Mento Stablecoin Rebranding and Strategic Evolution

Mento
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Dear Celo Community,

We’re excited to propose a major milestone in the evolution of the Mento Protocol — a rebranding of Mento stablecoins and a transition toward a more scalable and decentralized collateral model. The proposed changes are designed to prepare Mento for multichain adoption while reinforcing Celo’s position as the home of Mento’s core collateral infrastructure.

Stablecoin Rebranding: cUSD → USDm and Beyond

To align with our multichain strategy and strengthen Mento’s brand identity, Mento Labs is proposing a unified naming convention for stablecoins created by the Mento Protocol.

Under this change:

  • cUSD (Celo Dollar) becomes USDm (Mento Dollar)

  • cEUR (Celo Euro) becomes EURm (Mento Euro)

  • cKES (Celo Kenyan Shilling) becomes KESm (Mento Kenyan Shilling)

  • … and so on.

The “m” suffix stands for “Mento-native” and signals that these assets are designed for use across multiple blockchain ecosystems.

This is a branding upgrade only. There are no changes to the smart contract addresses, collateralization mechanisms, or the 1:1 fiat pegs.

This proposal, after accounting for wider community feedback, will be handled under Mento governance and, if accepted, will be executed in collaboration with wallet providers, exchanges, and DeFi protocols, etc. to ensure a seamless transition for users and partners.

We acknowledge that there are specific Mento stablecoins for which such a rebranding may not be the right step, like PUSO (stewarded by the Celo Philippines DAO) and cCOP (stewarded by the Celo Colombia community) and we would like to hear from the respective stewards what their preferred approach would be.

Transition to CDP-Based Architecture

While Mento has historically relied on a reserve-backed model to overcollateralize its stablecoins, we are proposing to now transition all Mento stablecoins (except cUSD/USDm which would remain 1:1 backed by prime dollar stables) to a CDP-based model — inspired by the architecture of Liquity.

This upgrade allows for:

  • Decentralized minting of stablecoins via collateralized debt positions

  • Protocol-native yield opportunities for depositors and liquidity providers

  • Scalable creation of stable assets tailored to real-world currencies

  • FX risk management by CDP borrowers instead of the Mento Reserve

Importantly, the CDPs and the underlying collateral are rooted on Celo, meaning the capital that powers the multichain expansion continues to live within the Celo ecosystem.

A Multichain Future, Anchored on Celo

With integrations to Wormhole and other interoperability layers, Mento stablecoins will become natively multichain.

This unlocks:

  • Real-time cross-chain FX and stablecoin transfers

  • Localized currencies accessible across ecosystems

  • **Increased liquidity and capital efficiency
    **

And as TVL grows with CDP adoption on external chains, Celo benefits directly — since the CDPs, collateral, and stability pools remain on Celo. In other words: more demand across chains = more TVL and activity on Celo.

Why This Matters for Celo

This transformation reflects a maturation of Mento into a global FX layer, and reinforces Celo as the foundational layer for real-world financial access. With a growing set of real-world stable assets and a more scalable stablecoin design, we believe Mento can bring meaningful capital inflows and economic utility to the Celo ecosystem.

We’re excited to walk this journey with the Celo community and welcome your feedback on the proposal.

Let us know what you think in the comments.
The formal governance proposal will then follow soon on Mento Governance.

Onwards,

The Mento Labs Team

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sounds great roman.
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Speaking for CeloPH we’re not wed to the PUSO name although it is easily the strongest stablecoin name we’ve seen offered here (because it means “heart" in our native language, while still being similar to PESO). The other competing names include cPHP, PHPC, PHPX, all from different providers. I think we’ll have to leave it to you guys to decide one way or the other, because ultimately, the usage metric and how we drive adoption is more important than the specific brand. I mean, look at ChatGPT, arguably the worse name for a revolutionary product ever.

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Why Wormhole and not Celo Native Bridging?

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@helloluis Agreed that PUSO is a strong name and it`s a bit sad to give it up. Feels important though to keep some consistent naming convention with Mento stablecoins so my personal recommendation would be to go with PHPm going forward.

@aaronmgdr We want to keep all our options wrt. chains including non-EVM chains and Celo Native Bridging would just not give us that flexibility.

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Thanks Mento Labs and @roman for sharing this proposal, really exciting to see the protocol evolve and prepare for a multichain future :raising_hands:.

From Celo Colombia, we are fully ok with the proposed rebranding of Mento stablecoins. In Colombia there is already another stablecoin called COPM (issued by Minteo, with capital letters). Since COPM is a completely different asset, the m suffix for Mento stablecoins does not create any conflict on our side.

Regarding cCOP, we are open to the community process and willing to support whichever naming path provides the most clarity for users in Colombia and across the ecosystem. There is no issue from our side with adopting a new name if that becomes the preferred approach under Mento governance.

We appreciate being included in this discussion and we are excited about the opportunities that a more scalable and decentralized Mento architecture can unlock for Colombia :colombia: and the broader Celo ecosystem.

Happy to continue collaborating in the next steps.

Cheers,
Celo Colombia Team

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Given MegaETH is using USDm already, I would maybe consider using USDme instead. Actually has a good branding image that could be leveraged. “Hey USD me!” “Hey euro me!”

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I do agree that USDme sounds and looks interesting - this could indeed be a more “unique” and “marketable” ticker. I would be in support of it! I think the ‘me” angle could do well if we position Mento as the best non-custodial / most user sovereign respecting stablecoin!

When it comes to MegaETH, their USDm process hasn’t been very smooth, as they are going to return all current pre-deposits. In any case, having the same ticker as them may create confusion.

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Hey all! MGP-12 is now live for voting:

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We rebranded cGLD to CELO before launch and we still are dealing with the artifacts 5 years later. The Core Mento team was there so Im sure they know the pain. This will probably be worse. My biggest concern is how users of cUSD on Minipay will be informed of the change.

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@roman Are there new token icons / svgs or renamed svgs for people to use for example on https://github.com/celo-org/celo-token-list/blob/main/celo.tokenlist.json

If not having them before the contracts are changed would enabled smoother and faster transition

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@aaronmgdr We are working on them right now and will share an update here soon!

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Just noticed that the “SYMBOL” variable inside the contracts have indeed changed from cUSD → USDm and so on.

I am not 100% sure, but I am guessing you are going to break quite a lot of tooling and apps with this change. There is no going back anymore, but you might want to try a wider outreach to app and wallet developers to let them know this has happened.

Good luck!

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Hi @thezviad, yes, the new symbols and names are of course reflected in the smart contracts - my message that you quoted just aimed to point out that smart contract addresses, collateralization mechanisms etc. do not change. We reached out to a range of integration partners beforehand but I just realized we did not reach out to you regarding the Celo Terminal integration - apologies for that. Anything we can help with at this stage?

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I mostly noticed because some of my internal tooling broke, since they could no longer find “cUSD” tokens (tooling had list of whitelisted token addresses, was fetching their names from contracts and was trying to find addresses corresponding to names).

I am not 100% sure what might break. A lot of stuff is keyed off on the contract address, however, in certain UI search and selection situations, things do get keyed off on a symbol (or name). We now have a situation where contract shows different Symbol, compared to a lot of “token list” type of places, like Coingecko:

https://tokens.coingecko.com/celo/all.json

Uniswap, and so on.

I think it is quite hard to predict what might break here. Hopefully nothing super critical, because I am assuming most critical things will depend on the contract address itself, but I can see how it can break certain user interactions where user is simply unable to select the token properly because of mismatch in the names in various sources.

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