Celo Foundation Grants Program Wave III

Details

Timeline and Key Dates

• Application Deadline: November 6
• Interviews: November 16–20
• Official Announcement: December 14th

Technical & Research

DeFi Tooling

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.

Examples:

• Work to support oracle decentralization
• Crypto trading bots: integrating CELO and cUSD
• Developing DeFi middleware (lending platforms, automated market makers) on Celo
• Open APIs for accepting cUSD online

Wallets and Celo Dollar (cUSD) Integrations

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.

Examples:

• Web UI for Celo Ledger application
• Secure smart contract wallet
• Improving the Celo Ledger application (i.e. improve messages and addresses displayed when sending transactions or interacting with network contracts on the Ledger)
• Support for Celo on MetaMask
• Support for offline or local network transactions in the celo-blockchain client for use in wallets with low connectivity (i.e. allow a user without access to internet to send a transaction via a merchant’s PoS or phone using NFC, bluetooth, or 2 QR code scans
• Plugins for Shopify and other popular eCommerce platforms for store owners to accept cUSD as payment method
• Integration with iOS Messenger Services
• Lightweight cUSD custody services to integrate in Celo ecosystem wallets.
• Smart light client <-> full node peering based on gateway fee market (using Celo’s full node incentive protocol)

Developer Tools

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.

Examples:

• Celo web IDE for smart contract development in Solidity. Remix.ethereum.org works if connected to a Celo node, but is focused on supporting Ethereum devs. A remix plugin to support development for Celo could be a great addition.
• Meta-transaction services / relayers, which allows developers to use service to have frictionless onboarding/UX

CELO Holder Voting Tools

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.

Examples:

• Tool for all things governance, including submitting proposals (UI form that can create a JSON that adheres to the proposal structure), viewing current and past proposals, and voting by connecting Ledger or using Celo ecosystem wallets / Dappkit
• Services that could provide guidance on how to vote for Celo validator groups and offers a one-click voting experience (shows transparent criteria, allows users to set risk tolerance, etc.) (allows following the Celo Foundation Voting Program)
• “Pre-proposal” off-chain governance tooling for CELO holders to view proposals before committing to votes on-chain (i.e. Politeia from the Decred ecosystem, or Snapshot from Balancer)

Protocol Research and Validator Tooling

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.

Examples:

• Add Wasm support to Celo, by porting over current EWasm work
• Investigating and improving performance of the EVM
• Bridging to Celo & bringing other assets on-chain
• Develop threshold signature scheme for Celo validators (i.e. similar to Polychain’s scheme for Cosmos)

Celo Blockchain Data Tooling

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.

Examples:

• Service to listen to events and provide webhook notifications
• Service that indexes and serves fast access to archival data from the Celo core smart contracts and blockchain
• Community block explorers
• API Gateway provider with hosted remote nodes

Ecosystem Support & Community

Lower barriers to access Celo

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.

Examples:

• Solutions for feature phones & physical cards
• Credit cards
• On / off ramps
• APIs for cUSD to fiat conversion
• Online directory of where Celo is available locally

New use cases on Celo

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:

Examples:

• Solutions for Merchants — Point of Sale, Inventory
• Earning — Pensions, Micro Tasks & Freelancing
• Saving — Interest, Micro Savings, Gamified
• Lending — Credit Scoring, P2P Lending, Loan Groups, B2B Lending Solutions
• Local Economies & Local Currencies (e.g. Crypto Sardex)
• Decentralized Marketplaces
• Tokenized Assets

Promote use of Celo in Your Community

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.

Examples:

• Earning programs
• Referral, Rewards and Cash Back
• Agent Networks
• P2P Marketplaces

Celo Education and Tutorials

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.

Examples:

• Creating content and education for Web2 developers, Web3 developers, and entrepreneurs to learn and build on the Celo Platform
• Hosting events and initiatives to grow the creator community around Celo
• Researching and designing a creator incentive system that is in-line with Celo’s mission, values, and tenets. What behaviors are you incentivizing? How is work compensated? What is in service of the long term health of the Celo network?
• Increasing awareness of the Celo Platform, CELO, and cUSD through localized content for your local audience in emerging markets
• Content and education that is designed and built for mobile-only (Celo is a mobile-first platform, what if education was mobile-first?)

Getting Started

• Check out Celo developer resources
• Read about latest updates
• Join the community on the Discord #grants channel

Next Steps

Submit your application here. If you have any questions, feel free to email [email protected].