Hi all,
I’m pleased to share that the grants program supported by the Climate Collective Treasury is now open for applications! “Wave 0” grant recipients will be introducing their projects and assets in this forum over the coming days, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Celo community. Please refer to this article for more details.
The Climate Collective’s grants program has a few unique features:
- Grants applications and milestone disbursements are administered on-chain through the Questbook platform
- Security audits, in partnership with Verilog, are covered by the Climate Collective separate from the projects grant funds. This functions as a ‘coupon’ that encourages more production-oriented projects to apply. Helping projects securely deploy on Celo is the optimal end result of our grants.
- Funds reserved for disbursement can be otherwise utilized to help the ecosystem
On the 3rd point, we would like to get community feedback on the possibility of staking a portion of already-committed grant funds (that would be disbursed after successful completion of a milestone) to the Spirals platform. In short, Spirals redirects yield earned from staking CELO on a validator, to environmental assets from ReFi projects such as Toucan Protocol. Spirals Protocol will be governed by the $SPRL token, earned by staking CELO through Spirals, who could then vote on how funds are allocated across projects. This would help drive activity across a range of ReFi protocols and overall contribute to the ecosystems growth.
Given that the funds for the Climate Collective Treasury originate from the on-chain governance fund - we would like to check with the community if there are any objections to supporting specific validators using community funds, through this partnership between the Climate Collective’s grants program and Spirals Protocol.
The Climate Collective and its members/grantees/partners will post regularly on the 'Climate & ReFi’ category, but given the ecosystem-level nature of this post I thought this category would be the most visible. We look forward to your input!
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This sounds like an excellent means of dogfooding an interesting dApp and putting idle funds to use.
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Great idea. Would love to better understand how Spirals chooses eligible ReFi projects. The website mentions “Climate projects in our portfolio are reviewed and approved by a committee of climate experts.”
Any chance someone from the Spirals team could elaborate a bit on this?
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Hi Slobodan! Helena here from Spirals:)
Key pieces of our project funding:
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Portfolio approach: we support a variety of projects
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Climate Committee Vetting: We have a cross-disciplinary community of climate and impact experts that can add and remove projects from the whitelist.
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Community-Based : any $SPRL holder can participate in funding allocation across projects
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Maximizing Impact : beyond CO2 drawdown as the only unit of measure
Steps for a project to receive funding:
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Propose a new project to climate committee. This requires governance by whoever may be proposing the project.
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Committee reviews, focusing on scientific feasibility, community impact, reversal risk, etc.; we’ve modeled a lot after Stripe Climate’s review process while expanding the scope from tech-enabled solutions to broader initiatives
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Community members participate in choosing allocation of funds towards any given project
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Project continues to share updates on progress and can attract more community votes as they build up trust.
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Committee can remove a project from being listed at any time, set limits on funding amount, etc.
This combined system where a community determines allocation, yet a centralized and highly vetted group of experts allow/deny projects from receiving funding, will ensure that regardless of how a community votes across the portfolio of approved projects, impact is maximized.
An obvious next question that ensues, is What is Impact. We have a strong thesis here around tackling root causes rather than symptoms. A symptom of climate change can still be worth tackling if it creates a negative feedback loop-- such as CO2 in the atmosphere: effects compound, and drawing it down, while not solving the system as a whole, saves us time.
In other words; we are looking far beyond the reductionist CO2 sequestration approach in an attempt to finally start attributing value to a more all-encompassing approaches that change the dynamic between people and the planet.
At scale, we want the use of Celo to be regenerating the world. Building better defaults like described here by Nirvaan is a huge piece of making this possible!
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I agree with Pat, this would be a great way to use the idle funds and further support builders in the Celo ecosystem. As a member of the Climate Collective grants committee, I am also keen to explore how Spiral’s blended community + expert-driven approach to identify and select grants could create an opportunity to discover early projects Climate Collective might want to eventually support.
Excited to see the kind of projects that discover the Celo ecosystem through the focus on 'all-encompassing approaches.
As a clarifying question, “Spirals Protocol will be governed by the $SPRL token, earned by staking CELO through Spirals, who could then vote on how funds are allocated across projects.” I assume that since the CELO staked comes from Climate Collective’s grants, then CC will participate in deciding funding allocation. Because another less likely thought was that maybe the projects that will receive the ‘already committed grants’ receive the $SPRL and participate in governance.
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