Introducing Prezenti

Prezenti, is a new grants organization that is taking over the helm of stewarding some (800,000 CELO) of the funds accumulated on-chain in the Community Fund. This spend approval is for Prezenti to take over responsibility from the first disbursements team - CCF1.

The Celo Community Fund 1 was initially conceived by three awesome community members Patrick (Moola), Deepak (Kresko) and Dee (USOPP). They provided 43 grantees with a total of $1.9m cUSD. Prezenti draws inspiration from them as well as utilizing their enormous technical and administrative knowledge base.

Prezenti are: Wade Abel, Aaron Boyd, and Maya Richardson-Brown and you can read about our experience and interests in our original introductory forum post here. Through the Celo Governance Proposal #61, which passed in late June 2022, the Celo community helped us establish the 2nd phase stewardship of the Community Fund, allowing us 800k CELO to grant to those working on the Celo ecosystem.

Our vision, like Celo’s, is prosperity for all.

Some of the very early optimism and ideologies of blockchain as a movement have largely been under-developed and under-realized. Recently, there’s been a focus on market profiteering and purely extractive practices: DeFi shell games, private investing, rate of return, staking, and so on. Prezenti’s remit is to get back to basics: funding more projects focused on supporting accessible, global, affordable and open, financial sovereignty.

The on-chain Community Fund is open to all Celo community members across the world to apply for assistance bringing their vision to fruition. However, on-chain governance is a fairly slow and difficult process. The idea is that by having a large, already pre-approved tranche of CELO available to be managed by the Prezenti team, we can shortcut the long time it would normally take any individual project to gain CELO voter support for (relatively) small spend proposals.

We are delighted to announce that Prezenti grants are now open for applications! Broad (but not limited to) focus areas are listed below.

Education

Examples may include: Creating educational content (for users, builders and any sector looking to use Celo) or hosting Celo-related talks. We are also open to considering other great teams/projects that might be beneficial to Celo’s mission/ecosystem.

Why is this important?

• Trust of blockchain and digital assets in general is still an issue, globally

• Blockchain does have the ability to make people’s lives easier - payments, remittances, etc - “Prosperity for all”

• Blockchain monoculture to date hasn’t catered for all - we want to support expanding involvement, information access, and perception, with a focus on gender inclusion and cultural sensitivities.

Research

Examples may include: Support to people and projects that want to conduct research. This can include both technical and non-technical areas relevant to Celo.

Why is this important?

Research is key to getting Celo adopted more globally:

• Technical / economic research

• Market research / surveys

• Academia / university students

Community Tooling

Examples may include desktop, browser, or hardware wallets, developer tools, governance voting applications, block explorers, validator metrics dashboards, localization etc.

Why is this important?

• Engaging and beautiful tooling is the gateway to the ecosystem. We want the adoption journey to be as smooth as possible. An example would be Questbook, this tool is a huge improvement in allowing grants to be easy to administer (spoiler: we proudly use their service).

Other

Anything else aligned with Celo’s mission, and that is not easily funded through other means. This may include bounties and other administrative upgrades Prezenti will offer for tender that help the administrative process run as smoothly and hands-free as possible.

More details on eligibility, requirements and processes can be found on our website. Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog posts about our monthly grant submissions.

Prezenti’s grants program is supported by Questbook, a fully on-chain grant management platform and all grant milestones will be disbursed through Questbook.

For questions about our grants, please be sure to read our grant kit or contact admin@prezenti.xyz.

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