Marek Olszewski, CTO, cLabs

Episode 70 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro, and cLabs CTO Marek Olszewski.

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This episode of The Scoop was recorded with Marek Olszewski, Chief Technology officer for cLabs — the core development team behind the Celo platform — live from the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris.

In this episode, Olszewski unpacks cLabs recent proposal to transition Celo to an Eth Layer 2, and explains why he thinks one day "hundreds if not thousands of chains will all be rolling up to Ethereum."

Olszewski, who co-founded cLabs and helped build Celo as an independent, mobile-first layer-1 blockchain focused on stablecoin payments and financial inclusion, tells host Frank Chaparro why the team decided to propose migrating Celo directly onto Ethereum rather than continuing as a standalone chain. He frames the move as part of a broader consolidation he expects across the industry, arguing that a large share of today's independent blockchains will eventually consolidate onto Ethereum as rollups as the technology matures and settlement increasingly concentrates around Ethereum's base layer.

The two dig into the technical and strategic reasoning behind that decision, including how a shift to layer-2 status could let Celo keep its existing validator and developer community while gaining Ethereum's security guarantees and deeper liquidity. Olszewski also discusses what the transition would mean for Celo's stablecoin-centric use cases, which have focused heavily on emerging markets and mobile payments, and how cLabs was thinking about preserving that mission through an architecture change of this scale.

The conversation touches on the tradeoffs involved in giving up sovereign layer-1 status, including questions about token economics and governance, and why Olszewski believed those costs were worth paying for the long-term benefits of settling on Ethereum.

The episode captures a pivotal strategic moment for Celo, as one of crypto's earlier independent blockchains made the case for joining the rollup-centric future many in the Ethereum ecosystem were betting on, rather than continuing to compete with Ethereum for developers and liquidity as a standalone layer-1. Olszewski closes by addressing how cLabs planned to bring Celo's existing community and validator set along through the transition without disrupting the payments and financial-inclusion applications already built on top of the chain, and what timeline the team was targeting for the migration to actually go live.