[BUIDL Asia 2024 Builder Stage] The Road to CEL2: Migrating to an L2 & Unlocking 1B Users

Transcript

thank you very much um and thank you uh to bidle Asia for for having me today yeah today I'm here to talk about um about cello and our transition to an L2 and share a lot of the experience that we've had um uh through this transition so first off if people don't know uh cell is an L1 uh uh evm compatible L1 but focused on building for mobile users um and making payments very quick uh cheap and easy and fast recently we announced uh the intention to go from uh to turn from an L1 into an L2 and we were very excited

to see how many people uh supported this transition and in in addition to that a lot of folks um initially read our proposal and uh thought instead of us using op stock a bunch of teams came up and made a recommendation to potentially choose another L2 um this was probably our most active uh proposal um on the Forum in a very long time and I think it makes sense um we'll be one of the first L ones to transition to becoming an L2 and with that comes a lot of uh challenges and things to consider um and hopefully I can share those things so taking a quick look at how you would propose a L1 to

transition to an L2 too uh cell is a proof of proof of stake Network so they already have a a set of over 110 uh validators on the network and uh and our belief is that we can provide a path for those validators to um become decentralized sequencers um on on the L2 and so that's been our pitch and uh so far from the validator community they're interested if you look at how much revenue being is being generated um through L2 sequencing it's quite a lot of money um and so anything that can help grow this valider community into you know decentral art sequencers I think is is is great and

then also um there are many I think attempts right now to change the centralization of sequencers into a decentralized um uh process and um I think that's I think that's a great move in addition to that um we're also looking at how we can make uh data available so we've been talking with igen da to provide that and then also um you know when people consider be you know going from like an L1 to an L2 one of the main reasons that um they would consider that is accessing more you know security and what they mean by that is more uh more money that's staked in the network and having more access to that means uh a lot of the great programs

that you know cell has pushed and and um is developing will have a higher chance to attract additional support um and be able to grow so we're really excited about that some of the other work that's already gone into C's um network is there is plumo which is a a ZK um uh a a like client with some ZK snark uh ZK snark scheme that allows for um very very light um amounts of uh compute on a mobile device and things like that to to um perform transactions and so we're going to be bringing that um plus a bunch of other things like um I think we have like 5-second finality

we want to bring all those great things to the L2 partner that we choose so when we announced this the optimism team reached out polygon ZK team um ZK sync and also arbitrum and so a lot of these teams uh submitted proposals on the Forum and we were excited to evaluate these so in this case here we've shown um the evaluation notes from a technical perspective and I'm really hopeful that we make a decision soon I think uh the Big Challenge here is it's a big decision and you you can there's some ways to move back but when you make that decision you want to make sure you make the right choice other things we've been doing in the space have been pulling together you know thought leaders in the space in the

L2 world and so if you haven't heard about L2 unplug take a look at that uh it's it it doubles as both a Twitter space plus a um you know podcast we've had toolic on there we've had trium from Igan layer um danrad um and a bunch of other um very smart people including ZK sync team recently optimism um and uh and others so worth worth listening to this um if you're interested in L2 space so what I'm really here to talk about is a kind of thrown around term that we say a lot in our space we talk about a billion users the next million the 100 million a million all these million billion numbers and at the end of the

day C started with the intention of truly unlocking this from the beginning and so what we mean by that is um cell was uh initially launched with a mobile focus in in from the beginning um and with things like even climate I think uh cell launched on Earth's day so when we think about refi you know I mean s was launched on Earth Day so we thought about this from the beginning um and tried our best to you know make it as welcoming as we can to um to to new new people coming into uh the crypto space when we talk about what mobile first means um many of us everybody has a phone nowadays and mobile first and mobile apps in general are designed in a

way that are very different from uh traditional web 2 applications and uh the reason this is important is you know you need you need wallets especially for people in Emerging Markets to be simple enough for them to manage their money um because not everybody is entirely literate and also if you take a look at any of the web 3 tools um many of the tools are very complicated and and have advanced um features or it's not that they're Advanced they're just very complex and so to cater to billions of users it's important to think about um building for something that you know that the least techsavvy person in your

family or friend group the work that we've done also to um to research this has also been not just talking about it but also meeting people and so the cell Foundation team has um has run about 12 different studies where we've gone out into the um into Emerging Markets talked with people and a lot of what they're looking for has been um you know in some Emerging Markets like Kenya it's very common that if you have someone's phone number you already know you can send them money and we want to bring that same experience uh to web 3 as well um when you talk to not just users but you're actually digging deeper with

um with Merchants uh they need certain require they have certain requirements right they want to make sure that their customers are able to pay their customers are able to to um you know cash in money if they need to bring money into the system and if they need to if a merchant needs to pay a vendor the merchant needs to have access to that to that money as well and a lot of these mental models around um you know buying something or um running a business a lot of those models um are established and so you want to make sure that when you're bringing new technology to people it me it matches the mental model that they have and so going from a mobile phone where I have money on it to

sending it to a vendor or sorry a merchant and then them sending that to a vendor to pay them off for products and services um it's really important that these things are con uh are considered and thought through so when we dig a little bit deeper into how we're helping to unlock o how helping to unlock um more use real world use cases we take a look at high scalability and one what we mean by that is very low fees on Cell fees average under half half a penny in some cases like point you know 0.1 um and why that's important is when you look at a lot of the transaction volume that's are even happening uh in the recent you know

L2 since denin it's still if you only have a dollar you know sending a transaction for one penny is still 1% of your money and so we want to keep the cost as low as possible um and be able to scale to you know lots and lots of people using this for payments addition additionally if you're a merchant um you run the risk of having someone do a chargeback or you know um or something like that and so one way that this can be solved is through things like um you know fast finality and so with solo the average transaction finality is about 5 seconds and so if you paare that low cost with finality you don't have to worry about a transaction getting

reversed the reordered or or you know major changes like um on ethereum for example we also want this to be user Centric and focused on people so a couple things that cell uh uh offers is um you know gas being paid in stable coins so sounds like a simple thing but um from the beginning c has allowed a couple stable coins um for gas and what this means is that if I if I knew everybody's phone number here I could send you um maybe $1 of a of a Sol stable coin and you can mediately start transacting on the network additionally um you know managing phone numbers is

hard and so um not everybody who's coming into uh or learning about web3 for the first time understands how complex it is to create a wallet and make sure you you save the keys and then send me you know send the person their um their specific wallet address with social connect you can use your phone number people can use your phone number to associate that phone number to a wallet they they can associate a GitHub email address any sort of social identity and what that does is it makes it easier for people to send people money similar to how with uh ens you know everybody has their you know I have Eric nakagawa that eth um and that can be a very easy way to look things up um you can also use your phone number and

that same method of like associating yourself uh you know something personally identifiable to one of your wallets um since we're talking about money at the end of the day and for not just um businesses but people you need to make sure that people can easily offramp and onramp um including from even in some cases like Kenya they have a concept of mobile money you want them to be able to swap between mobile money and AirTime um and to into whatever you know uh coin they might need if it's if it's a Kenya Shilling or if it's US USD you want to allow them to do that um and then to make this happen you need to work with a lot of cash in cash out providers so solo um has introduced a a project called Fiat connect and Fiat

connect helps to simplify the experience of cashing in and cashing out so that um when people are comparing their options like one thing that is very common for cello um Community users is they're trying to cash in let's say $10 worth of U money in um some of these uh rates can be you know 9% and so if you put a market to allow people to um connect their cash in provider or cash out providers then they can start to compete over you know the percentages and like if once there's competition people are going to businesses like those cash in providers Cash Out providers are going to want more volume and so what they'll do is they'll start

to lower their rate which is better for both the users they pay less in fees and for these cash in cash out providers because they're Pro they're generating business um quick some quick stats on cello we've had over these stats are a little bit old but over 350 Mill transactions on chain but uh for me the most important part is the number of countries that people are using uh cello in over 150 um and we have a lot of active users who are um you know using it for payments cashing in cashing out moving money um and we're very excited about you know the growth there um in terms of the dius because that matters a lot for Builders which is

where I tend to focus a lot of my attention um solo has had a had a lot lot of growth um and these charts you know how they are they're they change over time but we've seen a quite a large growth um due to some new projects that I've launched on cell I'm going to talk about that in a second so going back to you know how do we how we bring truly bring more people on um it's what I said before is understanding the mental model for people in their where they're from um if they're business owners making sure you understand what they need um and matching those experiences um and we think that you know when you're looking to build um on or partner with a a blockchain it's

really important that PE you know people put the the users first and make sure that they're thinking about their user experience making sure figured out how to you know they can cash in make sure you can figure out how to cash out um and I think if you pull those out together um like alelo has done then the focus can be on you know building really good user experiences for people to do things with their money um earlier today uh usdt officially deployed on the network we're really excited about that um and the reason we're excited about this is for us stable coins are the you know a very strong piece of cellos um strategy from the beginning we want to make sure that we have stable coins for every user no

matter where they are and so right now we have examples of usdc usdt there's some cell specific stable coins like an over aized um Mento CD c real real is for uh for Brazil and then you have um the angle protocol Euro um and having access to all of these means people know that I mean ironically some people want to have a stable coin or they want to move to and switch to whichever one they believe is the strongest and so allowing them to have access to all of these and more um means that they can make make sure that when they're sending value like if if you've ever sent money

overseas um a lot of that value can get lost along the way and so by using stable coins um this allows you to ensure that the value that you intended to send makes it all the way there it also helps with savings so some people who are in places like Nigeria will use some of their money to hold into savings or to hold until they need to make an expense and keeping it in like a stable coin allows them to you know one allows some of them to kind of navigate High High um in not interest but High um inflation countries like Nigeria and other African countries it also helps with lending right um people can get loans businesses can get loans and we can talk about that um and then from PTP

if you're sending money between folks you want to make sure you are using you know the best um the most valuable thing to send so going back to how cell was launched with the mobile Focus one of the first things that was built was a mobile wallet and the first mobile wallet built on solo was Vora and in this case here you can see a you know really simplistic you know emphasis on how much money is in the wallet um and this is another example of a a very simple UI that allows people to access all the daps that they need um keep track of their you know their their money sending receiving and vora's also introduced really easy ways to within

the wallet um quickly do actions Within each of the dabs and one example of this is like if you're in a liquidity pool you can use valora uh valora's hooks to very quickly like claim that pool and these things make it easier for people who um you know they're keeping a close eye on their money and they want to make sure that they can um you know grow that or use it however they want we've seen um or they've seen over 100 million uh sorry 100 countries users in 100 countries um and uh over a million downloads the um kind of bigger thing I wanted to talk about today helping people or helping us as a community get to a billion users is this new project

launched back in September um and this one for me if any of you are going to be at eat soul my goal is to really pitch developers to build for for Opera uh minay what Opera minay is is a wallet um built into the Opera Mini browser primarily focused in um Africa they have over half a billion downloads um and I think upwards of 80 million active uh mobile users and um they recently switched on their wallet and um the growth has been incredible so here's a quick just want a kind of quick video [Music]

here [Music] so that that example of the wallet is already live um and and we've seen a ton of people using it um and we're very excited so when you look at those numbers you're like did you really grow that fast well we grew because Opera Mini switched on tons of wallets um and very recently we broke 2 million so 2 million people uh have have uh connected their uh wallet to the cell

network and we're very happy about that um these are 2 million people that are you know again based either in Nigeria Kenya Ghana South Africa um and you know these are their first in many cases their first wallet um in web 3 and I think the big opportunity here is if you had you know if you look at our community in general a lot of us are building stuff um and hoping to get users while with Opera Mini it's the opposite it's like hey there's 2 million people and they gain about 10 to 20,000 new people every single day so if you're building if you're building Financial tools um or new ways to you know uh uh send payments or you know with friends

or things like that then you know op mini is a great way to invest time and energy um one of the key things that oper mini does oper mini pay does that is different from most wallets is um we abstract away the connect wallet button so when you open oper mini oper mini pay um it automatically connects to the cell network um and the reason for that is um if this is your first experience we want to make it as simple and easy for people to um to to start using um uh the web 3 space and the primary focus is on stable coins so once you have stable coins in your wallet you can transact um you don't need a cell token you can use that but the wallet will sense what's available

and uh just yesterday usdc got added to that list so if you have native usdc in your mini pay wallet in your Vora you can start transacting and interacting with daps like from the moment you receive any money so it it it's been really great to see that growth um other projects I would like just quickly talk through um that are helping to reach the billion people are examples like good dollar so I know there's some teams that have heard of this uh good dollar is a Ubi tool um and what it really is is financial empowerment helping people to gain a little bit of money um through a daily check-in I think you can claim every single day um and the way that good dollar you know kind of fights civil

resists is civil resistant is it requires people to identify themselves through um some biometric information um and they've distributed a ton of uh Ubi and uh this is probably the one of the largest uh Ubi projects I think on in web 3 in general in addition to that we have impact Market impact Market within minay um allows people to do Learn to Earn so you can learn more about financial uh um information or learning you know what does it mean you know to take a loan um not everybody knows these things and so through impact Market they've produced a bunch of Great learn terms campaigns that helps people to or helps to incentivize people to learn about these things either get a bit of

little bit of tokens that they can then you know stake um and earn or Swap and things things like that um they also offer Ubi too so um we got learn turn you got Ubi and then you have short-term loans that people can um can uh request from Impact Market another protocol on solo that we're excited about is uh Talent protocol this is more like your onchain um resume and what people can do is they can join a community either locally or globally that helps them achieve like set goals and then achieve those goals and then um uh retain those goals on chain and so you know we've seen a lot of people that they want to get into the web three space they want to learn to code um people use Talent

protocol to do that other projects kind of similar how I said sell a launched on Earth Day um you know climate work has been uh important to us and the chain is also carbon uh negative I think maybe since one or two weeks after launch um and uh one example project that I think is relevant to everybody here is um this project Sylvie which their goal is to help a billion people plant a trillion trees um but the way that they're doing this is through gamifying um uh uh helping the planet and so a very interesting project and one that I think everybody I mean who here would in planetry if they had a chance how many many of you have heard about

flow carbon flow carbon is uh an organization that's meant to focus on bringing carbon uh transparency to the carbon markets and bringing that all on chain um they have I think they've financed a bunch of projects and or carbon credits to bring them into um uh real real Road asset and climate um type projects uh one really cool project is toucan so toucan produce is the uh the first market for biochar and now we're starting to get into like yeah kind of more climate um projects but they have done I think 50,000 uh retirements so like if you've ever heard of um carbon

offset credits well it doesn't mean anything until you retire them and so when you retire them you actually wipe them off um and they've done quite a bit of that and uh the new the new trend right now in uh in climate has gone from carbon credits into biochar and so you would start seeing or hearing biochar come up and the reason that this is more interesting than previously or previous uh topics is um it's easier to track um and it's higher quality and the quality does matter when you're looking at at climate stuff finally or not finally but there's also Huma hum has another project recently launched on cell and the intention here is to provide credit for small to mediumsized businesses um

their payback rate is I think very high I think they've they it's almost identical I think they've had tons of of their loans repaid and I think that just shows um that there are businesses and people that need access to this um to um to finance and through their own maybe local markets they can't access it or they can't access enough or if you look at some of the the rates that are given to some of these teams or these companies um it's ridiculously expensive and so with Huma um uh uh people can uh put up certain amounts of money to be loaned out and uh and because of that um I think it helps to helps a lot of

businesses that are out there um one other project I think this is a final example is you know we talk about yield farming the project ethic Hub actually has a token that lets people um generate yield from physical farms and I think it's really cool because I learned that um coffee farmers in Latin America some of their interest rates are potentially 50% you know um and if you know about farming there's only you know so much money you're going to generate from a farm but if your rate is 50% um you're very beholden to you know making sure your your farm does um uh produces and then you very likely have

to have another loan the next season and so with ethic Hub and ethic token people can um access much more favorable terms oops much more favorable terms um that help them to lower the cost for their uh for producing um their for their Farms um and I think it's a great project and I think when you look at accessing people and helping people we talk a lot about people that aren't even in Tech or are you know on the fringes of tech and how much how much more On The Fringe can you be than someone physically Al farming um and so this is definitely a project worth checking out so to kind of tie it all together um thank you for folks for being here I

really um I'm a big believer in cello um I used to work at some big very big projects and I've been in space for over 10 years um but the thing I'm most attracted to uh to C for has been its focus on Mission trying to help real people um and really trying to help connect people to uh real word examples real use cases and you know cell has been doing this for about four years the chain launched about four years but our Focus has always been on people and um I think it's finally becoming a thing where I think a lot of people who are um building in our space you know I I believe as when they get to their F their second project they start to look for more meaning and and solo

has a project that has you know meaning built from the beginning so if you have any questions happy to to answer them or you know happy to talk more if you're participating or you know people participating at eth Soul um I'll be giving a workshop um and also mentoring throughout the week uh weekend if possible but uh that's it for me thank you everybody