Hi Alex,
Happy to answer those Qs!
To provide an easier overview of the program data and season budgets, we’ve merged the data from Season 0 and Season 1 - including an overview of Contributor Affiliation into a single CeloPG 2025 Overview you can view here.
(1) Program operators’ affiliation and payment from program income
In all three of the projects mentioned, 0% of the program income was used to pay a fee/salary to any of the CeloPG contributors of 2025. The entire budget was used as user incentives, pay infrastructure bills, and rewards for product developers for their work.
Prosperity Pass is a solution that is part of the CeloPG program. The CELO earned by it is dedicated to the season contributor rewards program, which expands the budget from 100K CELO in rewards to end users to about 135k CELO in rewards to end users.
AkibaMiles, led by Kenyan builder in residence Ibrahim with direct support from Niko and advice from Luuk, uses most of the rewards as user incentives, with a minority of rewards allocated to infrastructure and freelance developers. AkibaMiles has committed to the 1% pledge.
RegenerativeFi, built in collaboration with the team behind Symmetric with direct support from Luuk and Monty, uses all of the incentives to allocate onchain user incentives. Regenerative also aims to allocate 10% of any potential token supply to the CCF.
(2) How is it acceptable that affiliated projects earn program rewards?
In early-stage ecosystems, it’s often the case that individuals hold multiple roles, as is clear from the CeloPG 2025 Overview and the overlap between Governance (guardians/reviewers), Community (Guild, grants, regional DAOs), and Core team (Foundation, cLabs, etc.) roles.
Because of this reality, CeloPG worked with third-party teams (Snapshot, Aragon, Karma, and Talent) to create data-driven reward programs that are completely based on the results of onchain measurable, and equally accessible outcomes.
- Support Streams: Incentives are allocated completely based on stCELO votes, which all CELO holders have an equal opportunity to participate in and promote the holding and usage of stCELO.
- Proof of Impact: Rewards are allocated based on parameters that are measured by Divvi and executed by them.
- Proof of Ship: Celo DevRel leverages Talent to measure and allocate rewards.
Due to the design being completely automated and onchain, no favorable conditions were created for any of the projects with (in) direct involvement from program operators.
As these programs grow - which they are, as shown by the cycle of growth in terms of number of participants, program impact, and reward decentralization - they will be able to include an increasing amount of Celo stakeholder input and impact-data, resulting in a rewarding mechanism that truly operates in line with all ecosystem priorities and stakeholders’ preferences.
(3) Why should the community accept “Foundation oversight” as sufficient?
The foundation oversight is specifically related to the Prosperity Pass reward distributions, as that’s the only program that is not allocating based on onchain factors (Divvi ranking / stCELO vote).
We believe that the CELO voters provide oversight and approval through the Celo Governance votes.
The author speaks about “patterns” that repeat. A detailed breakdown of program operations and rewards outcomes was published at the end of Season 0 and included in the context of the Season 1 proposal, which was accepted with a 95.7% yes votes. Because of this clear support and the fact that no specific questions about the “patterns” were asked, we believe that the vast majority of stakeholders do not perceive these “patterns” as negative, but as a symptom of an early-stage growing ecosystem.
Conversations like this, and future votes, will give us pointers on whether this perspective is still correct or not.
Program reflection
After operating the same programs for 1 full-year, we believe the progression of Proof of Impact and Proof of Ship is positive for the Celo ecosystem, as it provides result-based builder incentives and creates a strong ecosystem dataset to optimize resource allocation around.
We also believe that the insights from Support Streams, granting Celo stakeholders direct influence on which protocols should earn growth incentives vs having a council review this, is a valuable input for Launching the CELO Tokenomics Initiative: Designing the Next Era Together conversation.
Future policies and separation
We do recognize that in order for these programs to grow, it will be helpful to establish clear governance guidelines and operating policies - even when the actual incentives are allocated through verifiable, third-party measurements.
Moving forward, we propose to establish standard CCF governance, accounting, and CoI guidelines and include an additional section into Celo Governance proposal when requesting funds from the CCF that specifies that teams opt in to these guidelines. We are happy to co-author or review such policies and opt in for any future proposal.
Final thoughts
All of the current CeloPG contributors have dedicated years of their lives to support the Ethereum, Celo, and wider onchain PG space. We love Celo and deeply care about its health and development. In the end, we are happy to have this conversation and believe it contributes to better operations and ecosystem growth.
We’ll be signing off for the Christmas holiday, but we look forward to proceeding with this conversation in January and making concrete guidelines and agreements for ecosystem operations in line with Celo’s priorities.
Towards prosperity for all.