PANews reported on July 7 that the Celo Foundation launched Celo's L2 testnet Dango, a key step for core contributor cLabs to introduce EVM-compatible independent blockchains to Ethereum. The plan, first proposed during EthCC 2023, intends to fork the Alfajores testnet to Dango, allowing ecosystem developers to begin transitioning their projects to the latest version of the blockchain built for the real world, designed to enable fast, low-cost payments around the world. All historical data of Alfajores, including smart contracts, accounts, and balances, has been saved and carried forward. Based on cLabs' recommendations and the community's decisions in a series of forum posts and governance votes, the testnet is built on Optimism's OP Stack. Following the Eigen Foundation's strategic funding to the Celo community and the community's support for cLabs' subsequent governance proposals, the Celo Layer-2 testnet uses EigenDA as an alternative data availability layer to maintain transaction fees below one cent.
The development of the L2 architecture focuses on maintaining the existing advantages of Celo L1 for real-world solutions in more than 150 countries. In addition to low transaction fees, the core elements maintained and improved through the migration include: bridging of WETH and ERC-20 tokens between Ethereum and Celo, reducing block time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds, and increasing total throughput by 50%.