Canvassing is growing — Insights for research, Intelligence for agents on Celo
TL;DR: Canvassing started as a product-validation platform connecting African founders with verified participants. We are now organizing under one umbrella with two wings: Canvassing Insights (research marketplace, surveys, product testing, and Polls) and Canvassing Intelligence (AI and agent tooling for Celo, starting with Celina). Existing products — Rez, Pax, and thecanvassing.xyz — stay where they are.
Where we started
Canvassing emerged from the Build with Celo 7 hackathon in 2024, where the prompt was to transform rewards and loyalty. Founders Andrew Kim and Benedictors Ogada built a platform that lets startups validate ideas and test products with verified African participants — without assembling a research panel from scratch.
About a year and a half later, Canvassing has become a working marketplace:
- Researchers run online surveys and product testing through Rez, often turning around results in 48–72 hours
- Participants complete micro-tasks on Pax and earn rewards in stablecoins and tokens — defaulting to GoodDollar (G$) alongside cUSD, USDC, and USDT
- Founders across Africa use the service for concept validation, usability testing, beta feedback, and launch readiness checks
We have supported teams at Wayst Recycling, Minilend, Exion Finance, and many others. The site today reflects that focus: online surveys & polls, product testing, pricing, and participant onboarding via Pax.
Along the way, we also began publishing research as a public good on this forum — eight reports so far on payments, MiniPay, stablecoins, recycling incentives, Web3 voting, and crypto education across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
Why we are evolving
Our original mission has not changed: collect data, make it useful, and share it openly. What has changed is scale and opportunity.
On the research side, founders want faster sentiment reads — not only full surveys. On the technology side, AI agents are becoming a practical way to interact with wallets and on-chain protocols. Canvassing has been building in both directions; it is time to name the wings clearly.
Canvassing is now an umbrella project with two facets:
| Wing | Mission | What ships today | What is next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canvassing Insights | Research marketplace and data-driven life-living | Rez, Pax, surveys, product testing, forum research | Polls (short one-question sentiment surveys); hub at thecanvassing.xyz/insights (coming soon) |
| Canvassing Intelligence | AI-focused SDKs, tooling, and dApps for Celo | Celina — SDK, MCP server, hosted MCP (usecelina.xyz) | More agent-native tooling and automation across our workflows |
Canvassing Insights
Insights is a new name for an old tradition: collecting data and reporting it as a public good.
We already run paid online surveys and product user testing for teams that need structured feedback from people who actively use stablecoins in daily life. We are adding Polls — short, one-question surveys designed to capture sentiment on timely topics across themes like payments, culture, climate, and Web3 adoption.
Insights will power our expanded mission of data-driven life-living — helping people make better everyday decisions from real, verified signal rather than guesswork. The dedicated destination will be thecanvassing.xyz/insights. That route is not live yet on the current site map; until it ships, everything continues through thecanvassing.xyz and Rez.
Canvassing Intelligence
Intelligence is our step into AI and agentic development on the Celo network.
The same team behind Canvassing is building tooling so agents and apps can do useful on-chain work safely: reads, quotes, estimates, and unsigned transaction preparation — with humans signing in their wallets.
Our first Intelligence release is Celina (unofficial community tooling, not a Celo Foundation product):
@andrewkimjoseph/celina-sdk— TypeScript reads + prepare flows for wagmi apps@andrewkimjoseph/celina-mcp— MCP server for Cursor, Claude, LM Studio, and other clients- Hosted MCP at mcp.usecelina.xyz — zero-install reads and Carbon prepare
We will announce Celina in a separate Developers thread with full setup instructions, security model, and stats. This post is the umbrella story; that post is the builder deep dive.
What changes for you
| Audience | What stays the same | What is new |
|---|---|---|
| Researchers / founders | Rez, pricing calculator, 48–72h turnaround | Insights branding, Polls (soon), /insights hub (soon) |
| Participants | Pax, GoodDollar verification, token rewards | Same app — clearer home under the Insights wing |
| Builders / agents | — | Celina SDK + MCP via usecelina.xyz |
| Forum readers | Our forum profile and published research | This thread + a 7-part follow-up below |
Nothing breaks: URLs for Rez, Pax, and the main marketing site remain as they are.
If you run product validation today, start at thecanvassing.xyz/rez. If you build agents on Celo, try the hosted MCP config at usecelina.xyz. Questions welcome in this thread.
Published by Canvassing · thecanvassing.xyz · Forum: canvassing