Rapid Insights: Celo's Transition to an Ethereum L2

cLabs recently proposed to migrate Celo from an EVM-compatible L1 to an Ethereum L2, to align the interests of Celo and Ethereum while potentially bringing more adoption for Celo and improving Celo’s security. The technical details are specified in the proposal’s appendix, but the main takeaway is that Celo will leverage OP Stack, an increasingly popular optimistic rollup framework, as well as EigenDA, a data availability layer developed by EigenLayer. This way, Celo can retain its low transaction fees while inheriting some extent of Ethereum’s security.

Under cLabs’ proposal, Celo validators will become transaction sequencers and post transaction data to EigenDA. The data availability (DA) certificates, which attest that the transaction data was made available, would then be mapped to proposed batches on Ethereum. Celo sequencers will then verify proposed batches against the full transaction data from EigenDA. This should allow Celo to maintain its fast transaction speeds without causing much detriment to both validators and users.