Hello there! I wanted to share a quick update regarding CELO Rewards program.
TLDR: In the spirit of the initial governance proposal, we want to iterate from our initial learnings from the CELO Rewards program. For this reason, we are proposing to end it as it currently is and start testing a “Savings” program. We are targeting beginning of July as the date when this change will take effect.
Why are we doing this?
- We have heard a lot of great feedback on CELO Rewards and ways we could improve it.
- A majority of Valora users (the main access point for the program) now see Valora as a place to save and earn.
- However not many users benefit from CELO Rewards (only a small percentage of confirmed accounts were eligible).
- We believe this is mainly due to (A) a lack of awareness in the program and (B) for people who are aware of the program, it is hard to understand the current tiers system
- We onboarded a lot of new users to the Celo ecosystem with the CB earn campaign that happened back in April and see an opportunity to retain these users and increase the amount of funds they put in their Celo Address with this new program.
- A lot of them have under 10cUSD and aren’t even aware of CELO rewards. This new program would make them eligible and hopefully encourage them to cash-in more.
- It will initially have the same distribution mechanism as CELO rewards but with a few differences:
- Rewards are distributed in cUSD, not CELO. We heard from users that they were confused by the dual asset aspect of the reward, and would find it simpler to receive the rewards in cUSD.
- Rewards are calculated based off a % of the confirmed address’s cUSD balance, instead of the tier system we currently have. We’re thinking of starting off initially by rewarding users with a ~5% of their cUSD balance each year, still funded by the Community fund.
- There is no more minimum balance to qualify, you just need to have an address with a confirmed phone number
- The max qualifying balance is upped to 1,000 cUSD rather than the current 500 (earn up to 50 cUSD per year)
- For the first few weeks, we will run an A/B test where 50% of users won’t receive any earnings and 50% of users will. This will allow us to causally measure the impact of this program on the key metrics we care about (people’s cUSD balances)
- If this initial test is successful, we will explore in a second phase deeper changes to the program, namely find more sustainable sources of funds than the community fund (e.g. leverage the DeFi ecosystem on Celo) that could allow us to offer a save + earn product longer term.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!