Celo Governance Season 1 Intent

Governance
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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

Season 1 Intents
Season 1 Intents1400×700 19.8 KB

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
Community Operations 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

  1. Present Intent and Budget proposal on a Governance Call
  2. Submit the Intent and Budget for onchain ratification
  3. 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.

26 Likes
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Very clear, I like it. Looking forward to seeing this Season’s proposals.

One question regarding the final section “Next Steps”. You recommend everyone request funds using a ReleaseCelo contract. Many existing teams, quite correctly in my opinion, use Safe multi-sig wallets - with all of the benefits that brings.

Encouraging teams to use a custom contract, with no front-end or best practises listed, I think would be a step backwards in terms of composability and usability. Also, could you expain what the vesting terms are for successful grants? Are teams expected to front their expenses for the Season and progressively repay from their vesting contract? What are the terms for potential clawbacks?

Maybe a streaming service like Sablier would be a good fit here?

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Very well stated and organized. I believe this new season would streamline and usher in products that produce real world value within the ecosystem.

I would like to know though if the existing governance process to submit a proposal stays the same?

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Like @Thylacine suggested you could use Superfluid for streaming the funds over the year.
Or even use solutions like flow council from flowstate.network

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Hi @Thylacine, thank you for the feedback!

I think these are all very valid questions. It would not be a requirement for this Season, it was more of a suggestion and we can finalize the verbiage around it before this proposal gets ratified. I think in the future it would be helpful to implement something like Sablier but for the first Season we don’t expect that this would be the case yet.

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Thank you @hawwal! Yes the governance process itself will remain the same, however if Governance adopts this intent and budget for Season 1, all funding proposals following it will need to clearly correspond to one of the intents and combined total of community proposals will need to be below the 3M spending cap for the season.

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Looking forward to seeing the proposals

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Thanks @CeloFoundation and team for the proposal, at my end this proposal is fulfilling all the requirements:

  • Post a proposal in the Celo Forum and leave it for discussion at least for seven (7) days.
  • Present Proposal in a Governance Call and address the feedback received: Proposal was presented during Celo Governance Call #71 | Jul 3rd, 2025

With the above said, from my end the proposal is ready to move into the voting phase when proposer wants to move forward or consider is appropriate.

:bangbang: Remember Current Celo Governance Overview & Procedures

To proceed to the submission and voting phase at least two Celo Governance Guardians must post explicitly that the proposal fulfills the requirements to be able to move into the Voting Stage in the proposal thread on the Celo Forum.

Remember next steps

  • Submission of PR to Celo Governance Repository
    Proposers needs to fork the Celo Governance Repository and add a PR including the proposal .md file and json file.
  • Approval of PR by Celo governance Guardians and merge into main branch of Celo Governance Repository.
    Celo Guardians are responsible for conducting a comprehensive review of every Pull Request (PR) to ensure that there is complete alignment and consistency between the final proposal posted in the forum post and the specific files that are being requested to be merged.
    This review process is strictly technical in nature, focusing solely on verifying the authenticity and good faith of the proposers. It does not involve any personal opinions or biases regarding the merits or content of the proposal itself. To maintain the integrity of the Celo Governance repository, it is mandatory to obtain approval from a minimum of two Governance Guardians for each PR before it can be merged into the main branch.
  • OnChain Submission of Proposal
    After PR is merged into main Governance Repo the proposers needs to fork locally the Celo Governance Repository and submit the proposal onchain using the guidelines described in the Celo Docs.

CC: Governance Working Group (@annaalexa @Wade @0xGoldo)

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Thanks @CeloFoundation. Confirming as a governance guardian, the criteria has been met as per @0xj4an-work post and this proposal is ready to move forward to the next stage.

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Stabila: 0x9C257bDC314dc516e673728D70F45444F6e22412, Safe Wallet

CeloPG: 0x85910bE70D7eBF149918ed96eF8BE175A0639c33, Safe Wallet

Communities Guild: 0x0B6a6666027d90fD56f4a2E1827296db4d590f4d, Safe Wallet

Prezenti: 0xA5c9389A0Ce1bFe24FF883E761Ff313225C77D44, Safe Wallet

Regional Council: 0x90860C778a8A69380376BAab6ac7Fec5daff4Ab5, Safe Wallet

Celo Foundation: 0x0f293B1548a55a7ba9541d4c27442e1591B068C9, Safe Wallet

cLabs: Unknown at this time

CICLOPS: 0xd71efa410B6EaAB0bAc3b515B393C886BE70F09E, Safe Wallet

I’d like to understand how retroactive clawback would be enforced in practice e.g. in the event of a no-confidence governance proposal agains a non-core entity. While it is reasonable enough that core entities like cLabs and the Celo Foundation have built enough goodwill to receive funding into their preffered wallet, proposals under the open “Ecosystem Growth” category should be held to stricter standards i.e. using ReleaseCelo contracts.

Right now, it is a theoretical safeguard with no practical enforceability.

Additionally, if sufficient evidence of mismanagement or failure to deliver is presented, would the Celo Foundation be willing to step in to facilitate and sponsor such a retroactive clawback governance proposal? It is worth noting that other ecosystems have such structures in place and this would be overall positive for Celo as it would keep every receiver entity on their toes.

I’d also like to raise a critical issue regarding the use of CCF funding by receiver entities, directly or indirectly, to support projects or individuals with competing interests to the Celo ecosystem.

While some degree of collaboration across the broader ecosystem is healthy, there must be a line when it comes to funding initiatives that ultimately shift allegiance to competing chains. It is difficult to imagine Celo achieving its Vision 2030 if we continue allocating resources that, after receiving support, migrate to other chains effectively rug-pulling the Celo community in the process.

I’ve personally observed instances where CCF funded initiatives have pivoted entirely to Base or where individuals funded by the CCF are now promoting competing chains at in-person events. While CCF funded contributors are, of course, free to pursue their own interests and hold funds in alternative chains, the alignment optics of promoting another chain is kind of troubling. Imagine seeing a senior iPhone executive attending a Samsung launch event dressed up in full Samsung gear?

If the CCF is to remain viable and Celo thrive into 2030, in my opinion, it must be made clear that the CCF cannot be used to serve competing ecosystems (unless if it is in the context of serving cross chain infrastructure like SquidRouter, Uniswap, e.t.c.) and individuals working for CCF funded entities should not be moonlighting for competing chains, especially in roles that dilute Celo’s value proposition. Participation in security councils e.t.c. is of course an exception. Such boundaries need to be enforced.

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Hi @yomfana, thank you for your thoughtful feedback and comments!

To answer your question around the use of ReleaseCelo contracts, we completely agree that stronger safeguards around fund disbursement and clawback are necessary to improve accountability across the ecosystem. However, due to the current limitations as mentioned above by @Thylacine (lack of a front-end, unclear best practices, and operational friction) it would be difficult to require all teams to adopt the ReleaseCelo mechanism this season. To our knowledge, only cLabs is planning to use this contract in their proposal.

That said, improving the practical implementation of milestone based disbursement and retroactive clawbacks is a clear priority for future seasons. That’s why we included it as a suggestion rather than a requirement in the Season 1 Intent, with the goal to begin shifting expectations and tooling in that direction for Season 2.

I agree that there’s precedent in other ecosystems and think Celo Foundation is the right entity to help facilitate this in the future. If you think there’s examples in other ecosystems that are particularly relevant to our case, please feel free to share either in the comments or with me directly. I want to make sure we are thoughtful at implementing it and balance creating safeguards while not introducing unnecessary centralization.

As far as conflict of interest, I think this is a broader topic that we could discuss in regards to all proposals perhaps at a governance call or I’m happy to schedule a recurring metagovernance call for people to bring broader topics affecting our ecosystem. If there are conflicts of interest it would be important for us to flag and something we should ask proposers to disclose in their proposals.

1 Like