As we are passing the midpoint of Celo Camp, we would like to provide the community with a brief update on the progress of the MiniPay launchpad, Startup Pathway, and share our plans for H2. Stay tuned for a full report describing the impact and result of our programs following Celo Camp Batch 9’s Demo Day on July 24th and the conclusion of the programs.
Highlights
- 223 applications from 51 countries (our goal was more than 150 applications).
- Curated and interviewed 42 teams who pitched their projects.
- Onboarded 22 teams to the program (our goal was between 15-30).
- Onboarded 27 mentors (our goal was between 15-30).
- MiniPay launchpad is in week 5 and on track with the proposed schedule. So far, we’ve hosted 18 live sessions, with 14 guest speakers sharing their insights with Celo Camp Participants.
- Hosted 4 Celo community events, participated as judges in Celo Africa DAO’s demo day, and partnered with Prezenti, Talent Protocol, and other Regional DAOs (CeLatam, KohCelo, and Celo Europe DAO).
- 93% satisfaction rate for camp sessions based on 68 responses (from 20 unique users) on our weekly feedback surveys.
These figures represent a 38% growth in the number of teams and a 29% growth in the number of mentors compared to the first iteration of the Minipay Launchpad - Celo Camp Batch 8.
Timeline
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Proposal Passed: March 6th
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Applications Opened: April 9th
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MiniPay Launchpad began: May 27th
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Demo Day: July 24th
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Program concludes: August 25th
MiniPay Launchpad
So far, participants had insightful sessions with speakers from the MiniPay team, IDEO, Bloomtree Wellness, and the Celo Foundation alongside other great organizations and speakers. In addition to the highlights noted above, as a result of increased coordination with the MiniPay team, there was a clearer focus on which projects are best suited for Celo Camp which enhanced the curation process for selecting participants. Additionally, we increased our coordination with other CeloPG programs (Celo Africa DAO, CeloEuropeDAO, KohCelo, Celatam, Prezenti, and Talent Protocol) to provide additional resources to our community, awards, and prizes for Celo Camp participants.
Learn more about the participants of batch 9 in this Medium article.
Community Events
Throughout camp, we have also provided weekly updates on our Twitter account. Additionally, we hosted a podcast titled “Building for MiniPay’’ featuring Adedolapo Adeagbo of BitGifty, Angelo Kalaw of the Celo Foundation, and Daniel Kimotho of the Celo Africa DAO. This podcast episode received 15K combined views on our initial post and a follow-up snippet post. Additionally, we hosted a meetup session for ecosystem partners and discussed various use cases for building on MiniPay. We were excited to hear how Celo Camp Batch 8’s Grand Prize recipient BitGifty launched on MiniPay, thus joining Celo Camp alumni ImpactMarket, HaloFi, and Fonbnk who are already on-boarded to the platform. We also had the pleasure of participating in Celo Gather organized by the Celo Europe DAO during Berlin Blockchain Week. During the event we hosted a panel on the MiniPay builders ecosystem and participated in a session on Accelerating Talent and Potential on Celo.
Startup Pathway
We released “Building for MiniPay,” the third learning track of the Startup Pathway on March 16th which includes: overview of MiniPay, key features, integrating a dApp with MiniPay, code examples, and more. Since then, our entrepreneurship track has been introduced to the Celo Africa DAO, which has used it in their incubator curriculum, KohCelo translated the track to Thai, and CeLatam is translating it to Spanish and Portuguese, all driven by their own initiatives, kudos Celo fam!
The official launch of Startup Pathway is planned for July 8th and coordinated with the Celo Regional DAOs and Hackathons to broaden the offer of the program to their members.
The Startup Pathway “Launch your Web3 project in 30 days” challenge is open to anyone building an open-source project on Celo and wishing to get access to free resources, grants, and support. Eligible participants will have the opportunity to win prizes such as 500 CELO, a piece of Talent Protocol’s RPGF funds, and a $25,000 Prezenti Growth grant which are open for both Startup Pathway and Celo Camp participants.
Plans for H2 & Beyond
We would like to get the community’s support for the next batch of the MiniPay launchpad. We believe that the increased collaboration with the MiniPay team, the Celo regional DAOs, Prezenti, Talent Protocol (among other ecosystem initiatives) and a more focused curation criteria, which was achieved during this batch, will allow us to plan an even more focused cohort that will deliver great value to the Celo community as well as achieving the goal of onboarding great teams to MiniPay.
In addition, we are outlining a program to support the OP X Celo transition as well as other potential tech-stack integrations such as EigenLayer, by empowering founders to leverage these advancements in both the technical and cross-ecosystem opportunities made possible by these remarkable milestones. We have already begun mapping the areas with the most potential impact and draft content which we would love to get the community’s feedback for in the following months.
