries. most prominent teams.
The developer, cLabs, published the “Framework for Selecting an L2 Stack” on its discussion forum on Wednesday, inviting community feedback on the document in mid-December and making plans to review the various candidates over the following month.
The community behind Celo approved the plan to move to a layer 2 blockchain in July, which was essentially an acknowledgment that the project would thrive as part of the dominant and fast-growing Ethereum ecosystem rather than as a smaller, self-contained network.
CLabs initially named OP Stack from the Optimism ecosystem – the technology underlying US crypto exchange Coinbase’s new layer-2 network, Base – as the default provider for the new layer-2 network. But in the coming months, rival teams Polygon and Matter Labs, which is behind the zkSync project, came up with their own proposals to capture Celo’s company.
Celo is the 27th largest blockchain in decentralized finance, with a total value (TVL) of $102 million, according to the website DeFiLlama. That’s a tiny fraction of the $26.2 billion in the Ethereum ecosystem, and still well behind Solana’s $656 million.
But as the teams go to great lengths to build dominant layer 2 ecosystems – with first-mover advantages at stake, such as the means to set industry standards and increase liquidity – Celo’s choice has turned into a surprisingly competitive proxy battle.
“Note that we are selecting codebases and subcomponents here, so we find it less useful to directly compare metrics such as TVL, number of transactions and users, other than as indicators of what could be a closer collaboration and/or shared bridge between the two ecosystems . look like in the future,” cLabs wrote. “This exercise isn’t about selecting a ‘best L2 stack’. It’s figuring out which one fits best for the specific technical and non-technical needs of the Celo L2 project.”
Priorities laid out in the new framework proposed by CLabs include “easy migration, with minimal downtime,” maintaining low gas rates, and Ethereum compatibility.
The document makes no mention of the ongoing debate between optimistic rollups versus ZK rollups, a key design choice that experts say poses important tradeoffs between operating costs and speed.
What is clear is the clabs team’s desire to continue with it – perhaps a nod to how quickly the blockchain landscape is evolving.
“Our goal is to deliver CEL2 as quickly as possible, minimizing deployment risk,” the proposal said. “We prefer projects that have been verified, implemented and proven in production, versus projects whose designs are subject to constant change or whose implementations have not yet been proven.”