Celo Governance Guild | Season 2 Retro (H1 2026) & Funding Top-Up Request

[celogovernance]

Celo Governance Guild | Season 2 Retro (H1 2026) & Funding Top-Up Request

From the Celo Governance Guild (@0xj4an-work @Wade @0xGoldo).

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TL;DR

• In H1 2026 we hosted 10 governance calls, merged 54 PRs in the governance repo, and moved 26 CGPs through the process (8 executed on-chain).
• Our treasury is fully transparent: every cUSD and CELO in and out of the Guild Safe matches the on-chain balance exactly.
• The problem: Season 2 was approved as a $60,400 budget, but paid in CELO at ~$0.1135. CELO now trades around $0.069, so the funding is worth about $39,900, a 34% shortfall. We did not overspend a single dollar. The token price dropped.
• Status: everything through today is done and paid: 7 of 12 months of guardian payments (Jan-Jul, 34,650 cUSD) are executed. The only thing pending is August to December (24,750 in payments plus 465 unspent on the legal line).
• The ask: 22,100 cUSD. That’s the Aug-Dec payments plus the unused legal budget, minus what’s still in the Safe (valued at today’s price), plus a 10% safety margin, using the same payment method as Prezenti. Anything left over at year-end goes back to the Community Fund.

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Retrospective - H1 2026

Governance calls. We hosted 10 calls (#82 on Jan 22 through #91 on Jun 18), each with a public agenda, notes, and recording. Call #92 took place on July 16 (details).

Repo work. 54 PRs were merged into celo-org/governance this year. 16 of them came from Guild accounts: keeping CGP statuses current, maintaining the call log, and helping proposals move from draft to vote.

CGPs. 26 new CGPs entered the process in 2026. 8 are already executed on-chain, including the whole Season 2 funding round (Communities Guild, cLabs, Stabila, Governance Guild, Celo Foundation, MiniPay, Prezenti, CICLOPS). 3 are in voting, 12 in draft, and 3 were closed (1 rejected, 1 expired, 1 withdrawn).

KPIs

Approved KPI	H1 result	Evidence
Calls hosted	10 (#82 Jan 22 to #91 Jun 18)	Call Log · agenda issues 751, 757, 758, 772, 778, 783, 795, 803, 806, 816
Calls fully documented	10 currently	Call Log rows #82-#90
Calls documented within 72 hours	Completed	N/A
Average proposer response time	ASAP - Adhered to	Governance Proposals category · repo PRs
Proposals requiring procedural rework	None (0 of 26)	Repo PRs
Unique proposers supported	13 distinct proposer teams across the 26 CGPs merged in 2026	CGP front-matter author fields, CGPs directory
Average/median call attendance	13 attendees per call	Call recordings and Gemini meeting notes
Weekly governance communications	Completed	N/A
Governance timelines met	Completed	N/A

Payment History (Jan 1 to Jul 20)

Safe: 0xc733…b54F on Celo, 2-of-3, 38 transactions

Season 2 money (2026)	Amount
Received from Governance (Feb 27 + May 7)	532,000 CELO
Converted to cUSD so far	460,213 CELO converted to 34,940 cUSD (avg $0.076)
Guardian payments Jan-Jul (approved rates)	34,650 cUSD
Left in the Safe today (Jul 20)	71,787 CELO + 150 cUSD ≈ $5.1k

Note: the closing balance includes 395 cUSD carried over from Season 1 (55,000 received - 54,000 stipends - 605 expenses in 2025). Of the 1,000 cUSD legal and entity expense line, 535 cUSD was used on Jul 12 (300 legal entity annual renewal + 235 Google Workspace and domains), leaving 465 cUSD available, reserved for future legal costs.

Conversion history:

Date	How	CELO sold	cUSD received	Price
Feb 28	Uniswap (multi-pool)	130,213	10,000	$0.0768
Mar 20	Mento	60,000	5,063	$0.0844
Apr 20	Uniswap V4 router	60,000	5,043	$0.0840
May 19	Mento	60,000	4,793	$0.0799
Jul 10	Mento	150,000	10,041	$0.0669
Total		460,213	34,940	$0.0759 avg

Funding Top-Up Request

Dilemma: why we’re short of the approved budget

Simple version: the approved budget was $60,400. The 532,000 CELO we received is worth about $39,900 in practice (what we already converted plus what’s left at today’s price). We held the CELO and converted only as payments came due, hoping the price would recover; with the continued decline, that leaves a $20,500 hole, caused entirely by CELO’s price, not by our spending.

What’s left in the Safe (~$5.1k) covers roughly one more month. Without new funding, the Safe is empty at the September payment.

Pending: August to December (the ask)

Everything up to today is executed. What remains for 2026 is five guardian payments (Aug-Dec, 5 x 4,950 = 24,750), plus the 465 cUSD still unspent on the approved legal and entity expense line, since legal costs can still come up. We’re not asking for that full total. We count what’s still in the Safe first, then add a safety margin:

The math	Amount
Aug-Dec payments + unused legal line (24,750 + 465)	25,215 cUSD
− Safe holdings today (71,787 CELO at the spot price of $0.0692, + 150 cUSD)	−5,117 cUSD
= Gap	20,098 cUSD
+ 10% safety margin (in case prices move before we convert)	+2,010 cUSD
= Top-up request (rounded)	22,100 cUSD

We follow the same payment method Prezenti used in Season 2. We show both prices: at today’s rate ($0.0692) the Safe’s CELO is worth about $4,968; at the 90-day average ($0.0749, DefiLlama) it would be about $5,376. We size the request at today’s lower rate so the program stays funded even if the market moves, and the remaining 71,787 CELO gets converted right away in weekly batches (about 18,000 each) with every sale price published.

Monthly rates stay exactly as approved: 2,200 (Lead) + 1,375 + 1,375 (Guardians). Paid in cUSD (not CELO).

Our commitments:

1. Anything left over at year-end goes back to the Community Fund (or counts against Season 4), including the 10% safety margin if it isn’t needed. Total Season 2 funding stays at or below the approved $60,400.
2. All CELO gets converted right away, in batches, starting with the 71,787 CELO still in the Safe, converted over four weeks with every sale price published. No more holding tokens and hoping.
3. We keep publishing the full accounting, and we suggest all future team budgets be paid in cUSD so no other team hits this same problem.

Safe (unchanged): 0xc733285e8e4db433d4cd641f99C46Bf108DCb54F

Links: Season 2 request / CGP-223 · Call Log · Safe history

Every number here can be checked on-chain or in the repo. Questions welcome.

[Thylacine]

This has been a repeated ask from grant recipients over the years, and in good faith I can’t really support these style of requests.

It’s up to grantees to manage their expenses, and if you have expenses paid in dollars, it’s on the group to exchange their grant for those dollars to manage their known expenses at the start of the season.

Going long CELO over a period of time is a opinionated trading stance. You traded your grant funding and lost. You can’t ask the community to now backstop the fiat value of your CELO position because it didn’t work out for you. You should pull your allocation immediately after the proposal is executed and manage it accordingly.

I don’t know if you pulled or left as an approval, but what would be happening if there was a huge unrealized fiat surplus from holding CELO? One might say you might pull it, sell it, and not require a request next season - or maybe send it back to the community minus any outstanding liabilities. Consider if this happened to a different grantee: a development grant for some project / company. They held CELO and it mooned on them. Could/would the community request they send their gains back? Or request they reduce their approval unit amount if they hadn’t pulled it? Of course not, the project would say: we were approved XXXX CELO and that’s what we’re taking. Why does the principle change in reverse?

You are literally the governance guild and should be one of the most knowledgeable governance recipients out there.

Maybe this gets a pass from the community because it’s so small in size and the governance guild keep the wheels moving - but consider if this was a large grantee like CeloCo or CICLOPs and the same thing happened to the tune of millions of extra CELO.

Further, I’m beginning the question the value here.

• Reviewing PRs for standards and compliance can be done by any number of automation workflows on the repository, with final merge decision given by one or two repository maintainers. Why are we paying people to click the merge button? Github Actions can connect to the forum, to Discord, to anything, and simply gate invalid, not ready, or malformed PRs.
• Call logs can be automated and presented now with a million different tools better than any human could (Circleback etc). These should be auto-generated and auto-posted to the forum and so on, no human in the loop. I would support a subscription fee for something that does this.
• There should be a page where proposers can self-submit to present on calls, and tag themselves on an upcoming governance call. The process should check the validity of the proposal, check they’ve posted and discussed in the forum and so on. First in to fill the schedule gets in. If there’s no submissions, the call is automatically cancelled and a host gets an hour of their life back. This should all be automatically posted to Discord, Forum, everywhere. Calls should be on a known calendar cadence 6 months in advance with a single host tagged for each call - the human in the loop here is useful for managing flow and I agree this is useful work that should be remunerated. This is a simple software development process, add it to Mondo or something.

Why are we acting like it’s not 2026 - most of these solutions are traditional software engineering with clear gates that prevent malformed or early submissions. We have the technology!

Secondly, the governance guild has consistently failed to do the one thing that adds a LOT of value: managing the referendum and approval queue and connecting with the current approvers on behalf of the proposers, who have no idea who the approvers are or how to get in contact with them, to make sure nothing that passed voting is forgotten or ignored by the approvers for no reason. If this happened consistently or at all, I would be far happier to support this proposal and the group going forward. This churn is simply the most expensive thing, person-hours wise, that happens in the governance cycle, and it happens again and again.

I would actually support a larger updated proposal to fund the guild as a once-off expense to manage and deliver a system that reduces the person-hours by building an automated, self-serve system here, but not to backstop treasury decisions.

This is nothing against any of the guild individuals - I’m just acting as if I was CEO of the community treasury here. How would you look at this system if you owned a company and was paying for it in perpetuity?

[celogovernance]

@Thylacine thanks for the pushback. Your diligence on these threads like this one, CICLOPS, others is consistently useful.

How the money moved. CGP-223 was sized in January at the executable rate (~$0.117 + 3% buffer): 532,000 CELO, implied $0.1135. Submitted on-chain Feb 1, executed Feb 14 as a single approval of 532,000 CELO to the Safe. So to your direct question: it was an allowance, drawn in two transfers Feb 27 (~270,400) and May 7 (~261,600) — per the approved semester payment structure. Nothing sits unpulled.

Where the $20.5k went.

Policy	Realized	Shortfall vs $60,400
Value at approval pricing (Jan, $0.1135)	$60,400	$0
Pull all + sell at execution, your prescription (Feb 14, ~$0.086)	~$45,750	~$14,650
Sell each draw on arrival (Feb 27 @ $0.0768, May 7 @ ~$0.084)	~$42,740	~$17,660
Actual (34,940 USDm realized + 71,787 CELO @ $0.0692)	$39,908	$20,492

Even under your exact prescription, pull and sell the day it executed ~$14.6k of the hole (roughly 70%) was gone before we held a single CELO. CELO opened February at $0.0955, so ~$9.6k of the gap existed before voting even started. Of the ~$5.8k that was in our control: ~$3.0k is draw timing, where the May draw beat the approved semester schedule (a July draw would have realized ~$5k less), and ~$2.8k is conversion pacing after receipt. The pacing has no defense. Two mistakes: we kept discretion over conversion timing instead of running a fixed schedule, and we should have flagged the gap in March at the first draw, not in this retro.

What changes. The remaining 71,787 CELO is converted on a fixed weekly schedule regardless of price first batch executes this week. We’re also cutting the ask by our pacing cost: 22,100 → 19,300 USDm. The cap stands: total Season 2 funding ≤ $60,400, and once the top-up and conversions land, anything above the 25,215 needed for Aug–Dec goes back to the Community Fund immediately, margin included. The margin is a ceiling, not a target.

On backstop vs budget. A CELO-denominated grant keeps both tails: if it moons, it’s the grantee’s, and we agree nobody could claw it back. A USD-scoped operating budget settles to USD both ways. CGP-223 is the second kind written as 60,400 USDm with USDm-denominated rates; 532,000 was the conversion, not the grant. Your treasury-CEO test gives the same answer: vendor invoices get paid in dollars, and a vendor doesn’t keep an overpayment either.

Precedent. You raised this same objection on CGP-202 which is fair, and consistent. The record so far: cLabs’ L2 follow-on was repriced when CELO rose 50% between drafting and vote (term extended 6→8 months for the same CELO); CICLOPS received $3M mid-mandate citing CELO depreciation; MiniPay’s $568k/quarter USD tranches were honored through the decline. In every case, price moves between pricing and execution got trued up and budgets settled in USD. Our terms are tighter than any of them: capped, fixed conversion, surplus returned, ask reduced.

Ending the pattern. One correction to our own post: the Community Fund holds CELO, so “pay budgets in USDm” isn’t executable today. What is executable: denominate budgets in USD, price the CELO at on-chain submission (90-day average, as CICLOPS did) with an honest buffer, and require fixed-schedule conversion on receipt with surplus returned. You’re right that we should know better. What you did with Prezenti’s budget is the working example: scheduled conversion with every execution price published, settled in USD. We’ll write that up as a proposed standard for community-funded budgets USD denomination, CELO priced at on-chain submission with an honest buffer, fixed-schedule conversion on receipt, surplus returned and bring it to the Strengthening Celo Governance threads before Season 3, so this doesn’t recur at $60k or at $3M.

Automation. To be honest, this has been done to an extent which includes auto-notes, GitHub Actions gating for CGP format and template checks (this implements the readiness checklist we committed to in January). Where it isnt and we think the human touch is neccesary: repo review isn’t clicking merge it’s verifying the merged file matches what the forum discussed before it gets referenced on-chain, plus moderating contested cycles like the validator-reduction rounds(although some were not pleased). You already said the human managing flow is worth paying, that plus first-time proposer support is most of the ~$60k/year.

Approver queue. You’re right, this hasn’t been consistent or visible enough. Two things change here. The approver set itself is being refreshed right now under Next Steps for Strengthening Celo Governance: the approval window extends from 3 to 7 days and four technical contributors are rotating in and the new signers are posting verifications this week. And on our side: you asked in that thread for visibility into the approval process. That part is ours to provide, we attempt to prompt the approvers in the case that time is running out for a proposal. We can’t sign for the approvers, but we can make sure nothing sits in the queue unseen and nobody has to chase signatures out-of-band.

Once again, thank you for your input!

[Thylacine]

Thanks for the comprehensive feedback, appreciate it.

What’s the reasoning for not just taking your allotment and swapping for USDm immediately after approval?

I’ve argued before on other proposals that somewhere over the years, grantees got the idea it was their responsibility to manage sell pressure on a multi-million dollar protocol with their $100k grant disbursement. It’s not. I honestly think if you have fiat expenses, and the proposal is nominated in fiat with CELO as the intermediary, with heavily market-dependent floating price - we should be de-risking our allocations and making sure there’s enough in the kitty on day one to pay future liabilities.

Let the success of our efforts drive the price! Grant recipients are not responsible for anything else than delivering on their goals.