Introduction and Background
- Judy Piper, an engineer at Sea Labs, welcomes the audience to Celo Tech Talks.
- Celo is a mobile-first blockchain platform focused on building a financial system for everyone.
- The Tech Talks series aims to share Celo technology knowledge with the community.
- York Rhodes, a member of the Contracts and Primitives team, introduces himself and his work on smart contracts.
Celo Core Contracts and Decentralized Governance
- Celo has a set of core contracts that provide fundamental functions for the entire stack.
- The registry contract allows communication between contracts and other components.
- Decentralized governance allows the community to decide how the core contracts should evolve.
- Users participate in governance by voting with the Celo token.
- The governance contract enables administrative changes to the core contracts.
Smart Contract Upgradability and Development Workflow
- Smart contract upgradability is a complex issue due to potential security risks.
- OpenZeppelin’s proxy storage pattern is commonly used to separate storage and logic.
- Celo aims to allow stakeholders to assess the safety of contract upgrades through decentralized governance.
- The Contracts and Primitives team follows a development workflow to mitigate risks.
- A custom continuous integration script ensures backwards compatibility and version control.
Release Process and Tools
- The Contracts and Primitives team has developed tools for the Celo community to participate in the release process.
- Four phases: verification of the previous release, backwards compatibility check, deployment of new contracts, and governance proposal.
- The release tooling automates the deployment of contracts based on the audited release candidate.
- The governance proposal represents the activation of the core contracts’ deployment.
Future Work: CIP8 and Off-Chain Storage
- CIP8, presented by Alex Harley, is an off-chain storage specification for Celo applications.
- It associates on-chain accounts and transactions with authenticated off-chain storage.
- CIP8 aims to maintain privacy and security while preventing state bloat on the blockchain.
Conclusion
- Judy concludes the talk and encourages the audience to join the Celo community and participate in the development process.