Celo mainnet turned five this week! We have a lot to celebrate as a community, as Rene highlighted in his post “Celebrating Celo’s Five Years & Vision 2030: A Trillion-Dollar Onchain Economy Built on Celo & a Battle For Crypto’s Soul.” We hope this can serve as a North Star for our ecosystem as it becomes continuously more decentralized and autonomous through strong onchain governance and tightly aligned community partners and initiatives.
At the beginning of the year, we kicked off a Governance Evolution workstream to refine what governance looks like post-L2 migration. It introduced Season 0 which runs from January to June 2025 to lay down the groundwork and establish the foundation for the community to move towards this new cadence. With Season 0 just over halfway now, I wanted to provide an update on what has happened in the past three months and share some next steps in this evolution.
First of all, I want to acknowledge the biggest milestone so far this season: Celo’s successful migration to an L2 and coming hope to Ethereum! You can read more about it in Marek’s post Celo L2 Mainnet Is Live — An L2 for the Real World, Secured by Ethereum.
As Marek shared in his post, now that Celo is a true Ethereum L2, we join a shared roadmap focused on rollups and modular scalability, which marks our long-standing alignment with Ethereum’s values, vision, and future. As a parallel to the technical protocol, we as a community also join a shared ecosystem, and governance is a key part of how we will grow it over the next few years. Moving to a seasonal model and aligning governance around the same vision and objectives is the social and coordination layer of the protocol.
Phase 1 of S0 so far has focused on building alignment between community initiatives and Celo Foundation, as well as transitioning existing community teams to this new cadence. Ecosystem and Community proposals that have passed through governance during this season have a mandate to grow the ecosystem until the end of the Season, and upon completion, will be able to contribute to a joint retrospective and planning for Season 1.
As highlighted by Rene in his “Vision 2023,” as Celo Foundation becomes more precise in its prioritization and execution, we have community partners performing many of the key ecosystem functions enabled by Celo Governance.
Celo Governance is how we collectively make decisions in the interest of growing a thriving ecosystem around the Celo protocol. Our ecosystem and community are made up of builders, companies, users, and other ecosystem players that contribute to the growth of Celo’s onchain economy. At the moment, Celo Governance is made up of several types of proposals and decision types, including technical proposals, ecosystem proposals, and Mento governance proposals (ahead of Mento finalizing their own governance transition). Technical proposals will continue on the usual cadence to align with the engineering timeline driven by cLabs.
Funding proposals and Seasons are how our ecosystem can organize and coordinate resources to work towards the goals outlined in Vision 2030. Below is the map of ecosystem initiatives that have been funded through the Celo community treasury in Season 0. For a more in-depth look at the overall state of treasury and previous proposals, please refer to the State of Celo Community Treasury | Q1 2025.
Community & Ecosystem Growth
The following proposals are enabling ecosystem and community growth through incentives, funding (grants, retroactive funding), incubation, and programs to grow regional communities in Season 0 and beyond.
- CGP 160 – Celo Regional Council Season 0 – Established a council of Regional DAOs. Each DAO has a budget and unique set of objectives and initiatives.
- CGP 161 – CeloPG Season 0 – Includes Builder Rewards Round and Retro Governance Round
- CGP 162 – Stabila Funding Request Aave Liquidity & Incentives
- CGP 165 – Celo Communities Guild Proposal 2025 Season 0
- CGP 168 – Budget Request: Prezenti Grant funding: Season 0
- CGP 170 – Authorize 2nd half of Minipay Strategic Grant
- CGP 176 – Celo Camp 2025 Season 0-1 Proposal
Technical Proposals
The following proposals enabled a successful migration of Celo to an Layer 2 on Ethereum.
- CGP 164 – The Great Celo Halvening Temperature check
- CGP 166 – Contracts Release 12
- CGP 167 – Set Parameters for L2 transition
- CGP 169 – Set The Great Celo Halvening Parameters
- CGP 171 – Celo L2’s Security Council
- CGP 175 Introducing Celo Core Contracts Hotfix Security Council
Mento Proposals
Mento saw a significant number of new stablecoins added this Season continuing to cement Celo as the home of stablecoins on Ethereum.
- CGP 159 – Adding oracles to support cGHS
- CGP 163 – Launch of the cGHS Stablecoin
- CGP 173 – Supply Liquidity to Aave via Mento Reserve
- CGP 174 – cGHS Name Update
- CGP 177 – Adding oracles to support GBP, AUD, CAD, CHF, ZAR
- CGP 178 – Launch of the cGBP, cAUD, cZAR & cCAD Stablecoins
Up Next for Season 0
There are several key areas of focus for the next few months that will contribute to setting us up for a successful Season 1. If you are interested in contributing to any of these, we are always looking for feedback and collaboration, please share in the comments below.
Continuing to Strengthen Our Delegation Program
There are now over 70 delegates registered on Celo Mondo, with many actively participating by voting and leaving thoughtful comments on proposals. Here are some actionable steps you can take to contribute to making Celo governance more distributed and resilient. If you hold Celo and are not actively voting on proposals, consider delegating your voting power to one of the delegates on this list! If you are interested in becoming a delegate, you can register here.
Creating the Scope for Season 1
Season 1 is around the corner, and up next is kicking off planning for what will be the scope of Season 1 with the goal of kicking off the season in early July. Below are action items and proposed owners for the scoping process.
- Define the Season’s Intent: determine a set of strategic objectives that align with Celo’s long- term vision but offer actionable steps for the ecosystem to work towards over the period of 6 months — Celo Foundation driving, Feedback Committee providing input and recommendations.
- Define a Set of Initiatives: Outline a set of initiatives that will work towards the intent — Community Proposed
- Align Funding with Strategic Objectives: outline a spending budget for Ecosystem Funding Proposals for the period of 6 months (July-December 2025) — Celo Foundation, Feedback Committee
- Ratify Season 1 Scope: ratify the proposed scope through onchain voting — Celo Governance
Continue Bridging Community Initiatives and Celo Foundation
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received through focus groups is that community-funded initiatives are often siloed and working in isolation. Part of the Governance workstream, there are now weekly meetings with Regional DAO Council with presentations from teams within Celo Foundation including Ecosystem, DevRel, and MarComms. We are also working closely with Prezenti to scope the evolution of grants to best serve builders. Close alignment between the Celo Foundation and community-driven initiatives will be a key part of Season 1.
Governance evolution is an ongoing effort and as always, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below and get involved in the discussion!
