Celo's team are excited to announce Wave III of the Celo Foundation Grants Program. The program provides mission aligned entrepreneurs all over the world resources to launch their projects on Celo and connect to the thriving Celo Ecosystem.
Celo’s mission is to create an inclusive financial system that allows access to financial services for everyone. While much of the DeFi fervor is for speculative projects, there are projects that are truly bringing lending and market access to participants. The Foundation would like to support this budding ecosystem that would both support Celo’s system through even more efficient decentralization and algorithmic arbitrage, but also set the stage for a robust financial ecosystem in the years to come. Team believe in the long term vision of Open Finance, with composable tools that are accessible to all.
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The Celo Foundation would like to support wallet developers to help build a robust wallet ecosystem. Improvements to the Ledger hardware wallet application and supporting a user-friendly Ledger interface is important. Developer and web-based wallets such as MetaMask will make it easier to develop decentralized applications on Celo. Plugins for Shopify and other merchant platforms are also highlighted, to make it easier for cUSD to be used in daily transactions.
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Developers, developers, developers you know the drill! There is a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of supporting developers. Without being too explicit, if your proposal makes life easier for Celo developers, the Foundation would like to support you.
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Celo Native Asset (CELO) holders have the benefit of being able to vote for validator groups and on-chain governance proposals. This is also a responsibility, to ensure that the network gets the broadest participation and remains decentralized. Currently, using the CLI to vote is challenging for non-technical users. This category is to support all projects related to improving voting UX and increasing access to governance for all CELO holders.
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Calling all protocol developers! The Celo blockchain client is a fork of go-ethereum (Geth), and there are many projects upstream that could be ported over to support Celo. The Foundation would also like to support projects that could help improve Geth, so that Celo can contribute back to the Ethereum community. Additional projects recommended include improving validator tooling.
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Celo is still young — Mainnet has only been live for around 6 months. Even so, developers and validators are eager to get raw chain data structured and into their applications. This category is to support all apps and services that make it easy to connect to Celo nodes, observe and listen to on-chain transactions and events, and extract relevant data to be used in applications. Reliable services with clean and accessible APIs for data monitoring and retrieval are highly recommended for projects in this category.
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A large population in the world lacks access to financial products & services. Improving access to Celo is one of the most important pieces to achieving mission of building an open financial system that creates conditions of prosperity for all. Team believe that by reducing the friction, team can create radical financial inclusion for the next billion people.
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Team believe in supporting the exploration of new and innovative uses of Celo. Grant applicants are welcome to focus on any area that excites them. Solutions that greatly expand the number of people who interact with Celo currencies are priorities. Below are some categories team'd love to get submissions in:
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Team believe that communities can onboard more people onto Celo through creative initiatives designed for and by the community. Team’re interested in proposals that will onboard the next million users into the Celo ecosystem.
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Awakening belief in and understanding of Celo through tailored educational efforts for your community.
Team are seeding decentralized “creator” communities around Celo — talented individuals who educate, engage, and tell stories of and with Celo through a variety of mediums to their already existing audience(s). Proposals that reach: Web2 developers who could be interested in crypto, Web3 developers who are new to Celo, entrepreneurs, other creators, and tech-forward youth in emerging markets are of particular interest. Solid proposals focus on your community: what their needs are, what they want to learn, and how you’re going to help get them there. The Celo Foundation has some resources and tools to help you get started, however creativity and fresh thinking is actively encouraged! Think big, small, and everywhere in between.
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Submit your application here. If you have any questions, feel free to email grants@celo.org.