Investigation into CeloPG: Part 2
Before presenting the findings of Part 2, I need to address the responses from Monty Bryant and Niko da Costa Gomez.
This is an extraordinary statement. Are you stating that the body responsible for oversight of community funds was presented with concerns of potential misuse, reviewed them, and chose not to address them publicly and cleared you of all wrongdoing in light of this new evidence?
When the evidence cannot be rebutted on its merits, attack the messengers. The evidence in this investigation is on-chain. It is transaction hashes, timestamps, and wallet attribution. It does not matter who presented it, how many people are in the discussion, or whether they choose to remain anonymous. The transactions either happened or they didn’t. The routing either leads where I say it leads, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, show me the transaction that proves otherwise. Nobody has. Not once. Across multiple posts.
You do not get to unilaterally close an accountability process. That is not how governance works. That is not how fiduciary duty works. And it is certainly not how justice works. When a steward of public funds is presented with evidence that those funds were routed through undisclosed intermediary structures, concentrated around a few individual, used to bootstrap private validator infrastructure, and extracted through exit addresses, the response cannot be “I’m confident in my integrity” and a walk-off. Confidence is not evidence. Declarations are not audits. “I consider this matter closed” is a statement of personal preference, not a resolution.
Neither Monty nor Niko have provided those answers with Luuk being completely absent from the conversation. Monty pointed to unrelated work. Niko pointed to the Foundation’s alleged private blessing. Both choosing to ignore. That is their right. But the questions remain. The evidence remains.
Introduction
Part 2 examines the validator infrastructure, the reward extraction pipeline, the Season 1 continuation, and the governance architecture that enabled all of it. What emerges is not a collection of isolated accounting errors but a coherent, traceable system of misuse of community funds.
The Validator Setup: Community-Funded, Personally Enriching
CeloPG operated a validator group called Celo Public Goods (0x6F769BcC21A867b839b6cA59dDe6c6C90c1DF18D) with 5 validators, and a second private group called RegenerativeFi/EcoLabs a private company started by Luuk (0xEff3222c0c540618D5f10a98A40571db5f6397aa) with 1 validator. Each validator required 20,000 CELO in locked deposits. Total: 120,000 CELO locked.
Every single CELO used to fund these validators traces back to the S0/S1 multisig (0x85910bE70D7eBF149918ed96eF8BE175A0639c33), which received its budget from the Celo Community Fund. These are community assets. The validators were not disclosed in any Season 0 or Season 1 governance proposal as a budget item. They do not appear as a named line item in any subsequent published report.
This deserves its own spotlight: The RegenerativeFi/Ecolabs validator group is not a community asset. It is a private entity under the sole operational control of Luuk Weber. Yet 490,000 CELO redirected to a multisig under the full control of Luuk from the CeloPG treasury was used to lock and vote for this private group.
This is not a grey area. This is the use of public treasury assets to bootstrap private infrastructure that generates private revenue streams. Even if we assume, purely for the sake of argument, that the CeloPG validator group was legitimately established as part of the public-goods mandate, we would then expect the locked CELO to be used to vote for itself. But that is not what happened. Instead, 490,000 CELO was routed to vote for the private RegenerativeFi/Ecolabs group controlled by Luuk Weber. Not the CeloPG group. The private one.
It is also worth noting that Luuk Weber was extremely vocal and one of the primary proposers responsible for dismantling the broader validator infrastructure on Celo. Whether that was hypocrisy or an attempt to cover the tracks of his own validator operation, I leave for the community to judge. The timing and the incentive alignment speak for themselves.
The validator reward extraction pipeline
Celo validators earn cUSD rewards from epoch payments. The CeloPG and Ecolabs validators collectively earned approximately ~51,596 cUSD in validator rewards across their operational lifetime. Where did it go? Not back to the Community. The rewards followed a consistent pipeline into addresses and multisigs linked to or controlled by the stewards. Note the misreporting in the Season 1 Impact Report addressed below directly contradicts the on-chain destination of these rewards.
The secondary multisigs pattern continues
This is the pattern that runs through every layer of CeloPG’s operational infrastructure through it’s lifetime: the Safe presented to the community is theater. The actual dealings happen freely under secondary Safes some of which are under the effective unilateral control of a single actor. This is not only reckless from a security perspective. It is structurally suspicious, and it reinforces the intermediary control findings from Part 1: the governance facade exists for the community’s benefit, not for actual accountability.
Lies in the Season 1 Impact Report
The CeloPG Season 1 Impact Report (CeloPG Season 1 - Impact Report) contains statements about validator operations that are directly contradicted by the on-chain record. I will quote them precisely and address them one by one.
1: “100% assigned to the CeloPG budget”
“Net, we earn about $1800 per node per month which is 100% assigned to the CeloPG budget.”
We can trace ~80% of all the ~51,596 cUSD directly touching steward associated addresses either fully or partially and some rewards even exiting via a CEX. Only a small amount is sent to a Gitcoin Grants related Multisig, ~8k.
2: “No CeloPG contributors operate a personal [validator]”
“No CeloPG contributors operate a personal. The only node that contributors have indirect exposure to is the RegenerativeFi node which has been active for about 1 month and dedicates all it’s node revenue to incentives on Celo - to which anyone has equal access and no fees are charged.”
520,000 CELO of community funds were used to vote for this private group. The community did not have “equal access” to 520,000 CELO of voting power. That was public treasury money, routed through a Luuk-controlled multisig, used to prop up a private validator. The setup fee for this validator can also be back-traced to the S0/S1 multisig.
3: “$12,000 cUSD projected” in validator rewards
“…with an additional $12,000 cUSD projected to be generated until the end of the year through our CeloPG Validator nodes.”
Validator rewards is a predictable metric. The actual validator rewards earned by CeloPG and Ecolabs validators total approximately ~51,596 cUSD across their operational lifetime. The report projects $12,000 for the remaining portion of 2025, while omitting entirely the rewards already accumulated and routed to potential personal infrastructure.
4: The RegenerativeFi/Ecolabs group is “1 month old”
The S1 response states the RegenerativeFi node “has been active for about 1 month.” On-chain data shows the RegenerativeFi/Ecolabs group was registered on October 11, 2025 and the validator was added on October 21, 2025 roughly two months before the December 17 response, not one. When the timeline doesn’t fit the narrative, apparently you just change the timeline.
Unanswered Questions
The following questions remain outstanding. They were either ignored in Part 1 responses or arise directly from the new evidence presented here:
- Where is the governance authorization for the validator infrastructure? In which proposal, budget line, or community vote was the use of 120,000 CELO for validator deposits approved? Why was the approx half million CELO used to vote for a private group using public funds?
- Where is the accounting for validator rewards? Approximately 51,596 cUSD in rewards was earned on community-funded validators. How much was returned to the Community Fund? Where is the ledger entry?
- Will CeloPG publish full ledger sheets for Season 0 and Season 1 ? This was requested in Part 1. It has not been done. When a multisig’s reported budget and its on-chain movements diverge this dramatically, the only responsible conclusion is that the reporting is unreliable.
- What did the Celo Foundation actually conclude when this was “briefed” to them? Niko stated the matter was previously delivered to the Foundation and that “the consensus was that there were no signs of misuse of funds.” On what basis? The on-chain evidence presented here directly contradicts that assessment. The community deserves to know: was the review rigorous, or was it a rubber stamp?
Call to Action: The Celo Core Co. Must Commission an Audit
The community cannot accept a private, undisclosed “consensus” as a substitute for a transparent accounting.
Because Niko has publicly stated that the Foundation cleared CeloPG of wrongdoing, I call upon the @CeloCoreCo to either publicly confirm or deny this in the interest of the community that funded this program.
I am also formally calling on the Celo Foundation to commission an (preferably but not necessarily) independent, third-party forensic audit of all CeloPG wallet activity from H2 2024 through the present in light of the above evidence. The audit should cover:
- All inflows and outflows from the H2/S0/S1 multisigs, including all downstream disbursements, intermediary hops, and terminal addresses
- All validator deposits, reward flows, and reward disbursement destinations
- All cross-chain bridge transactions
- The complete internal ledger documents
- Signer analysis of all associated Safe multisigs, including threshold configurations and transaction signing patterns
To the Celo Community
This investigation exists because you deserve to know where your funds went. Not the version in a curated impact report. Not the version filtered through a private Foundation briefing that conveniently found nothing wrong. The version that lives on-chain; immutable, timestamped, and indifferent to the preferences of those it implicates.
If you believe that stewards of public funds should be held to the same standard of accountability they agreed to when they accepted the mandate, then make your voice heard. On the forum. In governance. In every channel available to you. Silence from the community is the only outcome that benefits the people named in this report.
The stewards declared this matter closed. The chain says otherwise. So does the evidence. And so should you.
Part 3
This investigation is not concluded. Part 3 will examine additional evidence that has come to light from other whistleblowers and community members. It will be published when the evidence is ready. And it will not be silenced by declarations of closure from the people it concerns.
To The Celo Core Co: the ball is in your court.