Mento Reserve: Returning CELO

[tim]

@tim

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 just posted a concrete proposal as a follow-up to this: Funding for cLabs blockchain public goods work - would love your input!