The Celo Foundation is partnering with EigenLayer to integrate the off-chain data availability layer, EigenDA, into the forthcoming Celo Ethereum Layer-2.
Initially launched as an EVM-compatible standalone blockchain on Earth Day 2020, core contributors cLabs proposed “bringing the network home to Ethereum during EthCC 2023.”
A key priority of this proposal is “maintaining the existing benefits of Celo’s L1, including scalability and security, making EigenDA a crucial component of the framework.”
By leveraging EigenDA, Celo will offer its users “abundant block space and maintain the low fees that have enabled global use cases — notably micropayments, UBI, and more in emerging markets.”
With community governance support to build on Optimism’s OP Stack, the cLabs team has been hard at work “migrating to the Celo L2 testnet ahead of its summer launch date.”
During testnet development, the team successfully “integrated EigenDA with performance in line with EigenDA’s industry-leading 10MB/s throughput on mainnet.”
The staking model for ETH will also allow validators “to earn additional rewards, aligning economic incentives with improved security and performance for Celo’s L2.”
Following the Celo community’s unanimous vote in favor of the L2 migration, and with strong long-term strategic alignment “from both technical and community perspectives, the Eigen Foundation will award a strategic grant to the Celo Foundation.”
This is the first of Eigen’s strategic grants “to key ecosystem partners leveraging EigenDA.”
The Celo Foundation will manage the grant “on behalf of the Celo community, with a long-term plan to support the growth of Celo’s Layer-2 ecosystem through the on-chain Community Fund.”
Simultaneous with today’s announcement, cLabs published a comprehensive overview of their recommendation to build “with EigenDA on the Celo Community Forum.”
To learn more, read the Forum post and join “the community governance call on Thursday, June 27th, to hear from an EigenDA representative.”
As noted in the update, Celo is an “emerging Ethereum Layer-2 and mobile-first blockchain network built for the real world and designed for fast, low-cost payments worldwide.”
The Celo ecosystem consists of “a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (the Celo Platform), the CELO native token, USDC, and USDT (both enabled as gas currencies), several Mento stable assets (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL, eXOF), and popular, blue chip infrastructure including Uniswap V3, Curve, Chainlink, and Rarible, among others.”
Launched on Earth Day in 2020, the open-source Celo mainnet “supports a rich ecosystem of projects (1,000+) contributing to Celo’s global mission of prosperity for all.”
Additional Context on EigenDA: EigenDA, “a high-throughput, decentralized data availability store built as an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on EigenLayer. EigenDA aims to lower transaction costs by increasing transaction throughput, and ensure secure composability across the EigenLayer ecosystem.”
EigenDA leverages advanced techniques “like erasure coding and KZG commitments to provide efficient data availability while maintaining decentralization and high performance.”
