This is the first in a series of articles aimed at sharing with the community our vision of the future of Mento, and what we are doing to bring this vision to life at Mento Labs.

Mento Labs is a digital asset solutions company, a team of economists, engineers, and web3 experts dedicated to the development of the transparent Mento platform. Mento Labs is a spin-off from cLabs, the core developer company working on Celo.

We imagine a future where all sorts of financial tools and currencies, both local and global, work together. This diverse mix of tools is like a versatile Swiss army knife, helping to build economies that are efficient, sustainable, and really make a difference.

While some might argue this reality already exists, we believe it's evident that the majority of these financial tools are only within reach of a small population subset, with prohibitive barriers to entry for most. The behemoth currencies, though more widely available, still lack sufficient accessibility and tend to draw away economic potential from regions already grappling with hardship. As a society, we can and should strive to do better.

There is a long road ahead to reach the financial solarpunk utopia we dream of. One way to get there is through experimentation. By enabling wider access to core building blocks, we can create a larger pool of people who are willing to launch and run these experiments.

At Mento Labs, we see Mento as a helpful platform that makes it easy to create and manage transparent digital assets. We're planning to develop Mento into a set of easy-to-use tools, helping innovators and tinkerers come up with innovative and robust financial instruments that both serve their ideas, but at the same time are compliant with all regulatory and legal obligations.

These tools include: network of decentralized oracles providing data feed for wide range of real world assets that we are developing in partnership with Redstone; adding to our arsenal modern CDP module to allow borrowing stablecoins into existence; frontend interfaces for end users and analytics solutions; liquidity program aiming to make it easy to exchange between assets that are part of the platform.

Our commitment is to continually simplify the platform's usability, thereby democratizing financial experimentation. Mento intends to provide the fundamental components, freeing entrepreneurs to focus on their strengths - cultivating audiences and promoting product adoption.

If your product needs a different kind of currency solution, not just US-dollar pegged stablecoins, Mento has got you covered. You can launch a stable asset that follows your local fiat currency, or even a mix of different currencies, giving your core business a boost and encouraging other entrepreneurs from the region to build new products for the same audience.

Interested in launching a community currency to rejuvenate the local economy? Mento can assist you with infrastructure to launch new currency and back it with tokenized real world assets that resonate with your people.

Mento's goal is to be a versatile toolkit, enabling anyone - individuals, businesses, local governments - to build their own decentralized and transparent financial systems.

But it’s not just about providing the basics, a significant aspect of the platform involves incentivizing and aligning issuers, contributors, and users. Portions of the platform's revenue might be redistributed to contributors and issuers. The revenue stream will also be directed into the protocol treasury, which can be utilized by the community to fund continued development and initiate new ventures.

The envisioned Mento platform will adopt a layered governance model. This will enable individuals to maintain their stake with the asset they're chiefly invested in while participating in global governance of the platform.

This is a very optimistic and high-level outline of what we want Mento to become. In upcoming articles, I will be sharing more specific details about how we propose to implement different parts of this vision, including aspects like governance, revenue streams, token and reserve design.

We would like to hear your views on this. Follow @MentoLabs and @olenovyk on Twitter and join our Discord community to discuss (chat.mento.org).