Hi all – speaking as CEO of cLabs, I strongly support this proposal. It leaves enough of an additional buffer of CELO to mean that Mento assets have a greater cushion that other stablecoins. It is a step towards a crisper separation between the core Celo protocol and community, and the Mento protocol and community.
We could do a lot more with these funds as a community if they are available, over a period of time, through the on-chain Community Fund for the sorts of proposals and funding mechanisms we’ve developed so far (like grants to Climate Collective for their amazing work, and to Prezenti) plus many new ones. I think of this as permanent uses of the funds.
One potential future use of some of these funds: I also see the opportunity to move cLabs towards to a more community-funded model, and more transparent and responsive to community needs. cLabs is a non-stock, non-profit company. We don’t have shareholders or equity. Most of our expenditure goes directly on working to provide public goods for the Celo ecosystem – engineers working on blockchain, core contracts, and developer tooling. I hope you see the results of their work every day.
Right now, we fund that work primarily via a grant directly from Celo Foundation. cLabs also does strategic consulting work, and has spun out companies including Valora and Hyperlane, but as a non-profit any return on equity cLabs owns in those companies would be directed back into more public goods work, or more spin-outs.
Over time, I would love to explore increasing the role of the community directly in funding work done by cLabs (and other contributors) on core platform public goods. It would be awesome to be able to expand the team and accelerate the Celo v2 roadmap.
I also think there are great temporary use of these funds – e.g to provide liquidity and TVL, like @marek @nraghuveera @nirvaan s’ suggestions above. Some of these we might be able to do immediately, some may be held back for projects happening in the near future. But Governance should always be able to reclaim these funds to put to another temporary use, or disburse as a permanent grant.
I feel like if we can identify strong candidates for temporary uses, we should earmark the majority of the new funds for that purpose for now – say 100M out of 120M. And we should identify these before we move the funds, so they continue counting towards TVL metrics for the Celo ecosystem.
That would mean:
- get general consensus on returning the 120M to the Community Fund
- write and discuss proposals for temporary uses of funds, and agree those, and their allocation
- build one or more governance proposals that does (1) and as much of (2) as is possible (or if necessary delegates those funds to community multisigs)
- Execute/audit/vote on the on-chain governance proposal
- After all that, then discuss permanent uses of funds
Thoughts?