Hello Celo Community! I’m Sam, Governance Lead at GoodDollar.
For those who don’t know, GoodDollar is a non-profit, decentralized protocol designed to generate and distribute Universal Basic Income (UBI) through the G$ token. As a non-profit protocol, 100% of newly minted G$ supports the UBI ecosystem. There is no founder allocation and no private sale. The protocol operates as a public good, designed to expand financial access and participation globally.
Since GoodDollar’s launch in 2020:
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Almost 1 million unique users have claimed G$ UBI across 180+ countries and territories
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More than $600,000 in G$ distributed through the UBI protocol
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Over 2,000,000 peer-to-peer transactions facilitated
In 2023, GoodDollar expanded the UBI distribution to the Celo ecosystem, bringing over half a million unique users to Celo and almost 1,000,000 peer-to-per transactions to date on the chain.
In April 2025, with the launch of GoodDollar V4, the protocol deployed the GoodDollar Reserve on Celo in collaboration with Mento Labs. The GoodDollar Reserve is the onchain mechanism that mints G$, backs it with reserve assets, and provides continuous liquidity—enabling the sustainable generation, distribution, and circulation of G$ UBI.
Today, GoodDollar is the most active protocol on Celo by unique active wallets, serving as core infrastructure for onboarding and engaging global users onchain.
Background: GoodDollar Governance Re-Design
The mission of the GoodDollar ecosystem is currently expanding. While global access to UBI remains at the heart of the project, the stage is set to grow a sustainable economy on top of GoodDollar’s open infrastructure. Builders and community members are already contributing through the GoodBuilders Program, which is currently accepting applications for its third season.
Accordingly, we’ve also begun rethinking the role of the GoodDAO—a global collective that enables GoodDollar’s diverse participants to have a voice in stewarding the protocol, treasury, and ecosystem. As part of this process, we just wrapped up CoGov, a collaborative and participatory redesign of GoodDollar’s governance system. You can read all about this in our recently published retrospective report.
From CoGov, a new vision for GoodDollar’s governance system emerged, reframing GoodDAO as a network of impact capital allocators and a community that manages money distribution to grow a collaborative economy.
Opportunity: GoodDAO’s House of Alignment
The new vision for GoodDAO revealed a need for a governance structure that better aligns all stakeholders, principally the partner projects that share GoodDollar’s mission. This led to the House of Alignment: a model that promotes collective success through a shared mission, shared public goods, and a shared asset in G$ that drives positive sum economic activity and captures the value created.
A (very brief) TLDR on how it works:
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To join the House of Alignment, a project stakes a minimum amount of G$
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Each project receives continually streamed G$ distributions from a newly formed Community UBI pool
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Projects also receive governance power in GoodDAO
This structure echoes previously deployed Impact Staking models, whereby participants commit and stake capital to fund social impact projects from staking returns, while leaving the underlying principle untouched.
By aligning partner projects around G$ on Celo, the House of Alignment will increase onchain activity, strengthen liquidity and funding within the ecosystem, and promote coordinated economic growth across participating protocols.
Next Steps
The House of Alignment is an opportunity to invest in the future of one of the biggest experiments in UBI!
To start, we are looking for 4-5 partner projects to be part of the first iteration of the House of Alignment and over the coming weeks we’ll be having initial conversations with potential members. If you are interested in learning more on behalf of your project, please reply to this post or reach out to me directly (TG: @samccarthy27).