Ethereum (ETH) sidechain Celo (CELO) has set its sights on becoming the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain within the next fifteen months, according to Celo co-founder Marek Olszewski.
The platform, focused on making decentralized finance (DeFi) more accessible on mobile devices, has high ambitions for a newly announced partnership with Mysten Labs, a new research and development firm focused on building infrastructure for Web 3.0, Olszewski told Cryptonews.com.
According to him, the partnership aims to increase the number of transactions per second (TPS) that the Celo blockchain can process, while also maintaining “good levels of decentralization.” Overall, the goal is to make Celo “the fastest EVM chain by the end of next year,” Olszewski said.
The same goal was originally stated when Celo and Mysten first announced their partnership, but without a timeline on the plans.
To bring about the increase in speed, Olszewski explained that Celo will incorporate the Narwal and Tusk consensus algorithm. According to one research paper, the consensus algorithm is capable of running at speeds of about 140,000 TPS, compared with the roughly 200 TPS that the Celo blockchain is currently configured for. In comparison, the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain sees 4,500 TPS and the Ethereum main chain just 14 TPS, although all these operate at varying levels of decentralization, while the second layer scaling solutions are also being implemented.
Launched by a number of people who worked on Facebook’s Diem blockchain (formerly Libra), Mysten Labs will become a core contributor to the Celo platform going forward, Olszewski told Cryptonews.com.
Further, the Celo co-founder and partner at Celo development firm cLabs also promised that improved smart contract functionality is coming to the Celo platform within about a year with the help of Mysten Labs.
According to Olszewski, developers will be able to write smart contracts using either the widely used Solidity programming language or Move, a scripting language that was developed specifically for the Facebook-linked Diem blockchain.
As an example of the type of projects Celo is involved in, Olszewski brought up ImpactMarket, a decentralized protocol for poverty alleviation through universal basic income (UBI) in developing countries, which runs on the Celo blockchain.
Further, the co-founder also said that the blockchain had well over a million wallet addresses in September, and is on track to reach a million transactions per day “relatively soon,” after recently also hitting a new milestone of 700,000 daily transactions.
On September 23, the chain for the first time also reached the USD 1bn mark in terms of total value locked (TVL), after having seen strong growth throughout the month.
Based on data from DeFi Llama, the TVL has since corrected lower, and is currently sitting at more than USD 800m.
At 14:57 UTC, CELO, ranked 75th by market capitalization, traded at USD 5.39, down by 5% for the past 24 hours. The price was down by almost 11% in a week, trimming its monthly gains to less than 8%. over the week, and is up 5.3% the past 30 days. It remains almost 45% below its all-time high of USD 9.8 (per CoinGecko), reached briefly on August 30.
Source: Cryptonews
