Thank you for this response. I think it sounds like a good proposal 
I like that there’s no immediate sell pressurE, strong forced alignment and Opera is incentivized to grow CELO before they can monetize. If Celo and opera/minipay succeed then this will look genius. The only remaining question is after the 3 years is up if there is a full unlock of all the tokens at once which could create large sell pressure risk or if there is a gradual unlock for protection against that. All in all though I really like this idea and proposal so far. Thank you
When will MiniPay support Sierra Leone?
I have a question for the team of developers actively promoting this idea. Do you personally, as an individual or legal entity, receive any benefit from this deal?
Does the team have any hidden ties to Opera Limited or personal incentives?
Does Opera have KPIs? How many users are they required to bring in? What metrics (DAU, volume)?
Why is the coin lock period only 3 years and not 10-30 years?
Opera just announced a $300m share repurchase program. Are they not willing to purchase these tokens?
What is the vesting schedule?
What are the KPIs tied to unlocks?
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Hi @Thylacine
Appreciate you raising this. Sorry for the delay in responding
The commercial details were under embargo until the morning of March 19th, which is why the forum post and governance call presentation were compressed relative to what the community is accustomed to.
That said, the standard on-chain governance process still applies — the proposal must pass through the queue, a 7-day referendum, and execution phases. These windows are designed to give the community time to review, ask questions, and vote accordingly.
We’ve seen several substantive questions raised in this thread around expected user growth, performance metrics, potential selling pressure, and more key considerations. We’d encourage the community to continue engaging here so that voters have the information they need before the referendum.
Understand the commercial details, but once the governance call and forum post was up, clearly the embargo is over, there were blog posts and releases etc.
Starting the referendum immediately before the community has had time to really understand the proposal (especially of this magnitude) and had their questions answered was not required though right? The embargo is/was over.
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Your answer will be important in further investigation, please answer the questions
I agree.
Needs to be released based on pre-agreed on-chain metrics.
Then others can complete too?
More competition = better outcomes, maybe…
Yes, would have been nice to have some time to digest such a big decision.
Not sure why it needs to be rushed.
Hi ABC, thanks for the thoughtful questions. We’ll respond here as the organization that proposed this agreement to the community.
To address your first question directly: Celo Core Co. does not receive any undisclosed or personal benefit from this agreement. Any benefits are tied to its role as a steward of the Celo ecosystem and are aligned with the broader success of the network.
Opera is a trusted leader with 30 years of innovation in the tech industry, and a publicly traded company with quarterly stakeholder reporting, so the company holding CELO on its balance sheet stands to benefit the ecosystem significantly.
Celo Core Co.’s benefits from this restructured agreement are aligned with those of the ecosystem: maintaining the deep partnership with Opera to scale MiniPay beyond its 14 million current users, while reducing selling pressure associated with previous US Dollar-denominated grants while giving Opera a deeper financial stake in the success of the ecosystem.
Opera’s success metrics include new wallet creation, increased usage of onchain financial tools (such as Virtual Bank Accounts and merchant payment integrations), and contribution to Celo network activity (Daily Active Users, stablecoin volume, TVL, etc.)
The three-year period refers to the duration of this proposed partnership, an extension of the previous three-year partnership agreement that led to the launch of growth of MiniPay.
OK I’m Abstain on this on procedural grounds.
I understand commercial agreements, release timing, and embargos and so on. But if the community treasury is being utilized to enter into what appears to be a B2B commercial agreement, the governance and discussion time should be lengthened due to it’s impact, not reduced to “let’s vote immediately after publicly presenting the idea and doing the media releases”.
This proposal might be a great idea, and probably is - because I trust whoever inked this deal to being doing what’s best and needed for Celo. No idea why referendum started immediately after the announcement before the community could consume the idea and meaningfully interact with the proposers with time left to influence the vote.
The owners of this proposal clearly have enough weight to get this through which is their right as token holders and voters, so there’s no reason to rush here at all.
Anyway, the tokenomics proposal today is very interesting and might be the start of some great changes more broadly so I’m not against doing what needs to be done.
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Fair point @Thylacine, the embargo explains the compressed discussion window leading up to the governance call, but you’re right that once the details were public, there was no requirement to move to on-chain submission before community questions had been addressed.
Our view is that a proposal of this magnitude would have benefited from more discussion before going to vote. That said, on-chain submission is permissionless. Ultimately the proposer decided to move forward. Community members should factor the limited discussion period into their assessment when casting their votes.
I’ve voted IN FAVOR of this proposal. I do agree that under normal conditions, a longer discussion window would be helpful; however, I think Celo and the wider Ethereum L2 space are an inflection point where partnership opportunities like this, especially if built on years of trust and collaboration, should be acted upon instantly and swiftly.
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Opera and MiniPay have absolutely earned the right to be treated as one of Celo’s most important partners. MiniPay is no longer an experiment; with over 13 million wallet activations and 380 million transactions processed, it is one of the clearest proofs in the industry that Celo can power real-world financial activity at scale. Opera has helped build an incredible Web3 distribution engine, and that deserves sustainable, long-term alignment.
However, that is precisely why this proposal must be upgraded. Let’s look at the math: Celo originally allocated 400M tokens to secure the network for decades. Today, 287m remain in the unreleased treasury. This proposal asks the community to hand 160m of those tokens, 55% of the remaining future reserves, to a single private company for a 3-year exclusivity deal. Trading long-term strategic optionality for 36 months of certainty is mortgaging the ecosystem’s future at the bottom.
We are past the phase of product execution; capital allocation matters just as much now. Opera is a highly profitable, publicly listed company with a $155.5m cash position, 40 million USD in Q4 2025 operating cash flow, and active dividend yields. When Opera’s leadership believes its own equity is undervalued, it buys back stock. Ownership is how conviction is expressed in public markets.
If Celo is becoming the backend rail for one of Opera’s most promising financial products, the highest-conviction signal is not to maximize token transfers from a depleted treasury. It is to start treating CELO as a balance-sheet asset.
There is a massive difference in market signaling between these two realities:
- Celo gave Opera 16% of its total supply to stick around for 3 years.
- Opera bought CELO on the open market as a strategic reserve asset because it believes MiniPay’s success will compound into the value of the network itself.
Recipients ask for grants. Owners buy the asset. A more durable structure would look like this:
- A smaller upfront treasury allocation, locked for the long term.
- A matching open-market purchase program by Opera over 24-36 months.
- Annual unlocks tied to transparent milestones around users, Mini App activity, and onchain volume.
- A broad delegation policy and published voting principles.
Opera has a unique opportunity here to either be remembered as the company that received a distressed treasury transfer, or as the company that recognized Celo’s strategic value early enough to buy the asset behind its own fastest-growing financial product.
Right now, Opera is building the railroad. This is the moment to buy some of the land underneath it. Is it better for Opera to own a massive piece of a weakened network, or a meaningful stake in a thriving ecosystem whose credibility they helped strengthen? Let’s build a partnership of true owners.
The second story is better for Opera. It is better for Celo. And it is far more likely to create the kind of long-term partnership both sides say they want.
That would create alignment on three levels:
- financial alignment for Opera
- greater credibility for the Celo community
- a credible and a clearer signal to public-market investors that Opera is capitalising on the Web3 platform shift and evolving into a fintech platform
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Understood, but someone on the governance team needs to merge the CGP pull request on GitHub and can meaningfully signal to the community on the forum if any proposal hasn’t met the gateways of the well-documented governance process. This has happened many times in the past for other proposals and @celogovernance has stepped in and said “this doesn’t meet the requirements to proceed”, and it could/should have happened here too.
What’s the point of the process at all if it’s applied with discretion depending on who raised the proposal? If this was a special dispensation due to reasons not possible to be shared publicly, the very first comment on this thread should be a short explainer about this break from policy. (Please correct me here if I don’t understand the process).
If I merely shrug at anything and everything, then I’ve failed those who have delegated their votes to me in this ecosystem.
TL;dr - proposal itself probably fine, break from procedure unneccesary
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I agree with @Thylacine that the governance process has been tainted and not the first time, possibly the 3rd or 4th from what I can recall.
This is factually incorrect and honestly a not a good look (escaping governance responsibility). The PR is public: Cgp 0232 by pahor167 · Pull Request #793 · celo-org/governance · GitHub and was merged within an hour or so. Yes you can put it anything in the descriptionUrl and submit it on chain without permission but the fact that it was merged into the repo proves that @celogovernance were aware and complicit in breaking governance rules. Not to mention allowing it as an agenda on the same day when other proposers have been denied for the same in the past.
It’s a shame because this proposal is one of the most important ones in recent history and the general sentiment is mostly positive. It would have benefited more from public discourse and clarifications.
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