Investigation into CeloPG

Governance
1

Investigation into CeloPG: Part 1

This is the public summary version of Part 1.

Introduction

This report is submitted in the public interest to place before the Celo community a concise but evidence-based account of financial movement irregularities and reporting discrepancies associated with CeloPG.

This version is intentionally compressed for publication constraints. The full transaction history, wallet tables, ledger traces, and supporting evidence have been moved into the detailed dossier on Codeberg archive referenced below.

Disclaimer

The following statements are provided to make the methodology and intent of this report explicit:

  1. Public Interest & Pro Bono Work: This report is prepared solely in the public interest for the benefit of the Celo community. It is non-commercial, pro bono work. No personal payment, financial benefit, or private consideration has been sought or accepted for its preparation.
  2. Methodology, Objectivity & Address Attribution: The findings in this report are derived primarily from public on-chain evidence. Claims are grounded in verifiable transaction data, contract interactions, public governance posts, and openly available supporting materials. Where wallet ownership cannot be established with absolute certainty, the report uses careful language and identifies the basis for reasonable attribution, including OSINT linkages such as forum posts, social profiles, project documentation, ENS names, and other self-published records.
  3. Adherence to Community Standards: This report is intended to comply with the Celo Code of Conduct, the Celo Forum Terms of Service, and the norms of fair, evidence-led public accountability. Its structure draws on established investigative and oversight models, including public grant-misuse reporting frameworks adapted to the Celo context.
  4. Evidence Provided Up Front: The supporting evidence for this report is being provided up front alongside this publication. The Codeberg archive and the detailed dossier contain the underlying ledger extracts, transaction references, wallet mappings, report snapshots, and processed evidence relied upon here.

History of CeloPG

CeloPG (Celo Public Goods) was formally established in February 2024 through CGP115, following the Celo Governance Development Sprint.

The relevant governance progression is straightforward:

  1. H1 2024: broad steward model, 5-of-9 multisig, initial public-goods rollout.
  2. H2 2024: leaner steward structure, 4-of-7 multisig, expanded operational discretion.
  3. Season 0 and Season 1: narrower core operating group, 3-of-5 multisig, increased concentration of execution and control.

Across those periods, CeloPG controlled a core budget of approximately 2,927,500 cUSD, 2,585,000 CELO, and 250,000 OP, excluding the inactive H2 matching allocation.

Summary Findings

H1 2024

No material discrepancies were identified in H1. The balances appear to have been returned correctly to the Celo Community Fund at the conclusion of operations.

H2 2024

The principal concern in H2 is the transaction 0x51f17697713d2cbd8c8a7092beedad54d5361f7207c288d21ba21e471063ec5f, labeled on the CeloPG ledger as “BioFi Regen Coordination Ops.”

Based on the traced flow presented in the detailed dossier:

  1. 5,000 cUSD moved from the H2 multisig into an intermediary multisig linked by attribution evidence to Monty, Niko, and Luuk.
  2. An additional 10,000 cUSD from the Season 0/1 multisig was consolidated into that same intermediary wallet.
  3. 12,500 cUSD was then sent onward to the RefiDAO multisig.
  4. Those funds were subsequently disbursed to individuals within the RefiDAO orbit, while only 2,500 cUSD was sent to what appears to be a Gitcoin Grants multisig.

The governance concern is not merely that funds moved. It is that they appear to have moved through an intermediary insider-linked structure without equivalent clarity in the public reporting record.

The questions raised by this pattern are direct:

  1. Why was an intermediary insider-linked multisig used at all?
  2. Where was this routing clearly disclosed in public budget reporting?
  3. What conflict-management controls were applied?
  4. Why did this pattern emerge after governance control had narrowed?

This is not a minor documentation issue. It is a material governance concern involving the routing of community funds through opaque, insider-adjacent pathways without matching clarity in the public record.

h2
h21920Ă—586 125 KB

Season 0 2025

The Season 0 review reveals another pattern that is difficult to reconcile with the public-facing mission of the program: a substantial share of the budget appears to have been consolidated, through multiple intermediary steps, around a single individual, Luuk Weber, before being bridged out through Optimism to Lisk.

Bridge exit:

  1. AxelarScan, Celo - Optimism
  2. LayerZero, Optimism - Lisk

This is not a minor accounting curiosity. It goes directly to whether the operational reality of the program matched the stewardship story presented to the community.

The questions raised are straightforward and severe:

  1. If a large portion of the budget was routed through a chain of intermediaries toward a single destination, how were subcontractors, service providers, and distinct budget lines actually paid in the manner represented to the community?
  2. If the observable flow shows significant budget concentration around stewards or steward-linked entities, what documentary record exists to justify that concentration and distinguish legitimate program administration from insider-directed control?
  3. CeloPG’s stated mandate was to strengthen Celo, including improving Celo TVL. Why, then, did Season 0 funds that reached the consolidating safe subsequently move off Celo and toward the Lisk network (a competing chain) via Optimism? A public-goods program funded by the Celo community is expected, at bare minimum, to act with fidelity to the ecosystem it was created to serve. When community assets are seen moving away from Celo and into another Layer 2 environment, the burden is on program leadership to explain why that conduct was consistent with the mandate they were entrusted to execute.

s0
s01920Ă—1104 216 KB

Detailed dossier with full ledgers and transaction tables: etherlens/celopg-review: The is public interest review and investigation of CeloPG on-chain activities - Codeberg.org

Part 2

Part 2 will examine additional evidence concerning Season 0 and Season 1, including the use of the Celo Community Fund in connection with validator and Community RPC-related extraction pathways.

1 Like
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I’m addressing this to clarify the record.

The transaction you highlight labeled “BioFi Regen Coordination Ops” is what it says it is — operational funding that supported a series of Gitcoin / Allo-based regenerative funding rounds and related coordination work that ReFi DAO and Regen Coordination helped design, operate, support, and fundraise for. Those activities were publicly described in CeloPG reporting, including the CeloPG H2 2024 Progress Report.

Further public documentation of this work exists across multiple forums:

Across these rounds, relatively modest CeloPG contributions were used to unlock significantly larger pools of capital from partners including Gitcoin, Ma Earth, BioFi, and others. For example, BioFi Pathfinders received 25k cUSD from CeloPG and raised an additional ~$43k. More broadly, further Regen Coordination–supported programs mobilised over $236k in funding with only ~$80k from CeloPG (~2.95x multiple). These rounds funded real projects and communities building on Celo, onboarded new users, and piloted new capital allocation mechanisms such as quadratic funding, cluster matching, AI-assisted impact evaluation (ImpactQF), and retroactive public goods funding. They also included clearly defined operational budgets (typically ~5–10%) to support coordination, delivery, and ecosystem development.

The suggestion that this involved an “intermediary insider-linked structure” is a mischaracterisation. In practice, this was the operational flow across collaborating teams and multisigs. There was no attempt to obscure or extract value, the funds were used for the purposes described. As mentioned here, I also believe that this operational work was delivered at a rate that I believe is below market relative to the scope and outcomes achieved.

From my side, I’m highly confident in the integrity of this work and the value it delivered to the Celo ecosystem. I support transparency and accountability, and I’ve provided context here to clarify the record. At this point, I consider this matter addressed and would like to be focusing my time on continuing to build and contribute.