I think this post captures something essential: that focus creates the conditions for meaningful change. The decision to pause fragmented spending while the Tokenomics Initiative takes shape feels like wise stewardship.
I’m particularly excited by the timing. In the earlier tokenomics thread, I proposed what I called the “Prosperity Engine”, a model where gas paid/burns mint decaying, non-transferable “Gas Credits” that give users routing power over protocol yield, rather than just claiming passive rewards. The idea was to turn network usage into protocol “ownership”, creating what I even called a kind of “Universal Basic Equity”. Since then, I’ve been building a working prototype: ProsperON
ProsperON implements a core loop:
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Burn: All historical gas usage and voluntary CELO burns are indexed
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Mint: Burned CELO converts to Prosper Credits (with 2% weekly decay)
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Pool: An endowment generates yield (stablecoins via Aave or any yield solution in other chains for net positive liquidity flow)
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Allocate: Users steer yield, through their credit-weighted share, across ecosystem priorities (as them seem fit), for example: Users (40% default): Rebates, perks, community distribution; Builders (40% default): Gas sponsorship, growth incentives; Public Goods (20% default): Infrastructure, tooling, audits, etc.
The decay mechanism is crucial and often misunderstood. It’s not punishment, but what makes the system regenerative. Influence must be continuously earned through network participation (and/or CELO recurring voluntary burns), not captured once and held forever. This prevents early dominance and creates natural counter-cyclicality: when CELO price (or network activity) drops, the same USD gas spend burns more tokens and each transaction drives higher influence, making routing power “cheaper” to acquire (and usage incentives become more significant), precisely when the network needs the most. More details on this How it Works page.
What excites me about Season 2’s direction is that it creates space for proposals like this to be evaluated properly, grounded in data, not hype. ProsperON Season 0 is intentionally centralized as a validation sandbox. All inputs are on-chain verifiable (Celo transactions), and all calculations are auditable. The goal is to generate real data on:
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How users respond to decay mechanics;
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Whether steering (routing power) motivates continued participation vs. passive extraction;
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How a “mid-level” credit-weighted governance affects further proposals and decision-making quality;
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Whether “allocator competition” can replace grant committees with skin-in-the-game conviction;
If the Tokenomics Initiative is interested in exploring PCARE-inspired models (as @ddd suggested, citing Puja Ohlhaver), ProsperON can serve as a live testing ground. Not as the answer, but as one experiment that the community can observe, critique, and build upon.
The shift from “grant-dependent” to “proof-of-conviction” economics won’t happen through theory alone. It needs prototypes that fail fast and learn faster.
Happy to share the codebase, open-source the mechanics and calculation logic, and collaborate with whoever is stewarding the tokenomics research in Phase 2. The goal isn’t to push a particular solution, but to contribute with additional data points towards the economic foundation that will power Celo’s next decade.
Building together. 