Grassroots Economics Delegate Update:
Unstaking, Community Support, and Request for Transition Help
Hello,
Grassroots Economics Foundation is sharing an important update with everyone who has delegated to us, supported our validators, or followed our work on Celo since 2023.
We also want to acknowledge and thank the Celo team for the response shared on this [forum].
We appreciate the recognition of our years of work as a validator and as builders through Grassroots Economics. We also appreciate that the ecosystem is exploring ways for previous validators to continue contributing, including the active proposal to compensate Challengers, and possible future roles such as Voter Reward Commission work. Any support in this direction would be helpful. At this stage, truly, any practical help we can receive to keep communities operating and transitioning safely matters.
We want to thank the Celo team, founders, validators, delegates, builders, and community members who helped make Celo a home for this work while they could.
That makes this update difficult.
We have now unstaked the CELO that was held on our validators.
This was not an easy decision. Grassroots Economics came to Celo not only to use infrastructure, but to help secure it, participate in governance, and build real-world systems of decentralized exchange with communities on the ground.
However, since the transition away from the validator role we originally participated in, our validator infrastructure no longer serves the purpose it once did for us. At the same time, gas costs have risen dramatically and appear to be continuing in that direction. This has created immediate operational pressure for the communities, savings groups, cooperatives, field teams, and local exchange systems that depend on our tools.
Because of this, we will be using the unstaked CELO to support our communities and operations, including paying for gas and maintaining continuity for the people already using these systems.
We want to be transparent with delegators: now that this CELO is no longer staked, Grassroots Economics will no longer have meaningful voting power as a Celo delegate. In practical terms, this means we are stepping back from our role as a governance participant and will now treat Celo primarily as infrastructure we pay to use, similar to other server or hosting services.
That is a painful shift for us.
We joined because we believed Celo could be a home for grassroots economic coordination, public goods, and decentralized infrastructure connected to real communities. In many ways, for a time, it was. We are grateful for that.
But the lessons of this transition are also clear. Grassroots communities cannot depend on infrastructure where the basic cost of participation can rise dramatically without their meaningful control, protection, or ability to help secure the network. We cannot responsibly ask people on the ground to remain exposed to rapidly rising transaction costs without a credible path to long-term survival, governance voice, and infrastructure security.
So this is not a departure in anger. It is a parting in sorrow, gratitude, and lessons learned.
Our request is simple:
To anyone who cares about the work of Grassroots Economics on Celo, please help us find and transition toward a new home with stronger guarantees for grassroots communities: predictable costs, meaningful governance participation, wider stakeholder involvement in major protocol or infrastructure changes, and credible pathways for community builders to help secure the systems they depend on. We are looking for an ecosystem where decentralization is not only a technical claim, but a lived governance practice that includes the communities most affected by its decisions.
We need time, support, and practical pathways for migration and protection. Our priority is to protect the people and communities already depending on these systems.
With gratitude to everyone who delegated to us, worked with us, challenged us, and believed in this shared experiment,
Will Ruddick