This proposal seeks continued funding from the Celo Community Fund to support cLabs’ efforts in building out the Celo L2 client. We are requesting a grant to cover the next 6 months of development, following the successful execution milestones in a prior grant request. The proposal includes detailed milestone updates, budget estimates, and a commitment to transparency and progress reporting.
In our previous governance proposal, we outlined a 12-month plan for developing the Celo L2 client. At the community’s request, we divided this into an initial 6-month funding period, with the intention to return for additional funding after demonstrating progress and achieving key milestones. Over the past 12 months, the cLabs team has made substantial progress toward the milestones in the initial proposal, as well as additional milestones such as achieving a feature-complete codebase that is ready for audit. Given this, we are now ready to move forward with the funding request for the next phase of the L2 upgrade.
We are pleased to report that cLabs has achieved the following milestones since the first proposal:
This follow-on proposal outlines the work planned for the next 6 months of the Celo L2 development. The key milestones and budget estimates are as follows. Note that the first milestone is complete and included retroactively.
| Milestone | Overview | Deliverables | Time Estimate (Since 1st proposal) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code Completion | Achieving feature completion for the L2 stack. | A feature-complete version of the L2 stack that is ready for audit. | End of Month 10 |
| Audit | Work with Trail of Bits to audit the L2 codebase and fix any issues. | A publicly published audit report with major and critical vulnerabilities fixed. | End of Month 11 |
| L2 Upgrade Dry Run | Coordinate an upgrade of the Baklava network with the validator community. | An upgraded Baklava network. If all goes well, a block height can be picked for the mainnet upgrade. | End of Month 12 |
| Mainnet Upgrade | Support an upgrade of the Celo mainnet with the validator community. | An upgraded Celo mainnet. | End of Month 13 |
| Decentralized Sequencer | Work with leading shared sequencers in the Ethereum ecosystem to add support for shared and decentralized sequencing for the Celo network. Alternatively, develop a bespoke decentralized sequencer if the community prefers. | A decentralized sequencer network live on the Celo network | End of Month 16 |
| Cost Category | Details | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Staff | 7.8 FTE blockchain engineers, 1 FTE product manager, 1 engineering intern, 1 devops engineer, 1 smart contracts engineer. | $192,250 USD/month |
| Infrastructure & Tools | Google Cloud budget for testnets. | $10,000 USD/month |
| Communications Costs | One off event sponsorship for publicizing the L2 | $10,000 |
| Total Cost | $202,250 USD/month + $10,000 |
As with the previous proposal, funds will be deployed into a ReleaseCelo smart contract with a vesting schedule. The contract will include a 2-month cliff, and all remaining funds will vest monthly, ensuring accountability. If cLabs does not meet its commitments, a subsequent governance proposal can revoke the contract, returning unvested funds to the Community Fund.
We commit to reporting progress at each milestone and engaging the community through forum updates and discussions.
The proposal funds a ReleaseGold contract already deployed to the network. It does not modify or upgrade any contracts or parameters.
Before approving/voting, fetch the on-chain proposal and verify that the destination address matches the address of the ReleaseGold contract, 0x04a876E94AD57aBf28250Aa0f19cb4Ac031B566F and that the amount is 2,792,440 CELO, equivalent to 2792440000000000000000000 or 2.792440e24.
$ celocli governance:show --proposalID 194 -n https://forno.celo.org
Then verify that the same contract is a ReleaseGold contract with parameters that match the proposal:
$ celocli releasecelo:show --contract 0x04a876E94AD57aBf28250Aa0f19cb4Ac031B566F -n https://forno.celo.org
In particular check these parameters:
releaseOwner: 0xD533Ca259b330c7A88f74E000a3FaEa2d63B7972 # check this is GovernanceProxy address by copy-pasting into Explorer: allows Governance to revoke the grant
beneficiary: 0x8c7510C66f1BbF8f700a2665c898b3FB77550E38 # cLabs self-custodied account
releaseSchedule:
releaseStartTime: Fri, Nov 15, 2024, 3:00 PM GMT+7 # release start time
releaseCliff: Wed, Jan 15, 2025, 11:00 AM GMT+7 # 2 month cliff
numReleasePeriods: 8 # 8 month total vest
releasePeriod: 1 month, 10 hours # monthly vesting
amountReleasedPerPeriod: 349054875000000000000000 (~3.491e+23) # 8 times this value plus 1 CELO equals total grant (contract sends 1 CELO when beneficiary registers a vote signing key)
This proposal does not deploy or upgrade contracts or change network parameters so represent minimal risk to the network.
This proposal does transfer funds from the Community Fund. The major risk is an incorrect destination address that would leave the funds in the wrong account, or an incorrect releaseOwner on the ReleaseGold account. So long as those are correct, if any other parameter is incorrect, the contract can be revoked, the funds returned, and the grant reissued.