Celo: An L1 Focused On Real World Use Cases | Marek Olszewski, Rene Reinsberg

Transcript

all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Empire you have Renee and Merrick the two co-founders of cello joining us uh really excited to have this episode American Renee welcome to show guys it's great to be here thank you yeah it's really great to be here yeah I think the first place I want to start I've been following cello since like the very early days and have never had you two on the show um and I think you two have been a little quieter in the like what I'd call the the crypto native crypto Twitter sphere but maybe bigger in some of the the real real world uh uh ecosystems uh maybe outside of the the Twitter sphere so maybe I'll pick on Renee to just give like a quick overview on the last couple

years in cello at like a very high level for maybe crypto Twitter sphere people who are listening who maybe don't know solo and then we can get into some of the fun stuff you guys are working on if that works for you sounds great yeah um I mean this is a good problem to just even like go back in time to when we first started thinking about um you know cello and we we recently looked back at the old white paper and we're actually like wow we actually you know this it's like this exists now this has been built and some of the stuff the core team built some of the stuff people in the community built but it's interesting because what really got us into the space was I think a realization that uh ethereum smart contracts just generally web3 would

potentially bring a huge change in how people are able to access the digital economy and um I think for us was exciting to play play a role in that and you know our first thing we did is build a build a wallet on ethereum and put it in front of real people you know people that weren't like deep in the space you know and try to get an understanding of what would be required to make uh you know this stuff work for everyday people and this is you know going back five almost six years ago at this point and there was a big gap and I think the Gap to some extent still exists right but it's also it's it's been closing and I think has played a pretty pretty big role in helping close the gap and you now have

people really all over the world that are using products built on cello often about realizing that you know it's powered by you know an open permissionless public blockchain under the hood but bringing them real value in their day-to-day lives and so in in many ways this was um it has been our focus of all these years and as much as I think personally speaking American I I'd love to chime in or a lot of the you know Twitter arguments uh that are that are happening you know there's 24 hours in a day and you know we we like to spend uh that was time you know was was product on product was found as an ecosystem and moving the pack forward and um

I I do think that has led to subtle being a little less known than some of its peers but I think that's also really changing this year as there's a shift and focus on hey how is this stuff actually worked in Like Houses used in the wild that's webstery you know it's kind of the moment right does web3 you have like a reason to exist and um I think this is led to a lot of people starting to look at cello now and maybe sometimes taking a second look and saying oh wait a second like wow you guys are actually delivering against not just sellers initial promise but I think why a lot of people got into the space uh I actually want to go pre-sello for a second I was doing a little uh LinkedIn stalking and saw that you know both at

MIT and then it looks like co-founded a company together got bought by GoDaddy and then uh spent looks like maybe three or four years ago daddy did cello come out of some of the problems that you guys saw inside of GoDaddy with like how that world worked or two totally unrelated things yeah maybe I can take that I would say it's unrelated um but but you're right uh Randy and I met um at MIT actually we met um a funny story we met in the class taught by Tim berners-lee about the original web 3. uh so back then 2010 uh time frame Inverness Lee was um

working on on the semantic web and linked data and for a while people were calling that you know the the third version of the web um and so actually our first company loku it was primarily a machine Learning Company um in the data space and um and it had those origins in web 3. it's pretty pretty shiny wait what what was what what was the third web I don't I don't know that story so um there's this effort to create open databases uh using um what's called the semantic web or or linked data this idea that you have um documents that represent data that

are linking to each other much the way that documents on the web link to each other um and so this is the idea behind the semantic web uh and that there'll be three uh the web 3 w3c foundation and timbersley have been working on standardizing this now for a while uh and for a while people were calling that the the third version of the web so this idea that that we could do to data what for documents uh namely made them make them open make them accessible to everyone you know fast forward to today it turns out that um yeah having open data is really valuable

and uh and the semantic web was one way to achieve that but another way to do that is you know permissionless public ledgers uh and they're clearly um you know I think there's been just a wealth of activity around around this way of representing data in a fully open and transparent manner yeah I will maybe you just to add super quickly to add to this I think there's some perils here right and um in many ways for me what kind of Drew me to sort of the original web sphere the semantic web are some of the things that I think Drew us into into web3 now right which is sort of really giving power to the individual to you know sort of a a community of people versus

centralizing Power and this is you know back in 2009 2010 right even then people were talking about hey what is happening with sort of big sort of web 2 conglomerates you know like the power there amassing over their users right and so in many ways some of the discussions back then were precursor of what I think people are discussing now as as they look at what web3 architecture can enable hmm I want to tie this into the kind of ll1 Wars I guess I'd call them and that happened in 2020 and 2021 and maybe I'd just zoom out and talk about like the L1 ecosystems in general so when you guys launch cello my memories you launched sometime mid-2017 if I

remember that correctly or late 2017 sometime in 2017 you can correct me if I'm wrong there but uh what happened is you had all these kind of other l1s that like took advantage of I'd call like the Ico boom a lot of those didn't actually work out but you did have these other l1s like the solanas and The Avalanches and kind of the nears and Phantoms that did really well in the kind of 2020 days and uh some of those are still doing well and others aren't I'd be curious to hear now I think all the Talk of the Town are these like rl2s like optimism and arbitrum are have kind of taken the narrative I'd be curious to get your take on like where you all sit in the ecosystem and like what is the value prop of cello relative to all

these other things that are getting built right now yeah maybe I start high level in America feel free to jump in on some of the I think there's this is also maybe a good opportunity to start talking a little bit about the seller roadmap and seller 2.0 which we recently announced but I think at a high level we were from the beginning very driven by what does it take to achieve a certain use case right and for us that started really from the end user experience and then going all the way down the stack to recognize certain areas where at the time ethereum was well in short and I think even today you will be hard-pressed to find an infrastructure that can accommodate a micropayments use case and easy cash and

cash out right without the need for multiple tokens um in a you know in a local community somewhere and and for us you know I think really zooming in on that use case at the center of what has become a much richer ecosystem and and you know set of use cases um I think has really led to a differentiation so I think a lot of the stuff that you see on cello that you see working and growing is very different than the things that have worked on some of these other chains you mentioned where there's I think a lot more similarities in terms of how people are engaging with those and what some of the use cases are which oftentimes are much

more driven by you know whale defy activity for example right versus peer-to-peer payments in a local market or um or people kind of creating sort of these this sort of really native if new kind of digital economies so so to me that um in in some ways has kept us out of those you know near world wars because we've been just focused on on those use cases but I think increasingly we get pulled into that because people are saying hey wait a second I can build all the things on cello that I can build on on a polygon on an Avalanche right and so uh yeah like why should I not pick solo and you know the answer is yeah actually they're good reasons to to pixel in fact we are increasingly as

we're also seeing more and more projects launch and you know kind of transaction volume increase and projects becoming more successful right I think that has led us to think about okay from a roadmap perspective what are the things that are actually necessary to help those projects grow with and on cello and so rather than starting from like this you know hey let's let's build kind of a thing that no one will really know how to use but that may be useful 10 years from now and will sound really sexy let's just build something pragmatically that works that achieves a lot of the things that we're looking to achieve um and is future proof in a way that it can be extended over time and um the way cello is set up is that

through launching governance seller holders can vote on you know changes to the protocol there have been several hard folks there have been tons of proposals right to bring changes to sellers so even since mainnet launch which by the way I was in 2020 so we're coming up on our three year minute anniversary on Earth Day um this year um there's there's you know there's been a lot of change to the to the core protocol um but yeah I'll let Merrick um chime in on some of more of the specifics but that's kind of how I would think about high level yeah and I think you know first and foremost we were um um big Believers of the you know ethereum ecosystem um we we started our journey in the

ethereum ecosystem by by first building a wallet on on ethereum um and you know actually the the reason we ended up working on on cellular the platform itself is um because as Renee mentioned we wanted to have some functionality that made it really easy for for non-cryptonative people to to use um uh wallets and uh and kind of address their real world use case needs uh and so that took us down the path of thinking okay well we need uh we need a consensus protocol that is you know secure and decentralized but also that offers one block finality uh so that when you send the payment to someone you don't have to worry about

um that payment being rolled back um and you know when you make that decision you you end up creating a proof of State protocol that that is um in our case it was new and novel uh when we launched almost three years ago excela was the first proof of stake uh like major proof of stake um evm compatible chain which was really exciting um and um and then we also added other features like the ability to pay for gas with tokens uh natively in the platform you know without um yeah third-party bundlers or um or meta transaction relayers uh which ended up being really nice so that if I

send you a stable coin you can send that on to someone else without having without being stuck uh which I'm sure many of your listeners may have personally even experienced um and then we and then we added um phone numbers as a way to as and then layer it's an optional living layer it's it's something that uh wallets can opt into and it allows folks to send payments to phone numbers and to people in in in your contact list um in a fully decentralized way and and that I think um is probably one of the biggest enablers for kind of P2P payments on solo um and um and we we wanted it to be core and a

first-class citizen in in the platform so that it worked across different wallets so that it was you know truly a standard and so those are some of the decisions that took us down the path of um working on on a new layer one um I think critically you know I think we um so I think just how far ahead the the evm was compared to every other kind of idea at the time and we're glad that that we made the right bet um you know I think we've been uh really close to the ethereum ecosystem and and as Ronnie mentioned we have some pretty exciting plans up ahead with kind of solo 2.0 that bring us even

closer uh one of which will be the ability to pay for gas with wet soon on solo which will be I think really really nice nice uh can we you talked about uh phone numbers like when I think about cello one of the and I like as a maybe kind of Outsider looking and one of the first things that come to comes to mind is mobile first and um you guys have this light client that uses um uh CK Snorks I think it is to help users sync with the network with only a few kilobytes of data um and then you also have these like like you mentioned mayor you've uh kind of securely mapped phone numbers to wallet addresses which is a really clear like gives people the ability to send crypto to obviously friends and family

in your contact list before you even sign up for for a wallet which is a which is a really nice feature what is the um like what's been the uh impact of building this like mobile first uh layer here yeah yeah I jump in a little bit um and maybe just even give some stats you know I I saw this recently one of the amm's um build on cello Post-it sort of the distribution of their usage and there was I think over 80 percent of people that were accessing it were doing so from mobile devices right and then likely signing transactions with mobile

wallets like valora um and that's a fundamentally different user Behavior right than your your typical uh user um you know kind of connecting on a desktop with metamask right for it or some uh you know other setup and so that's that's really I think where to your original question hey why in this in this world of all these layer ones and layer twos now why should people care about selling is a fundamentally different audience that you're able to reach um when you're building a dab um you have really a lot of the mobile tooling um you have sdks right to quickly build mobile mobile dabs um you have Best in Class mobile wallets you have the

ability to really streamline the user experience by paying you know by allowing people to pay for example in stable coins or soon with and you have on and off ramps right and a lot of markets where really regular people want to easily cash in from the mobile money account right and they don't want to jump through like four or five Hoops or go through an exchange right but they just want to like fund their wallet and then use a dab and just go on with their life right or cash out from a payment they got for doing some work on an online Marketplace so I think the by focusing so specifically on on mobile and and making sure that people that are building on sale can have a really tight great you experience on mobile I think that's led

to a fundamentally different user base and in a way it's also I think the reason you have a lot of dapps you know that I've chosen to deploy on cello you know they maybe they're starting ethereum or um another VM but they're looking to grow Their audience and and sellers is a really great way to do that yeah and when we started you know nobody was talking about mobile right like I think everything was desktop based everything was basically through um you know metamask as a browser extension um I don't think there were any real Major mobile wallets uh out at the time um certainly you know there was no

Solana phone being talked about um and uh and you know I was going around talking about how you know we have this backwards um you know web3 should be leading web 2 web 2 move to mobile like 10 years ago already right there's this famous book um uh called just mobile first that's just an amazing read um and um I think it's by Luke rubelski if I remember correctly and um you know web 2 that book took web 2 by um uh storm and whip to transition but somehow web3 was you know behind in this like really really important way and so

um part of the focus around mobile was you know to just to get that Evolution right but you know part of it was also uh this belief that for the um for the advantages that the crypto and web 3 offer uh the people who who need those advantages the most are our mobile devices and so we should be we should be building mobile um and that's what took us down the path of like coming up with a consensus protocol that uh used um uh threshold cryptography and BLS 1237 set 12-377 which then enabled us to actually create um a stock based like clients which you

know no other protocol has um certainly know the ebm compatible protocol has uh and and that's amazing right like clients are critically important for for security and decentralization and uh and we worked really really hard to create something that that allows you to sync with very very little data yeah what's been had so what I mean one of the main reasons I want to have you guys on Empire is to I think we're at the like heart of this bear market and I think there are a lot of people maybe who aren't deeply embedded in in crypto land saying like what you know what do we all do in this for like what are the use cases here can you guys talk about the actual real world use cases here and like what what you've seen as the impact of uh

some of these technical decisions that you've made totally yeah I would say today um a lot of what has been in sort of broader Webster right where what's been what's what's what's actually working is is in gaming right and then we mentioned D5 as an example but we've we've really not seen um sort of a lot of real world use cases right and so um I think this is why it's interesting to take sort of a bit more of a deep dive into the cello ecosystem and and look at projects that are are yeah solving robot problems and sometimes connecting um really just using sort of the you know kind of

the cellochiness of a settlement layer right for for what they're building but but sometimes also smartly connecting those applications into the broader ecosystem digital economy whether that's for liquidity right and connecting Noble Capital markets to small-scale Farmers in Mexico which is something that for example FA Cup is doing was copy Farmers allowing folks to basically um you know do loans right peer-to-peer loans to to small-scale Farmers which otherwise would have no access to to those loans and and capital capital generally right but there's there's an element here of course leveraging kind of a broader D5 movement but then tying

it to kind of a real world uh use case I think the other area and this is something that cello has really um you know your way and getting known as the the home for refi um regenerative finance and uh generally maybe for those who are not familiar with the term regenerative Finance the way I would Define it as really um you know kind of derived from regenerative economics and decentralized violence but sort of having a financial system that has positive externalities so imagine your you're participating in a financial system but by doing so you're not actually extracting more from the environment or from people but you're actually having a positive impact

so you know by transacting more that has a positive impact on the environment or on the community and some examples for that which are which are life on sallow and um have been growing quite nicely you know it's things like for example having currencies backed by by natural assets and um by doing so right um the more those currencies local currencies often Community currencies the more they're used the more they lead to a preservation of those of those natural assets and an example of that would be a project called collectivo which has developed a whole framework for that and it started rolling that out in a bunch of different places starting in Curacao where you have a community currency that Chris algilder that's uh

Unchained and backed by natural assets uh starting with a food Forest local food Forest of coral reefs in the future and and other assets that you know as you imagine that economy growing and more of that currency circulating and being used more of those assets being being preserved so that's that's quite powerful but you also see it by by really um by starting to bring you know kind the connectivity in a sense Beyond information but with value right to communities you start seeing people in you know really all over the world suddenly be connected to this digital economy right you have artists creators that can create things and you know

access a global audience you start seeing um people that one of my more recently kind of projects I've been spending some time with is Plastics where um you know people are pretty familiar now with the concept of carbon offsets right and it's widely discussed and in fact you know they're the Big Challenge was carbon offsets is greenwashing right and web3 actually helps because it brings more liquidity to those markets and it brings more transparency and so you actually over time you'll see a flight to high quality assets right because then a corporate who wants to offset uh their carbon footprint right and and purchase those credits and doing so on Shane will bring a transparency

right to the market to those projects um that will straight on address that kind of issue and there's other benefits too but what's much less known is that this is really just the tip of the iceberg when you think about climate assets and taking positive climate action so you now have um you know a team called Plastics that has created sort of a similar concept for for offsetting the Plastics footprint of an organization or a community and basically providing a mechanism for people in local community to you know collect for example Plastics bring them to recycling centers and get monetary value in the form of a token directly for that that can be used again in this digital economy right and all of these things are building blocks in this

broader regenerative you know digital economy that people can now build with you know my hope is that this year people also well we'll start more engaging with that and seeing a totally different side of Webster and crypto Ruth Merrick before you before you jump in I'm curious Renee where or or America you can take the answer to this but where is this activity actually happening I'm assuming it's outside of the United States yeah a great question um four a lot of PDP payments uh activities uh certainly we're seeing a lot of that happening uh outside the US a lot in latam a lot in Africa um and um you know I think Rennie mentioned

Colectivo they're based in in Curacao there's other protocols that are giving out ubis universal basic incomes uh on cello uh like impact market and good dollar and these are also operating um in primarily in Emerging Markets um I think impact Market is focused heavily on Favela communities in Brazil um communities throughout West Africa uh and even places like Afghanistan after the US withdrawal so real adversarial uh environments where it's very difficult to get um uh any sort of payment uh to someone in a cost-effective way and they found that

with um with cello with the ability to to send value really cheaply uh to anyone um using the same rails in every country that they operate you know they're they're I think about an order of magnitude more efficient than something like give directly which um you know outside of web 3 has been kind of the leader for um doing really really low overhead uh and efficient um cash transfers but what's really great about about impact Market is you know they uh they disperse those funds to to these beneficiaries they've dispersed you know millions and millions of dollars now um and then the money circulates in

these communities people use um uh mobile wallets um like like velora which um you know I spend some of my time on um which is kind of the evolution of that wallet that we started on ethereum uh they use it like you know uh people in the US use venmo um and and the money just circulates in these communities again you can pay for gas with tokens on seller so you can can send stable coins and you can send it to people in your contact list uh and it just it just circulates um there's another project that's that's been planting trees in in Kenya called silvi um they're incentivizing it's a whole

protocol incentivizing the planting of trees around this one um rainforest that's being deforested over there and they have an interesting protocol which incentivizes the the planting of the trees uh but what's really cool to see is once the trees are planted and once people verify that other people have you know done the work you know naturally you need some game theoretic elements to to make sure that people are doing this well but the end result is this money lives in these communities in these fiber communities and and starts to circulate in these farmer communities uh uh which you know is just incredible no I just I think there's

um I think a lot of the examples we we've given and described are really you know oftentimes grassroot projects right that are starting in a community and that grow from that Community then grow to other communities right so it's a it's a different timeline right than you know sort of oh you have your your big kind of nft drop and it you know gets a bunch of people like to pay attention for a moment right but this is really sustainable um engagement right that grows over time and I think uh to me um you know and I guess when we started this like we had a very long time Horizon sort of that we kind of felt we would be working against just given some

of the technical challenges a lot of the stuff actually you know happened faster but I will I mean you know I'm very bullish that the the first chain to really or ecosystem to really onboard and truly onboard not just like a one-off but really sustainably on board a billion people to web series solo and that's like you know probably truer now than it that it ever was just given a lot of you know the amazing projects that are happening at a Grassroots level and then I think also supercharged with things like budget Telecom right which has 250 million people in there you know Global user base right that are also you know taking a deep look at Webster you know they're already validating on cello

they're running oracles right in there um they're actually like definite exceptional team now that I'm in uh in Europe I'm spending a lot more time with their team in them just impressed by sort of the expertise that they have in-house around web3 right which is five six years ago um sort of you know for corporate you would not have uh expected that and so all that makes me really bullish that um we're you know of the next few years we're gonna get really close to actually you know bringing real people in in in big numbers into the digital economy and and giving them real world value every day so that's that continues to be sort of the North Star

um and why we're here but it's it's really encouraging to see the diversity also in approaches and and projects that are contributing towards making that happen do you guys think that is valora the is the valora kind of the Holy Grail here in terms of like the uh kind of the first like do you think that'll be the first real world news case that gets to I don't know whatever number big number that we want to call it 10 million users 100 million users billion users is it valora are there there are other things on the horizon yeah certainly lots of things on the horizon um but velora um you know I'm biased I work there as well uh um you know very very excited about it um you know I think it does a really good job of showcasing all of the early

amazing features that Stella has to offer uh and just creates just a really really easy to use Mobile Wallet um and um you know and if you look at the home page or the home screen uh for the wallet um yes you know there's a whole that browser you can you can sign transactions within the apps and that's quite elegant uh but you know the the two um kind of primary actions on the home screen are are send and received uh and so it's really I would say kind of catered towards this kind of payments use case um and again that's what we're seeing in

in Emerging Markets people people using the wallet for um so yeah I'm very very excited you know if you haven't tried velor I highly recommend uh checking it out um and um yeah I don't know ready are there any other exciting things out coming down that we can talk about look to me I I see valora and also so at the end of all that's like key fabric right and I think if the better valora the better the experience as you use uh a lot of the other products um Halo 5S used to be called good ghosting uh just you know rebranded and like as is super popular right now it's kind of you know none lost Lottery kind

of group savings um and I I think you know obviously some of the use cases we talked about I think to me um I actually uh maybe this is where America like you know I mean I don't think it's a disagreement but I actually think it's going to be a collection of um of different applications right in different places um really kind of growing all you know Finding product Market fit or some of them have fun proc work and fit in they're growing week over week months over month you know and so it's not like this this one big moment where Suddenly It's like wow you know this this thing but it's it's a lot more sustainable in that sense now you do have

um obviously some some bigger uh organizations part of the ecosystem you know mentioned much Telecom Team Mobile you know Kickstarter announced they're decentralizing doing that hello so there is definitely you know when you have sort of uh you know someone who brings a big existing audience um and is able to successfully um actually onboard them um and often that you know requires to actually abstracting a lot of you know web Street into the background right and just giving people a great user experience then I think that those can be all big drivers but um to me the power of cello really comes down to um a lot of these building blocks just working really well together and this is

something that um I also personally really I mean I enjoy working in this ecosystem where where people are just very collaborative where people are very aligned towards the what's the North Star and and so you you do see a lot of collaborations Partnerships um you know projects teaming up and you know doing doing interesting things together so to me yeah I think it's it's probably the combination of a few things that just um just are on sort of their path and are sort of growing um but uh but yes certainly helps to have have really strong wallets with you know we talked a little bit about the Fiat connect standard and you know the connect the world program of just making

on and off-boarding just super seamless which I think that's really what's been holding back um Webster adoption more broadly you know it's just too painful today and we discovered that pretty early just by trying this out and like realizing the pain of myself and and so that's been a big Focus for for the foundation but also for Laura and for a lot of the kind of key ecosystem projects that are working on this and it's truly a joint effort of the ecosystem and when we crack that I think it will um dramatically accelerate adoption because today that's the hurdle right someone gets to sort of the point where they're they want to break money in right or take money out and it's you know takes time or comes at a prohibitive cost for small payments

right I think we've solved it for bigger payments but for small payments that's uh that's something that's really only now getting getting much better and I think that's a key differentiator for for sale on the cell ecosystem yeah and this is something I feel really passionately about so maybe I'll jump in real quick but um you know if you think about it right like um we've solved uh the ability to send payments to anyone right in the world right like I think not just uh with ballora and solo but I would say you know as a broader web3 ecosystem right we have enough scalability we have um uh enough functionality now and and swiftly on seller we have the ease of use to to send stable coins to

anyone in the world to literally any phone number uh and and have them receive it uh like within like 2.5 seconds on average without the like and be able to then send it on to someone else without having to go and buy gas um so that's great but you know we haven't seen this explosion of uh of payments the way that for example you know when WhatsApp uh can be launched kind of took over the world where when they basically made sending a message to any phone number in the world uh free and instantaneous and you know I we hypothesize that this is because the value is not immediately useful for everyone in the world right unless you can cash out instantly or until you know everything all payments become web3

based which you know I think uh I would imagine a lot of your listeners think it's going to happen and hopefully soon you know we're in this transition period until that happens where you need to be able to move back and forth between Sia and crypto really really easily uh and not just in one country but in every country in the world um and the only way we get there is if we have hundreds and hundreds of on and off ramps that all have their licenses and local banking relations uh in each market to be able to offer that service and increasingly we're seeing you know dozens and and soon hundreds of these on and off ramps in all all kind of uh

markets around the world launching a lot of people are really excited about this business opportunity but the one thing that's really holding back the whole ecosystem is um the fact that everyone speaks a different language right everyone and off ramp is their own API their own web widget um which is a pain to integrate for wallets um and paint to maintain it's not feasible for wallets to have hundreds and hundreds of these in it bespoke Integrations um and so you know when this happens a very standard solution is to create a standard uh and so that's what via connect is you can you can see you can read more about it FTI connect.org um but you know if you launch a standard

um all it does typically is it becomes like an extra thing that people have to integrate uh and so uh Randy mentioned connect the world that's what we launched it's the foundation launched a 20 million dollar incentive program to effectively incentivize the adoption of the standard and that's been going well there's I think 50 different um there's about 50 markets that that are currently uh in flight to launch soon um of which the first six launched just a few weeks ago um I think we have Nigeria Ghana Kenya Uganda India and the Philippines are all live using a number of different

providers integrated into valora and soon into other wallets in the Soviet ecosystem and critically it's a native experience you're you're um the user doesn't even know that they're using a third party um certainly it's it's mentioned in the app but they don't have to go through a custom login screen in a web browser um it just all feels very very native to the wallet um and yeah this is I think the power of crypto right that we can have uh incentive models that we can organize as a group to solve really big and ambitious problems and I think solving on and off wrapping globally is like

extremely ambitious extremely big and luckily crypto is just very amenable to doing that really really well yeah um how come you guys don't just uh what's the decision behind not just being a roll-up on ethereum like why um I feel like that would remove the cost of like needing to bootstrap and maintain this validator network while being able to provide the capital and the users on ethereum what's the thought process behind not going down that that route yeah great question I think part of it is you know Roll-Ups were invented long after uh cello started uh and so we've invested you know heavily and and done that bootstrapping we have a really

great consensus protocol that you know has only really had one hiccup over the last three years uh and otherwise has been you know just absolutely Rock Solid um and um the the other thing I would say um is you know some of our use cases require very low transaction fees um and in one block finality in short block times um you know when when people um are for example dispersing ubis or using PDP transaction uh just using it for P2P transactions in uh in Emerging Markets you know they can't really pay more than

a tenth of a cent for a transaction before it starts becoming not economical to to use a public blockchain uh and sadly with uh Roll-Ups today you can't um say on ethereum we can achieve that cost um right I think the reality is until bank sharding is comes out on ethereum um it just you you won't be able to um to store your transactions on ethereum at scale and and be able to deliver those those low costs um so we're we're big Believers in rollups um I think we we agree that it is by far the most secure way of scaling a chain horizontally I think

um the the kind of um you know the organic cosmos-like model I think has some appeal but from a security perspective I think uh you know you're definitely making trade-offs um you ultimately end up having to trust uh the validator sets of all the chains that are sending you messages uh and so as a full node you have to basically run all the chains which doesn't really scale um and um you know the the sharded model that ethereum 2 started with I think has a very similar problem where full nouns have to run all the shards to be able to trust what's going on in any one chart so from that perspective Roll-Ups you know to be able to only have to trust

that there's just one honestable node uh or in the case of ZK rollups you know you don't even have to trust that I mean that is extremely appealing and we're really big Believers of that strategy um yeah how it fits into can I sell those long term uh plan with regards to ethereum I think is something that you know the community is talking about but right now there's not much to be decided on because the gas costs would just be prohibited for all the use cases happening on cello yeah awesome guys well I appreciate appreciate you guys uh making the time here Renee and Merrick any anything else that we missed that you guys really want to talk about okay I think we've covered a lot

um I would say for anyone who's listening who's um a builder you know and you haven't checked out seller yet definitely give it a look sello.org um you know we're coming up on a quarter billion transactions you know process mostly on the network um I I track about a thousand a little bit over a thousand projects uh active projects um try to be in touch with with many of them over 100 of those have raised Venture funding I think that's a little known known fact as well um Q3 Q4 of last year is over 100 million Adventure money going into projects built on top of cello so not like cello itself but into the ecosystem so it's a very Vibrant Community

um lots of investors all over the world as well so there's a bunch of folks also running ecosystem funds and um projects are getting funded right now I think real world use cases are really top of mind for a lot of people regenerative Finance as a concept too if folks are new to that and haven't heard I highly encourage um to to take a closer look I think it's really um a big shift that we're seeing from like a year ago where no one really talked about it so now it's becoming much more of a sort of something that every dap uh developers is thinking about hey what does it mean to build you know in a regenerative way and I think it's something that users also really

appreciate and gravitate towards so um yeah um I would just invite everyone to you know check cello out uh come to one of our events meetups um we're very friendly community so uh just come and say hi at like the next event yeah and we have community centers in in San Francisco in New York in Berlin and Buenos Aires and so it's a great way to to meet people in person so if you're in any of those locations or if you're traveling to any of those locations uh then definitely definitely come knock on our door nice awesome guys well appreciate the time and I will uh talk to you guys soon thanks so much fun Mike yeah thanks for

having us [Music]