Thank you to the members of the Celo Feedback Committee for discussion and review of this document. For more information on the evolution of Celo Governance and the move to Seasons and Intents, please check out the post Updates on Celo Governance Evolution and Roadmap.
The purpose of this post is to introduce the inaugural Intents, strategic objectives of Celo Ecosystem organizations for Season 1 (July-December 2025), and to propose contributions from Celo Governance to support these goals.
Season 1 Intent
Rene recently shared Celo Foundation’s long-term vision in Vision 2030: A Trillion-Dollar Onchain Economy Built on Celo & a Battle for Crypto’s Soul. Turning this ambitious vision into reality will require coordination across all contributors to the Celo ecosystem.
For the first time, Celo Foundation is introducing Intents to align contributors — from Celo Foundation and cLabs to community organizations, Regional DAOs, and builders — around shared goals. The transition to Intents and Seasons has been a result of ongoing conversations and work on the Governance Evolution originally introduced here and inspired by Optimism Collective and Celo’s transition to a Layer 2 secured by Ethereum and built on the Optimism OP Stack.
What are Intents?
Intents are high-level strategic goals that guide how the Celo ecosystem will allocate shared resources from the Community Treasury over a six-month governance cycle.
All contributions, from grant proposals to incentive programs, should aim to advance these Intents. Proposals will be evaluated based on how they align with these priorities and on their potential impact.
In Season 1 (July–December 2025), we will focus on two core Intents:
Season 1 Intents
1. Grow Daily Transactions on Celo
2. Grow TVL on Celo
These two Intents are intended to grow onchain activity, increase protocol usage, and move the ecosystem toward long-term sustainability.
While the past year has seen daily transactions growing with the launch of MiniPay and an expanding set of DeFi protocols, further growth is a strong indicator of real-world utility and user demand. At the same time, increasing TVL anchors capital onchain, enabling a broader range of DeFi activity such as lending, borrowing, yield generation, and perps, all of which contribute to sustainability of the protocol. Choosing to focus on these two Intents aims to create a reinforcing cycle of growth, which will help increase economic activity on Celo and make the treasury sustainable long term.
In addition to these two Intents, each season will have ongoing work that is essential for protocol development and operations. This work will be categorized in the budget as Core Spending and will have follow up proposals to be ratified by governance.
Grow Daily Transactions on Celo
Builder programs funded through the Community Fund, should support applications and developers in progressing from early experimentation to scalable adoption using transaction growth as a metric. The following builder funnel has been defined to help measure project stage and funding eligibility.
Focus areas for applications that meet this criteria include but are not limited to:
- Opera MiniPay: Scale apps that serve MiniPay’s rapidly growing user base.
- Mini Apps: Support lightweight social/utility apps integrated into wallets or Farcaster clients.
- Self Protocol: Unlock trusted identity use cases by integrating Self into apps.
- DeFi Apps: Incentivize usage of swaps, lending, bridging, and staking protocols.
| Project Stage | Example Project Types | Est. Daily TXs |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 0 | Hackathons, testnet apps, OSS tools | 0 |
| Stage 1 | Mainnet MVPs, early Farcaster apps | <10k |
| Stage 2 | Valora apps, MiniPay pilots, pre-seed | 10k–100k |
| Stage 3 | Seed-stage or scaled products | 100k–500k |
| Stage 4 | Mature ecosystem apps (e.g. MiniPay, Mento) | 500k+ |
Grow TVL on Celo
Incentive campaigns and DeFi programs funded through governance in Season 1 should aim to deepen liquidity, lending, and protocol composability creating a DeFi Flywheel that drives long-term activity and capital retention.
Key areas of focus include:
- Stablecoins: Grow access to major stablecoins and high-potential local currencies.
- Lending markets: Expand borrowing opportunities and quality collateral types.
- Composability: Strengthen DeFi UX with low-cost bridging and seamless routing between apps.
Core Protocol Development and Maintenance
In addition to Intents, every season there is ongoing work to further the development of Celo protocol and maintain operations. In the post Celo as an Ethereum L2: A Frontier Chain for Global Impact, cLabs has recently shared a roadmap of upcoming technical milestones that will help hyperscale the network, strengthen infrastructure, and unlock new mini apps and use cases for developers and users on the road to a trillion-dollar onchain economy.
In order to accomplish this ongoing work, the Budget for Season 1 will introduce two types of funding: core protocol and ecosystem growth. Core protocol funding is meant to fund essential ongoing work on the network development and operations and will share more detailed follow up proposals. Ecosystem Growth will have a defined cap and categories but will be open for community partners to submit proposals that correspond with the two Season Intents.
Contributor Funding and Program Categories
Season 1 introduces a structured budgeting process to guide Community Treasury allocation. The table below outlines initiative categories, linked to specific intents.
| Funding Type | Funding Category | Supports Intent(s) | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Funding | Protocol Development | Core / Grow Daily Txs | cLabs |
| Infrastructure | Core | CICLOPS | |
| Partnerships, Comms, Marketing, Events, Programs | Core / Grow Daily Txs on Celo, Grow TVL | Celo Foundation | |
| Ecosystem Growth | Builder Programs | Grow Daily Txs on Celo | Open to proposal submissions |
| Direct Grants | Grow Daily Txs on Celo | Open to proposal submissions | |
| DeFi Flywheel Infrastructure and Incentives | Grow TVL on Celo | Open to proposal submissions | |
| Regional Community Growth | Grow Txs / Grow TVL | Open to proposal submissions |
In order to provide predictability to the onchain treasury spending, the proposed budget for the Ecosystem Growth category is the equivalent of $3M for proposals that align with Season 1 Intents.
Next Steps
- Present Intent and Budget proposal on a Governance Call
- Submit the Intent and Budget for onchain ratification
- Proposal submissions go live on the forum. We encourage everyone to submit proposals requesting funds using a ReleaseCelo contract, so they can vest and be clawed back by governance if needed.
Season 1 marks the first fully structured governance cycle on Celo. It’s a chance to move from ad-hoc coordination toward predictable, value-aligned decision-making and to collectively build an ecosystem that supports real-world use.