Hi everyone,
My name is Nikhil, and I work on the Strategy, Research, and Innovation team at the Celo Foundation. I’d love to give an update on the DeFi for the People program and where we are to date.
For context, DeFi for the People supports project launches through the following ways:
- Grant/liquidity incentives
- Security audit by the Celo Foundation
- Usability review and testing
- Co-marketing (Medium announcement, Twitter spaces, etc.)
Funding Update
We’ve thus far distributed $28.5M in incentives and support to the following projects:
- Sushi
- Moola
- Mobius
- Ubeswap
- 0x
- Pool Together
- Rabbithole
- impactMarket
- Symmetric
- GoodGhosting
- ReSource
- ImmortalDAO
- Bridge incentives
Looking forward, we plan to continue supporting these projects as they reach specific goals including TVL, monthly active users, or launching new features.
Additionally, we are continuing to ensure sufficient funding to support new project launches. The purpose is to support new Celo DeFi builders and further improve the DeFi infrastructure on Celo.
Upcoming Launches
We’re excited to see a number of upcoming launches this summer. I’ve included anticipated launch dates below. Please note, however, that these are subject to change based on developer timeline updates, security audit feedback, and other general market conditions. I will keep you all updated as any items in this list change, as well as new launches.
- Revo: June (Finalizing marketing content and pools)
- Masa: June (Launching credit builder loan)
- EntropyFi: June
- ReSource: June (mainnet launch)
- Uniswap v3: June
- Curve: June
- Flow Carbon: June (in partnership with Climate Collective)
- Toucan: July (in partnership with Climate Collective)
- Symmetric v2: June/July
- Double: TBD (waiting on security audit)
We’re also working on three other major items.
- With the upcoming launch of Wormhole as well as Curve deployment on Celo, we are exploring mechanisms to support Celo assets on Ethereum.
- Second, we are still actively working on Chainlink integration. Our development team is engaging with the Chainlink team on a daily basis and we are currently working through the SOAK test. Our last test reached 146 hours and stopped due to a transaction gas issue. We’re working through this problem and configured two separate testing environments last week to increase redundancy with testing efforts. We plan to host a Twitter Spaces in the next week or two to give the Celo community more context and info on the Chainlink work by our dev rel team.
- We are currently putting together an Aave governance proposal in order to begin the Aave governance process. We have been in contact with the Aave team for this and are currently working on the proposal details.
Upcoming Top Ups
We are in the progress of providing several top-ups to existing projects as they reach milestones including monthly active users and other key targets. DeFi for the People seeks to promote long-term user growth and we’re excited to see DeFi projects on Celo continue to bring in new users. We will announce these top ups as soon as they have been finalized and confirmed. Additionally, we are in the process of updating our top ups model and will publish a formal announcement detailing top up eligibility in the next few weeks.
Real World Use Cases
DeFi for the People envisions real world use cases of DeFi on Celo. We believe DeFi can empower users with self-governed tools and offer new financial solutions to everyday people that are either better than those offered by traditional financial institutions or not possible at all. With this vision in mind, we launched a first of its kind pilot in April with Mercy Corps Ventures in Kenya utilizing credit delegation on Moola Market for an employer-based lending model. Mercy Corps Ventures recently published a Medium post and we plan to publish ours next week. A comprehensive impact report will also be published by Mercy Corps later in the year once the pilot has officially ended.
Moving forward, I plan to provide more regular updates through Celo Forum posts. Please do reach out or comment if you have any follow up questions or concerns. I’m also active on Twitter and the Celo Discord, and happy to connect anytime. Thank you to everyone in the Celo community.
To prosperity for all,
Nikhil Raghuveera