Hello to the Celo Community,
The Celo Foundation has finalized Cohort 8 applicants of the Foundation Voting program!
The new cohort is found here.
The Foundation Voting Policy has also been updated here with the requirement for future applicants to also have at least 150k CELO votes from the community in order to apply for the program.
If you have any questions about this policy, feel free to reply to this thread here.
The Celo Foundation
Thanks @Yaz for the update!
What’s the reason for having at least 150k Celo votes criteria?
Thanks for the question @dapplooker.
The idea here is to avoid stagnation by having validators who are highly performant in uptime but don’t contribute much to the Celo community. By having the requirement of 150k CELO voted by non-Foundation addresses prior to applying or reapplying, it will ensure that a validator is being supported by the community to contribute to CELO which means a stronger signal about their involvement. Hope this makes sense.
Thank you @Yaz for the information 
Will this requirement be retroactively required for the current validator cohorts who are re-applying in 2022?
It’ll be required by everyone reapplying and applying for the first time.
Given that this requirement might be tough for some smaller operators, @Yaz do you think the Foundation would support a kind of community “super group” that collectively collects the voting requirement?
Create a forum post about it