The Celo Foundation, a nonprofit supporting the development of the Celo open blockchain platform, recently announced a new grants program. Providing entrepreneurs with funds together with mentorship to projects which are accelerating technical advancement and expanding the Celo ecosystem; the Celo Foundation grants program is an open source initiative where anyone is encouraged to apply.
Grants are located on four key areas:
- Fostering innovation and development of the Celo platform and Celo reference pockets.
- Lowering barriers to entry, encouraging the accessibility of Celo to programmers and end-users.
- Educating and expanding Celo’s international community.
- Expanding Celo’s accessibility, opportunity, as well as impact.
Following the Celo mainnet launching last year, the Celo community ecosystem has been growing. To date, the Celo Foundation grants program has encouraged 90+ projects in 54 countries, with a worth of $4.9M in funding across the last 3 waves. The last wave generated strong interest with over 170 applications.
Applications for Wave IV of Celo Foundation permits can be submitted here.
The deadline to submit applications is June 18, 2021.
The Celo Foundation is now happy to invite programmers, designers, dreamers, and doers throughout the world to work on some of the critical priorities for the Celo ecosystem. For ideas which are not represented at the list below, don’t hesitate to submit it join the #grants conversation on Discord for comments.
Lowering Barriers to Get
- On/off ramps: Proposals to supply users with more options to easily and compliantly purchase, sell, and utilize Celo assets; including cUSD and cEUR with fiat currencies.
- Multi-chain pockets: Proposals from multi-chain wallet providers to add Celo assets which will help join other electronic asset customers with Celo.
- Open APIs for accepting cUSD and cEUR online: Proposals to make it much easier for online merchants to take cUSD and for consumers to spend their cUSD and cEUR without having to go through an off-ramp. Also, related, proposals for eCommerce plugins that leverage APIs like WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
- Agent networks: To promote financial inclusion, agent networks play a key role in educating users and giving them access to crypto-assets, Agent networks in some of the key emerging markets to foster the use and adoption of Celo can additionally benefit the bigger Celo Community.
DeFi
- Community funding platform: Entrepreneurs on the Celo platform will gain from having the ability to increase funding compliantly and at a low cost. Proposals might include building a compliant platform which incentivizes liquidity providers and founders to take part in mission-aligned projects within the Celo ecosystem.
- Lending/borrowing platforms: Funding platforms can help Celo’s core mission of building financial inclusion. Zero collateral and undercollateralized loans are particularly intriguing as well as solutions that support credit markets such as credit rating, and insurance.
- Liquidity management: Tools which help automate different strategies to control liquidity for digital assets.
- DeFi aggregators: One of the hurdles to DeFi adoption is understanding and accessibility from customers. DeFi aggregators can simplify the user experience around interacting with DeFi protocols.
- Tokenization of distinct asset categories: NFTs are being used to empower new asset classes on blockchains. The Celo Foundation would love to see more research around how to make and deploy new types of asset classes on Celo.
- DAOs: Mechanisms that enable collective ownership between creators, publishers, and their audiences.
- Social networking platforms: Platforms which influence societal relationships to enable cooperation between artists, creators, and their audience to induce co-creation, showcase, and exchange NFTs.
Payments
- Credit cards and physical card-based options: Proposals that empower Celo users to earn rewards and/or spend Celo assets using payment cards.
- Decentralized market and/or use instances: allowing and educating buyers and sellers to interact and transact at a trusted, permissionless way.
- Integrate payments with SMS/iOS messenger: More ways to transact through the Celo network through familiar interfaces to encourage accessibility.
Promoting Celo Adoption
- Online directory at which Celo can be obtained anyplace : As the community develops more ways to get Celo assets, a frequently updated online directory could be great for consumers to know where they can get CELO, cUSD, and cEUR within their area.
- Earning programs. Proposals that assist users to earn Celo assets, by way of instance, microwork.
- Referral, rewards, and cashback programs: Proposals that empower Celo customers to refer their friends and family, transact, and earn rewards using Celo assets.
Education
- Localized specialized and non technical education and tutorials: Educational programs in native languages, namely programs in Tagalog/Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Turkish, and German, but all are welcome. Priority will be given to technical education for programmers that are new to blockchain and Web3.
- Incentivized and gamified-learning programs: Learning something new and technically complex can be challenging — that’s why the Celo Foundation would love to see programs that incentivize learning and/or leverage gameplay dynamics.
- Content and schooling: Create and promote mobile-friendly programs that showcase the possibility of Celo technology and its mobile-first strategy. Some use cases for content include community monies, natural asset-backed monies, and international basic income (UBI). Blockchain nevertheless presents high obstacles of accessibility, and also the Celo Foundation is looking for suggestions to help overcome these obstacles and make it easy for all to get the advantages of Web3. Especially ideas that aim retailers and remittance consumers in emerging markets.
- University student clubs: The Celo Foundation would love to support student classes worldwide in developing blockchain education programs and curriculum depending on their needs.
- Community-based options: The Celo Foundation is interested in supporting teams which are working on any of the given requests through Extensive community-based solutions.
Technical
- Offline trades: Support for offline or local network trades in the Celo blockchain customer for use in pockets with low connectivity. By way of instance, this will permit a user without internet access to send a transaction via a merchant’s retail POS or phone; using NFC, Bluetooth, or even 2 QR code scans.
- Privacy (identity and trades ): The Celo Foundation is interested in R&D and implementations around compliant ways to conserve privacy as it pertains to on-chain identities and trades.
- Plumo provers: Plumo requires participants who can contribute computational resources to run Plumo provers to create proofs and gossip them round the network.
Tooling
- Blockchain observation: The Celo Foundation is on the lookout for tools which make it easy for programmers to obey the Celo network and trigger different actions (possibly via webhooks).
- Block explorers: There are two or three popular Celo block explorers but obstruct explorer diversity is an significant part a wholesome blockchain network.
Research
- Local currency toolkit: Neighborhood currencies supported by blockchain technology have the potential to reshape and revitalize communities. The Celo Foundation would like to support teams which are investigating what this might look like and how to execute itas well as discuss their research with the broader blockchain and local currency communities.
- CBDC sandbox: Central bank electronic monies are coming online. How can central banks leverage public blockchain networks, and how are they onboarded? The Celo Foundation is seeking applications for projects which may help onboard central banks into Celo.
- Bond issuance sandbox: This is related to tokenizing different asset categories yet concentrated on how to issue bonds on Celo.
Timeline & Key Dates
- Program deadline: June 18, 2021.
To learn more:
Applications can be submitted here. For further information and any questions, email [email protected].
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