Prezenti: Mid-Point Season 1 Feedback and Community Discussion [October 2025]

Ecosystem Grants
1

The Prezenti Season 1 grant funding round has been open since 27 August 2025 (~6 weeks). Normally, we’d expect dozens of applications by this stage — instead, we’ve had 7 applications, a handful of drafts and offered zero grants. You can view the applications here(you may need to join our charmverse org via invite to view)

Feedback from other Celo ecosystem teams seems to be suggesting that the ‘Stage’ criteria, especially daily transaction targets, are too high for the current state of the Celo network.

Current Celo based apps are still growing, but most sit far below the current “10,000 daily tx” requirements set for Prezenti grants. These targets reflect other, more capitalized ecosystems like Polygon or Solana, not Celo’s on-chain reality. Even then, we’re talking about the top of the top applications, and teams that would likely require much larger incentives than Prezenti or Celo are presently able to facilitate and offer.

Examples of current Celo players

  • BitGifty: Received $50k from Prezenti over two years; grew from 0 → 200 k tx per month; still ineligible for new funding under current criteria.
  • Pretium Finance: Received $25k from Prezenti, grew to ~70k tx per month (MiniPay + stand-alone app).
  • Bando Cool: Received $25k from Prezenti, grew to ~50k tx per month.
  • Hurupay: Received $48k from Prezenti over two years9 months tx volume ≈ $14.5 M | 13 k tx | $220k revenue | 20k MAU | 33 k total users | 10 high-volume businesses.
  • Ubeswap: Received $25k from Prezenti. The only Celo app currently exceeding 10k daily tx (per CeloPG’s Dune dashboard).

Gathered Feedback

We’ve had discussions with other Season 1 Celo funding teams, who are in a similar situation. All teams have noted that they are struggling to find appropriate projects/teams that fit the criteria, both inbound or outbound.

The ‘carrot’s being offered by Celo at present are just not large enough to attract any ‘big’ players, the core players are mostly deployed on Celo already and the growing teams are left with fewer funding options.

The Prezenti Season 1 daily transaction criteria (minimum of 10,000 daily tx) is proving misaligned with the current throughput and market conditions on Celo. These limits inadvertently exclude high-impact builders that demonstrate genuine traction but lower daily peaks.

Other teams have adjusted their criteria to what they deem more suitable metrics. Such as:

Stage 1 = 100 unique users + 500 M gas per two weeks (~10k tx per month)

This revised version of the threshold, 10k per month, not per day has been utilized in the Proof-of-Impact dashboard.

Our Current View

After reviewing feedback from builders, reviewers, applicants and ecosystem partners, we’ve looked at the situation more broadly. While transaction thresholds are clearly an important metric, driver and necessity, several additional considerations have surfaced around capital flows, competitiveness, and outreach.

We fully appreciate that the Season 1 intents and stages were created as a call to action for what Celo needs, and wants, at this stage of growth as a new L2, e.g. larger apps able to really move the needle on daily tx’s. While this may be the maturity of projects Celo wants and needs, it’s proving difficult to find them.

Grant Sizing and Capital Flows

We have internally discussed various ideas of changing the Season 1 Prezenti grant amounts to try and ensure we attract the right builders, and properly utilise the funding available. We have discussed:

  • Do we reduce the grant sizes (from $25k and $50k) to amounts on our original draft proposal (10K and 25K) for different stages.
  • Do we increase the fixed amounts and have fewer, larger grants to try and attract some of the bigger players, some possibly external to Celo.
  • Do we have no fixed limit (within our budget scope) and fund only a couple of projects with a discretionary (larger) amount.
  • We do nothing and carry on with Season 1 as is planned.

Our internal understanding is that the Season 1 Intents were deliberately structured to direct capital toward projects suited to a more mature strategic phase. This approach wasn’t accidental; it was designed to focus limited resources on fewer, more catalytic projects rather than spreading smaller grants across a wide range of initiatives.

So, whilst we’ve discussed the idea of further reducing grant amounts to align with other Season 1 funders to overcome this current challenge (and we understand the reasoning), we recognize the need for flexibility. Celo is now competing with newer, extremely well-funded ecosystems offering tailored incentives to attract experienced builders. With that in mind, we’re considering whether maintaining strictly fixed grant amounts remains the best approach, or if introducing some discretion within each Stage would allow Prezenti to respond more effectively to emerging opportunities.

Pipeline and Outreach

Prezenti has a wealth of Celo builder team data and experience, having received over 500 applications over the last 3 years. Looking at the current applicant pipeline, and recognizing that some of the strongest candidates for Celo’s Intents may never apply organically, we are sending one of the team to be on the ground at DevConnect Argentina. This is with the aim to try to identify, and engage projects aligned with Season 1 goals.

In parallel, we will increase our direct outreach to teams whose products could significantly expand Celo’s product layer and liquidity base. We will continue to work closely with the Celo DevRel team as they try to scope possible ‘Boost Pool’ applicants for us.

Examples of the types of protocols under our consideration include:

  • Ethena — exploring how a stablecoin-as-a-service model could extend Celo’s stable asset infrastructure.

  • NEAR Intents — assessing whether intent-based transaction routing and UX primitives could improve cross-chain user flows.

These are illustrative examples, not proposals — they reflect the kind of ecosystem integrations that could support Celo’s medium-term trajectory.

Prezenti is also reaching out to a number of VC’s with a focus on stablecoins and emerging markets to see if we can create a cross pollination of pipelines to support Season 1.

Where We Are Now

At this point, our focus is on refining the balance between maintaining rigor and being able to act competitively.

  • we’ve reviewed the quantitative thresholds,
  • re-examined grant sizing philosophy, and
  • initiated outreach to fill pipeline gaps.

This isn’t a call for immediate changes but a summary of how we’re interpreting the feedback and adjusting our operational approach to better align with both Celo’s current state and the spirit of the Intents.

The goal remains the same: to ensure Season 1 funding reaches projects that advance tangible usage, align with mission, and position the network strongly heading into Season 2.

Next Steps:

We invite the community to help contribute to this discussion over the next 10 days and help our decision making at this juncture in Season 1, based on the following initial ideas/options:

  1. Do we reduce the grant sizes (from $25k and $50k) to amounts on our original draft proposal (10K and 25K) for different stages.
  2. Do we increase the fixed amounts and have fewer, larger grants to try and attract some of the bigger players, some possibly external to Celo.
  3. Do we have no fixed limit (within our budget scope) and fund only a couple of projects with a discretionary (larger) amount.
  4. Where are the current Stage 1 projects getting Celo support in Season 1?
  5. We do nothing and carry on with Season 1 as is planned.
  6. Any ideas we haven’t thought of that we should consider?

— The Prezenti Team

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2

This is a well-thought-out analysis of the conundrum facing Celo at the moment. It reminds me of employers who demand experience from job seekers who have none. It’s very difficult to acquire experience in that scenario.

As a growing blockchain, it is important to encourage innovation by widening the pool of potential grantees who may just have the next really big idea. Nonetheless, we must admit that many such projects, including ours, may lack the necessary resources to achieve those desired transactions. At the same time, it is important that Celo grants maximize impact and TVL.

My suggestion is that Prezenti looks at its community of grantees and finds out which teams can collaborate on similar projects that maximize economies of scale. At LUSOBE, for example, we found that by working with more established partners like Grassroots Economics (sarafu.network), Pretium and Sargo, and with funding provided through Prezenti, we were able to do much more than we would have been able to do by ourselves. At the same time, we provided our partners with valuable ideas and insights that shaped their product offerings, creating a mutually beneficial partnership.

My proposal is therefore to increase the size of the grants but encourage grantees to collaborate with each other when applying for the grants. For example, the Celo Cosmo-Local Credit Network and Sarafu Wallet projects can be completed by various teams working together for the common vision. In this way, the number of transactions and TVL could increase.

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3

I see this as not unrelated to the collapse of CELO’s tokenomics. Could it be because the value of CELO has dropped too much, and the CELO incentives no longer seem attractive or valuable in the medium to long term?

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4

First off: thank you for being transparent about where things are at.

Reading the mid-point update, it feels like Prezenti is currently being asked to solve two distinct problems with a single instrument and a single set of thresholds:

  1. Seed & grow earlier-stage / mid-stage Celo-native builders

  2. Attract larger, already-proven protocols and serious TVL onto Celo

Those are both important. They are not the same motion.

Right now, the 10,000 daily tx bar and fixed $25k / $50k framing push Prezenti into an awkward middle:

  • Too demanding / misaligned for the majority of credible Celo-native and MiniPay-aligned teams who are still compounding up from hundreds → thousands → tens of thousands of tx per month, not per day.

  • Not nearly aggressive or bespoke enough to move the needle for serious external protocols who have options across ecosystems and negotiate on economics, liquidity, and distribution.

So we end up with: strong language, strong intent, thin pipeline.

Instead of only tweaking numbers (10k per day → 10k per month), I’d frame this as a scope question:

Is Prezenti Season 1 meant to be (A) a surgical instrument for strategic/established “protocols”, or (B) a precision funnel for emerging winners on Celo — or are we accidentally mixing the two?

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5

Just for clarity. The rewards are in cUSD rather than Celo but thank you for the input as it is still relevant.

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6

To be frank, I am not really surprised to see this post. When Season 1 was first announced a few months back, it was clear that only a handful of projects would be eligible for larger grants.

As Ubeswap, we were very disappointed for being rejected even though we met the criteria and proposed a DeFi flywheel which was one of the examples of TVL growth. I believe the evaluation process should be more flexible and teams should be allowed to build on their proposals with the feedback from the Prezenti team.

Reducing the daily tx number when defining the stages seems to be the best option moving forward. It will be more inclusive for many of the key players mentioned above.

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Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, @H.Sarikurt. We appreciate the feedback - especially the view that transaction thresholds should be reduced. That point has come through from several teams and is something we’ve already been discussing internally.

Since you also raised your disappointment with our decision around Ubeswap’s application, we want to reply here and clarify our reasoning - the same reasoning we shared privately.

On the concept of a “flywheel"

The term gets used a lot in crypto, often incorrectly. A flywheel is a self-reinforcing system that, once started, becomes increasingly efficient and self-propelling. An incentives program that leaks value as soon as rewards stop is not a flywheel - it’s a temporary subsidy that tends to attract short-term mercenary liquidity. We’ve all seen this play out across ecosystems for years.

This is not a critique of the team’s excellent and ongoing contributions to Celo - Ubeswap is a core piece of the ecosystem’s infrastructure. But for Season 1, with narrow Intents and strict capital allocation, we have to weigh marginal impact, redundancy with other existing programs, and whether the proposal creates new growth rather than recycling the same liquidity.

You raise a good point about the current process. With tighter criteria in place, it may make sense to offer more visible support to promising teams that fall just short. We’ll take this into consideration for the next phase.

For anyone interested in viewing any of the grant applications, you can find all proposals available here. CharmVerse - The Network for Onchain Communities