my motivation to ask you guys on verification was precisely to put more motivation behind fixing the verifications on explorer.celo.org. Other (i.e. non cLabs) actors who have less implicit trust, will generally come down under more scrutiny and will need tools like verifications on explorer to work to get their proposals to pass.
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Hi everyone, I wanted to share an update regarding CELO Rewards:
Weāve distributed 2 balance-based rewards so far:
- In the first week, we distributed 773 CELO to 1,179 addresses. In the second week, we distributed 969 CELO to 1,334 addresses.
- The distributions cost less than 5cents in gas fees!! Itās quite exciting to be able to send so much value anywhere in the world at such a low fee!
Weāve made progress in getting people to hold balances above 20 cUSD, but thereās still a long way to go!
- A majority (89%) of confirmed addresses still donāt qualify for a reward (average balance <20 cUSD).
- This number used to be above 95% before we announced the program.
Total cUSD in circulation in confirmed addresses has almost doubled to $560k since we announced the program:
- While itās hard to take full credit for this given the amount of potential cofounding factors, the timing of when balances started to pick up lines up well with when we announced the program
80% of people who received a reward qualified for tier 1 (average balance between 20 and 100 cUSD)
- However, Tier 3 is the highest growing tier (82% w/w growth in number of recipients)
How can I verify that the rewards are correctly distributed?
We published the script that weāre using here.
Once you verify the merkle root, you can verify in the contracts linked above in blockscout that the merkle root is contained in the bytecode. This is not optimal for now and weāre working on fixing the blockscout verification tool to provide more transparency.
Qualitatively
We have received some overall positive feedback on the program from users (especially people excited about the potential of having this longer term). There are a couple of points where weāre trying to improve:
- 80% of confirmed addresses donāt qualify for the lowest tier. Weāre hearing especially in developing markets that saving 20 cUSD might be inaccessible to people. We will experiment lowering the lowest qualifying tier to 10cUSD to see if it creates more momentum. If this is not enough, we might create a 4th tier at 1cUSD for instance.
- We want to keep rewards coming on a weekly basis so people stay excited about the program: we have received a lot of positive feedback from the fact that the reward is distributed weekly, so we will continue doing weekly distributions after March 1st, but will reduce the amounts by 4x to stay in line with the end of the kickoff period
- Some end users got a bit confused about the concept of āaverageā weekly balance and how it differs from their ācurrentā cUSD balance, and ended up not qualifying for the initial one or two rounds of rewards because they cashed-in a bit late. As a short term fix, we were a bit more lax for the initial two distributions with the minimum qualifying average balance (19 cUSD instead if 20, 99 cUSD instead of 100 and 499 cUSD instead of 500) so that no one has a bad surprise.
- We want to reward users for inviting others: weāre in the process of thinking about what that program could look like. Stay tuned!
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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 āSavingsā 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 arenāt 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 addressās cUSD balance, instead of the tier system we currently have. Weāre 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 wonāt 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 (peopleās 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!
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Originally published on Reddit. My 2 cents hereā¦
I think Celo is making a major mistake and Iāll try to explain why.
I totally get the 5% program on cUSD, and eventually cEUR, but that should be managed through a separate custodial service, as Circle is doing with USDC. Itās very interesting for traditional bondholders and could be huge. What Celo should be aiming at is getting a small slice of a huge traditional market segment that is currently looking for alternatives. They wonāt move that money to Valora, sorryā¦
For retail investors like us, stable coins should be seen as a good way to transact and move money. As explained by others, we simply canāt miss the upside opportunity that only the native Celo token can potentially offer.
The end result will be that most of the people will leave Valora. So a net loss for everybody. Why doing this just when more people were getting interested? Was the previous model unsustainable? Why not being more transparent and ask for feedback, instead of imposing a new rule, just like a bank would do?
Big disappointment, sorry.
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Agreed. Copying/pasting my comment from Reddit as well:
I sent two emails to support last week but havenāt gotten a reply. The message had two parts:
- Asking when the new 5% savings program will be live
- Providing feedback on getting rid of the rewards program
CELO can of course do what they think is best, but I struggle to find the benefit of the new program. The old program gave 24-110% interest, allowed receiving the upside of the coin since it was paid in CELO, and your principal stayed safe since it was held in a stablecoin.
Voyager, Nexo, and similar platforms pay between 8-10% interest on stablecoins (12% if you elect to be paid in Nexo). And CAKE pools are yielding over 100% - albeit with the risk of losing your principal if the coin drops.
Just my opinion. Giving it a few weeks to see if anything gets adjusted before moving funds elsewhere.
My apologies for this. We are working to identify why our replies did not arrive. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
It is looking more and more like this is already a dying project unfortunately. Combined with the drastic inflation and the new ārewardsā program better opportunities are now presented elsewhereā¦
Hi everyone! I have some unfortunate news 
Last week we run into an issue which caused us to lose some funds. The TL;DR is that we lost 1940 cUSD (~746 CELO at the time of the loss). They are stuck on a contract and canāt be recovered: https://explorer.celo.org/address/0x7A6Ac258691a678719787d21265C8712E73948eb
This program was originally funded with 200,000 CELO so this represents ~0.37% of the total.
Please find the full post-mortem and steps weāre taking to make sure this doesnāt happen again here:
Iām of course available if anyone has further questions/comments/suggestions.
Hi from the Valora team! I wanted to share a quick update regarding the CELO Rewards program, as you may have seen its name change to Supercharge this week.
TLDR: Following our post here in June, we now have a new iteration to the CELO Rewards program. Earlier this year, we tested a 5% annual rate on Valora usersā cUSD balance, and we called it the āEarnā program. Based on the feedback from users who participated in the program and our own research, we just launched a new iteration that we believe will have a greater impact in growing adoption of Valora and Celo. Supercharge offers verified users 50% rewards on their stablecoin balance.
What are we doing?
We launched a new campaign called Supercharge aimed at 1) growing Valoraās user base, and 2) re-engaging existing users by encouraging them to āAdd Fundsā to their Valora wallet.
The campaign offers users 50% in annual rewards on their average weekly stablecoin balance. Supercharge will have the following requirements:
- There is a $10 minimum balance to qualify for the program
- There is a $1000 limit on the balance that qualifies for rewards
- Their Valora account needs to be verified (phone number confirmation)
Users can pick cUSD or cEUR, as they are both eligible for Supercharge, and the rules above will be calculated on $-value basis. We also built a Supercharge Calculator on our blog for our users who would like to see how much they could get out of this new reward program.
The T&C are here.
Why are we doing this?
We heard the following feedback from our users regarding the previous program:
- After the introduction of cEUR support in Valora, users asked us to include it in the rewards program too
- Users with small balances reported they couldnāt see the value of the savings program, hence they didnāt increase their balances.
- Some users told us they needed to see how much they would get by participating in the program (this resulted in us building the calculator)
- Valora users who are new to DeFi and the crypto space find it hard to add funds to Valora, and saw the funding fees as a barrier. So weāre trying to incentivize them to try it out
In addition to this feedback, our integrated partner Ramp started to offer 0% fees for cash in. We wanted to complement this offer to increase the awareness of cUSD and cEUR even more.
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Itās aggressive! I like it! Thanks @denisse .
How do you measure success for the program? What kind of sign-up rate and/or wallet usage makes sense to justify the ROI?
BTW, my direct experience with the new program is that ramp is the bottleneck. Iām still awaiting their verification process (maybe thatās a sign they are getting tons of signup? hopefully on valora?)
Hi there! Our goal is to grow Valoraās user base with activated users: i.e. new users that have positive stablecoin balances in their wallets. Additionally, weāre hoping to re-engage a lot of our existing users by incentivizing them to increase their balances. This is the third iteration of this program and likely not the last. Weāll continue to iterate based on user feedback and data.
Regarding your experience with Ramp, Iāve relayed your feedback and hope theyāll get back to you soon!
Makes sense! And thanks on ramp.
Re metrics, I was wondering what specific targets Valora has for user base increase with the program? What growth in users would you consider a success for the program? How much better are you expecting growth to be relative to the 5% program?
Also, are the funds from the same source as the 5% program - which was a CGP if I recall? I guess the CGP allows for pretty flexible use of the funds by Valora to incentivize user growth so there is freedom to offer any rewards rate?
Thanks!
Hi again! Yes, the funds come from the CCF. You can find all the details here: The Supercharge Rewards Program Terms and Conditions
Hello everyone! We want to share an exciting update about the Supercharge Rewards Program.
When we launched Supercharge last September, our goal was to incentivize people to create Celo wallet addresses and adopt Celo stablecoins. Weāre thrilled to share that weāve successfully distributed nearly all of the funds, and we now have more active Celo wallet addresses than ever before across 100+ countries worldwide. This community program (funded by the CCF through CGP 14) is now ending. Weāll distribute the remaining funds for Supercharge v1 next Tuesday, February 15, 2022.
Because Valoraās users found the Supercharge program helpful in their new journey into the Celo community, Valora is continuing this incentive for people around the world. To this end, Valora received a grant from the DeFi For The People initiative run by the Celo Foundation. These funds will allow Valora to continue attracting new people to the Celo ecosystem and incentivize them to get started on Celo.
Weāre dedicated to expanding this program so that more people around the world can benefit, and weāre starting by adding cREAL.
To learn about the next iteration of Supercharge, we invite you to join Valoraās Discord community. Weāll be posting updates there going forward.
We want to take this opportunity to thank the Celo community for supporting this early rewards program. We have been through many iterations, and more are coming. We are always looking for ways to stay aligned with Celoās mission to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperityāfor everyone!
Lastly, we are working on a share around Superchargeās success and hope to have that posted to this thread in the new few weeks.
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Dear community, this share is long overdue! Please accept our apologies; weāve been busy extending the Supercharge program, now in its 6th iteration.
The focus of this post is to share the impact of the Supercharge (v1) campaign funded by CGP14 and managed by Valora. The v1 program ran for 22 weeks (23 Sept 2021 to 15 Feb 2022).
Objectives & Results
The original objectives of Supercharge were:
- growing Valoraās user base, and
- re-engaging existing Valora users by encouraging them to add funds to their wallets
The Supercharge v1 program had the most impact on increasing the TVL of cStables held by Valora wallets (objective 2 above), and less impact on growing the number of wallets (objective 1):
- TVL:
- Stablecoin TVL for all wallets with a balance grew from $1.6M āāat the start of Supercharge to $9.6M by the end of February 2022, representing an increase of 521% increase in overall stable assets held in Valora
- The strongest growing stablecoin in terms of TVL was cEUR. Superchargersā cEUR TVL grew from cEUR 12k to cEUR 2.8M during the period (20k%). As cEUR was a newly launched asset, the growth here indicates that Supercharge helped jumpstart demand for the new cStable.
- Average weekly rewards available: $62k
- Rewards growth (period): 808%
- Wallets:
- Wallets eligible (end of period): 16k
- Eligible wallets growth (period): 77%
About 8,326 supercharging users transacted in Valora during Supercharge v1 period with an average 17.2 transactions per user (TPU). The most common transaction types for Supercharge users were Send, CELO buy, and CELO sell. However, the highest TPU (58.6) was observed for users who transacted with dapps.
Background
The CELO Rewards program was initially funded by CGP14 (6 Jan 2021). The initial goal outlined in CGP14 was to āincentivize early cUSD adopters with a long-term stake into the network.ā With a secondary goal of ā(Encouraging) cUSD liquidity in order to attract more users and developers to the network.ā
Participating wallet addresses had to satisfy 2 criteria:
- Have a phone number connected (3 attestations completed)
- Hold a minimum stablecoin balance
Program details:
- Rewards were calculated on the average address balance during the period Mon-Sun
- Rewards were distributed weekly
The funds allocated via CGP14 funded rewards for the first 4 iterations of the Rewards program:
Impact of Supercharge v1
The focus of this post is to share the impact of the Supercharge (v1) campaign funded by CGP14 and managed by Valora.
Eligible wallets
- 5% of wallets with a stablecoin balance (9k out of 177k wallets) were eligible for Supercharge at the beginning of the program. By the end of the 22 weeks, that grew to 7% of wallets with a stablecoin balance (16k out of 204k wallets)
- Eligible wallets to receive Supercharge rewards by 77% during the 22-week period.
- Note that 1,549 wallets during this period are double-counted since they were supercharging on both cUSD and cEUR
Total Value locked
- TVL for CELO followed the same growth trend (~35%) for both groups.
- The strongest growing stablecoin in terms of TVL was cEUR. Superchargersā cEUR TVL grew from cEUR 12k to cEUR 2.8M during the period (20k%).
- Stablecoin TVL for all wallets with a balance grew from $1.6M before Supercharge to $9.6M by the end of February 2022, representing an increase of 521%.
- As expected, TVL across cStables grew faster for Superchargers when compared to all wallets with a balance (at any point during the period), from $0.966M to $7.4M during the period.
Weekly Rewards available
- Weekly rewards increased by 908% (cUSD + cEUR), with cEUR rewards going up by 10865% and cUSD rewards by 452% during the period.
Transactions
- 8,326 supercharging users transacted in Valora during Supercharge v1 period with an average 17.2 transactions per user (TPU)
- The most common transaction types for Supercharge users were Send, CELO buy and CELO sell
- However, the highest TPU (58.6) was observed for users who transacted with dapps.
Next steps
Valora has continued the Supercharge program through v2 thanks to a grant from DeFi for the People, adding cREAL to the list of cStables that users can receive rewards on.
We are working on extending the program further while continuing to learn how to engage and educate people who join the Celo community via Valora.
We have exciting updates and new programs on the horizon. Join the Valora Discord to stay up to date!
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