As director of Funding the Commons and a Celo Scout, I’ve spent some time studying how public goods funding mechanisms succeed and fail across dozens of ecosystems, and years on the ground with founders operating at and beyond the edges of the financial system. I don’t believe any of the three options truly serve the Celo ecosystem’s highest good, and I want to explain why from a PGF perspective.
This doesn’t appear to be cost reduction. It appears to be reallocation from transparent to opaque.
Will Ruddick and David Dao have made this point clearly: the CELO being “saved” doesn’t disappear. To my understanding, it redirects flows to programs like CCF (which faces serious community concerns about accountability) and programs like CICLOPS - currently spending approximately $3M per six months under NDA, without public accounting of recipients or outcomes.
If we genuinely want to cut costs, the proper order would be to do a full audit before cutting. Then cut where the lowest ROI actually is. From my perspective, this would be efficient public goods funding administration. What we’re doing here instead is eliminating the one spending category that’s fully transparent, permissionless, and community-verified.
Validators are decentralized community investment, not “spending”.
Validator rewards aren’t payroll. They’re a mechanism that lets the community express preferences through staking. They’re how Celo maintains infrastructure at the edges - in Kenya, Nigeria, etc - where Forno isn’t a real answer.
Celo was built for real-world use. As the first Celo Scout, and later as director of Funding the Commons, I’ve been working with UNDP, UNICEF, and builders from East Africa to LatAm to Southeast Asia. If the network doesn’t function at the edges - resilient, decentralized, locally maintained - then who cares if it works in San Francisco? I have Visa and Stripe and Venmo and ACH and SWIFT, and a stable fiat currency regime. The people Celo aims to serve often don’t.
Grassroots Economics and other validators reinvest rewards into liquidity pools that drive actual on-the-ground transactions. That’s not an expense - that’s ROI.
The validator community doesn’t just run nodes - they show up to governance calls, file bug reports, build tooling, and create the coordination layer that makes Celo governable. That’s not overhead. That’s the difference between a living ecosystem and a corporate service.
The sequencing is backwards.
PGF Mechanism design: don’t tear down the old system before you’ve built and validated the new one. ie where is the decentralized sequencer? The transparent allocation mechanism? The public dashboard showing CCF outcomes? The audits of spending across the system?
We’re cutting the one funding mechanism that is working in a transparent, permissionless, community-governed way - one that creates operational resilience for the network itself - and replacing it with something that hasn’t yet been proven out.
What I’d support:
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Transparency first: Publish full CCF/CICLOPS spending before any reallocation.
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Audit before cuts: Let the community see actual ROI across all spending categories, then decide where to reduce.
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Honor the L2 commitment: Validators were told they’d transition to decentralized sequencer roles. Keep them whole until that’s live and proven.
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Rule-based adjustments: If we need flexibility, implement @Dee’s circuit-breaker proposal - price-band triggers with automatic reinstatement rules.
I don’t depend on Celo validator fees. But I’ve seen what the validator community produces, and I’ve seen what opaque grant programs produce. In my experience, transparent mechanisms consistently outperform opaque ones.
David Casey CEO @ Funding the Commons, Celo Scout