Hello Celo Community!
2024 has been an incredible year for Celo. As Rene shared in this recap post From Vision to Impact: Powering Real-World Change in 2024, this past year saw Celo’s products like Opera MiniPay surpass 4M+ users (currently at 5M+), and gain significant traction to become Web3’s “Home of Stablecoins,” continuing to evolve our diverse community of builders, artists, and regional contributors. At the same time, cLabs has made huge progress towards the migration of the network from an EVM-compatible L1 to an Ethereum L2 (#CEL2), with the community voting to leverage Optimism’s OP Stack, and cLabs’ launching Dango and Alfajores testnets respectively, with the L2 mainnet still on track for Q1 2025. This will be an exciting and monumental year for the Celo community and as the network prepares for this migration, we have an opportunity to evolve other areas, like governance, to enable our community to participate and shape the future of Celo as a leader in the Superchain ecosystem.
With this post, we hope to begin the conversation about evolving governance and invite our community to give feedback on a temperature check for moving to a seasonal cadence of governance and community contribution at Celo.
Celo Governance has been evolving since Mainnet with many changes taking place over the last two years. In August 2023 the post, We Need To Talk About Governance, introduced the need to discuss Celo governance and outlined some feedback and shortcomings of the current governance model.
One of the insights for this post is that from mainnet launch in April 2020, we have continued the same process for Celo protocol changes and funding distribution (Community Fund proposals). While the process has been particularly well suited for protocol improvements and technical proposals, there is room for improvement in the process of treasury management and funding distribution.
We’ve seen some great attempts at streamlining funding distribution with groups like Celo PG and the research sprint that introduced pertinent changes and kicked off our governance evolution. For example, raising the threshold deposit for submitting a proposal from 1,000 to 10,000 CELO has reduced spam and creating the Celo PG group has introduced new checks and balances, including more accountability among groups who access community funding.
Building on these pilots and experiments, this post outlines the further evolution of governance processes and ways we can streamline treasury management to continue to decentralize and grow the community and ecosystem around Celo. Now with the remaining CELO returning to Celo community treasury from Mento to be managed by Celo Governance, this is the right time to reevaluate how the governance manages funding and there’s a great opportunity to bring fresh energy to governance ahead of L2 mainnet going live.
Inspiration
As Celo transitions to an L2 and becomes part of the Superchain, we have been heavily inspired by the Optimism governance process and philosophy. The iterative nature of Optimism governance allows for time-bound governance experiments and learnings.
The Optimism Collective’s governance works in 6-month intervals known as Seasons. At the beginning of each Season the OP Foundation introduces the Intent for the season, a strategic objective that aligns all contributors towards a common goal. After it is ratified through governance, grants and retroactive funding is aligned to support this objective.
This seasonal model fits well with our own philosophy here at the Celo Foundation, where we introduced Seasonal Planning in September 2022 and have used it internally since as a cadence to set goals and share them with the community. Seasons have previously been quarterly to help guide the Foundation’s goal setting and execution, and with Seasonal Governance we would move to a 6-month cadence aligning closely with the Optimism Collective.
As one of the first L2’s to adopt this type of seasonal cadence, Celo has the opportunity to be a leader in governance evolution across Superchain as a whole and pioneer ways to collaborate together with Optimism Collective.
Proposing a Seasonal Approach to Fund Distribution
Introducing changes to governance while we already have proposals that have passed and several on the way is a little bit like changing the engine while the plane is flying!
There are a lot of variables to consider and this is a process that we believe should have input from diverse community stakeholders. For this reason, we propose that we begin with Season 0 from January 2025 - June 2025. The intent for this season will be to lay down the groundwork and begin to transition some of the programs to this cadence so that we can experiment and be ready to fully roll out Governance 2.0 in H2 after the CEL2 migration.
How this might work in practice
Similar to Optimism Collective, the Celo Foundation will introduce a North Star objective at the beginning of the season. Along with the objective there will be Governance will be asked to ratify this objective as a commitment for the whole community to align behind.
While aligning with Optimism’s seasonal intents makes sense to contribute to the growing Superchain economy and ecosystem, Celo has always had its own unique DNA that we will always retain. To honor that, in addition to seasonal intents we may introduce cross seasonal intents that are unique to Celo and that we work on regardless of the current seasonal priorities.
Some programs that set Celo apart and showcase our unique strength is our robust global network of Regional DAOs. Investing in growing our global community is an example of an intent we focus on across seasons.
Introducing Seasonal Budgeting and Operational Councils
Similar to Optimism Collective, we propose that governance votes to approve budgets for initiatives, and for those budgets to be managed by diverse and experienced councils with members from the Celo community. These councils may include a Grants Council, Regional DAO Council, Governance Guild, and likely more. Governance will approve a budget for these that includes an operational budget and a program budget to allocate to the initiatives. First iterations of councils will be seeded from currently operational programs and Governance will hold open elections in the future to keep decentralizing the membership and operations.
Time-bound experiments like a 6-month seasonal cadence has many upsides, including room for experimentation and evolution. Each Season will include a reflection period where the Celo Community can provide feedback and shape the direction of the future of governance. The first iteration will not be set in stone, but the first experiment in CEL2’s governance design.
How seasons might look in practice over the next 2 years:
Timeline for Evolution
The proposed timeline is as follows. We invite the Celo Community to comment on this temperature check and share your initial reactions and collective feedback. Next, we will host an open design sprint with meetings open to anyone who would like to be part of the Governance Evolution Feedback Committee, a core group of members who will give feedback and shape the direction of this governance transition. To volunteer to be part of this committee, please raise your hand in the comments below and indicate that you would like to be involved. We hope for this to be a collaborative process and will continue to share all insights and draft evolutions publicly on the forum, but in an effort to have a more focused discussion, we will reach out to this committee for direct feedback on future drafts.
I’m so excited to be working on this with you and looking forward to hearing feedback and comments. This is an important moment for all of us at Celo and I’m always available to discuss and address any questions, so please don’t hesitate to reach out!