• DeFi
• NFTs, Creator Economy & Games
• Lowering barriers to access
• Regenerative Economics
• Interoperability
• Web 3 Infrastructure & Developer Tooling
• Other Areas to Consider
• Education & Community Building
• Promote use of Celo
• Blockchain Ecosystem Inspired Projects

DeFi

• Community funding platform: Entrepreneurs on the Celo platform would benefit from being able to raise funding compliantly and at low cost. Proposals may include building a compliant platform that incentivizes liquidity providers and founders to participate in mission aligned projects within the Celo ecosystem.
• DeFi Middleware: Lending platforms, Automated Market Makers on Celo.
• Liquidity management. Tools that help automate different strategies to manage liquidity for digital assets.
• DeFi aggregators: One of the hurdles to DeFi adoption is accessibility and understanding from users. DeFi aggregators can simplify the user experience around interacting with DeFi protocols.
• Tokenization of different asset classes: We’re starting to see how NFTs are being used to enable new asset classes on blockchains—and we’re just beginning to explore what’s possible. We would like to see more research around how to create and deploy new types of asset classes on Celo.
• DeFi Dashboard: Tracking a portfolio position overtime on any of the major AMM models currently requires a separate spreadsheet. Building a tool which tracks on chain transactions plus a LP token balance would make yield farming more approachable to newcomers.
• Undercollateralized Credit: A leading strategy for undercollateralized lending is “delegated credit.” Consider applications that allow holders of cUSD to delegate them to other entities. This is a critical building block to driving down costs of capital in emerging markets and efficient undercollateralized credit. You may consider a borrowing pool from which a microfinance institution could draw and dynamically adjust the amount of funds they are able to distribute.
• Hedging for cStable Pairs: As Celo moves to release more cStable pairs in addition to cUSD and cEUR borrows and lenders will need tools to hedge volatility between currency pairs.
• Derivatives Exchange
• B2B Lending
• Credit Scoring
• Insurance
• Auto-compounding for LPs - Liquidity pooling rewards often require multiple steps: claim, swap, pool, stake to farm. Can this process be automated? Consider designing in such a way that hardware wallets can easily and securely interact.

NFTs, Creator Economy & Games

• Marketplace: Platforms for creators to launch their work directly to their communities using Celo blockchain
• Social media platforms: Platforms that leverage social relationships to enable collaboration between artists, creators, and their audience and also to drive co-creation, showcase and exchange NFTs.
• Social Game: Celo's decentralized phone verification protocol can act as a lightweight sybil resistance mechanism that can make certain game mechanics possible that are not possible on other platforms. For example, in a multiplayer game where inviting others to the game might be considered valuable (e.g. to grow a clan that acts together to fight against other clans), decentralized phone verification makes it harder for someone to write bots that create lots of users to artificially boost one's army. This idea is about connecting with Valora and leveraging its phone verification onboarding to create a mobile game where inviting other players to the game is incentivized (e.g. with a game token) and part of the game mechanic.
• Incentivized and gamified-learning programs: Learning something new and technically complex can be challenging—that’s why we would like to see programs that incentivise learning and/or leverage gameplay dynamics.
• DAOs: Mechanisms that enable collective ownership between creators, publishers, and their audiences.
• Community-based solution: In addition, the Celo Foundation is interested in supporting teams that are working on any of the given requests through inclusive community-based solutions.

Lowering barriers to access

• On/off ramps: Options to easily and compliantly purchase, sell, and use Celo assets, particularly cUSD and cEUR with fiat currencies.
• Online directory where Celo is available locally: As the community develops more ways to access Celo assets, a regularly updated online directory would be helpful for users to know where they can access CELO, cUSD, and cEUR in their region.
• Multi-chain wallets: Multi-chain wallet providers to add Celo assets that will help connect other digital asset users with Celo.
• Open APIs for accepting cUSD and cEUR online: Proposals to make it easier for online merchants to start accepting cUSD and for people to spend their cUSD and cEUR without having to go through an off-ramp.
• E-commerce plugins that leverage open 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 promote use and adoption of Celo can further benefit the larger Celo Community.
• ACH Transfer
• Credit cards and physical card-based solutions: Proposals that enable Celo users to earn rewards and/or spend Celo assets using payment cards.
• Decentralized marketplace and/or use cases allowing and educating buyers and sellers to interact and transact in a trusted, permissionless way.
• Integrate payments with SMS/iOS messenger: More ways to transact via the Celo network through familiar interfaces to encourage accessibility.

Regenerative Economics

• Natural Capital Tokens. We’d like to include high-quality, liquid, natural capital tokens in the Celo reserve. How can we tokenize carbon credits, ensuring that they are high-quality, liquid, and fungible? How can we tokenize other ecological service credits, such as plastic credits, and develop retail markets for them? How can we create NFTs that represent forest or other ecological assets?
• Oracles and monitoring. Bridging the off-chain and the on-chain world is a common challenge for regenerative web3 projects. How can modern climate tech communicate with smart contracts? How can we track the growth of a tree? How do I prove that a tokenized piece of rainforest remained untouched?
• Incentives and Collaborative Conservation. In 1987 a group of schoolchildren raised enough money to preserve 18,000 hectares of rainforest. What creative ways could you conceive of crowdfunding conservation efforts? Do fractionalized NFTs corresponding to particular coordinates make sense? A DAO? How might you incentivize water conservation? A tactile way to measure re-kelpification? Bounties for removing invasive species?
• Liquidity. For Natural Capital tokens, a liquid market is necessary for most uses. How can we increase liquidity of natural capital tokens? Dexes? Liquidity protocols? Marketplaces?
• Staking. There are many participants in a natural capital ecosystem; in the case of preserving forest, for example, there can be people who purchase the forest, and people who ensure that the forest remains preserved. Can we incentivize these various groups through staking analogies? For example, can we allow a forest NFT holder to “stake” a forest NFT to a project manager, who protects the forest and handles the project administration for earning carbon credits, in a way that tokenized carbon credits are split between the NFT holder and the project manager?
• Regenerative DeFi: We'd love for you to get radical and think about the financial infrastructure to support Natural Backed DeFi Projects. How might a DEX for forest NFT work? Can I provide liquidity into a carbon pool? How might I borrow cUSD against the carbon offsets generated by my garden?
• Stability-Enhancing Offsets: There are opportunities to make projects more ecological and at the same enhance the stability characteristics of the stablecoins that they use. Can we create protocols that allow projects to automatically direct a portion of fees (or yields) to purchasing ecological service credits, and then sends those purchased credits to the reserve?

Interoperability

• NFT bridge cross-chain application
• Cross-chain lending cross-chain application
• Optics block explorer
• Other tooling for users to use the bridge
• Agent monitoring and health dashboard for public
• Optics Xapps are cross-chain apps focused on Bridging:
• NFT Xapp - Build an Optics Xapp that allows the bridging of NFT smart-contracts from one chain to the other.
• Oracle Xapp - Trustlessly send a data feed from one chain to others using Optics

Web 3 Infrastructure & Developer Tooling

• Offline transactions: Support for offline or local network transactions in the Celo blockchain client for use in wallets with low connectivity. For example, this would allow a user without internet access to send a transaction via a merchant’s PoS or phone using NFC, Bluetooth, or 2 QR code scans.
• Privacy (identity and transactions): We are interested in R&D and implementations around compliant ways to preserve privacy as it relates to on-chain identities and transactions.
• Plumo provers: Plumo requires participants that can contribute computational resources to run Plumo provers to produce proofs and gossip them across the network.
• WASM Light Client: Celo has an incredibly efficient light client. It would be amazing if it could be compiled to WASM so that it could run in web apps allowing web-based dapps to connect with the network in a P2P fashion and therefore becoming more censorship and surveillance resistant. This would require compiling and linking the Go and Rust portions of the Celo client (light client only) to WASM.
• Efficient Light Client Gas Estimation: Celo's light client is particularly good for building truly decentralized mobile applications. Unfortunately, gas estimation gas can be expensive sometimes because of the way that a light client executes a smart contract locally and fetches the data it needs to do so in a sequential manner. It would be better if a full node could execute the same transaction locally to decipher all the data that needs to be sent to the light client in a bulk fashion.
• More SMS Providers: Celo has a decentralized phone verification protocol where elected validators run an Attestation Server that is randomly sampled to send verification text messages. Currently, validators use MessageBird, Twilio, and Nexmo to send verification text messages to new users getting onboarded onto the platform. Unfortunately, these providers don't work in some markets (e.g. China, Brazil, etc). It would be compelling to add provider bindings to additional SMS providers so that more markets can be reliably covered.
• CELO Holder Staking Tools
• Off-chain voting like Snapshot
• Multi-token voting like Snapshot
• Native Mobile SDKs
• User-friendly browsers

Other Areas to Consider

Education & Community Building

• Localized technical and non-technical education and tutorials: Educational programs in native languages, specifically. programs in Tagalog/Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Turkish, and German, but all are welcome. Priority will be given to technical education for developers who are new to blockchain and Web3.
• Content and education: Create and promote mobile-friendly programs that showcase the potential of Celo technology and its mobile-first approach. Some use cases for content include community currencies, natural asset-backed currencies, and universal basic income.
• Increasing awareness of the Celo Platform, CELO, cUSD, and cEUR: Help the community onboard the next 1 billion Celo users. Blockchain still presents high barriers of access, and we are looking for ideas to help overcome these barriers and make it easy for everyone to access the benefits of Web3. We are especially looking for ideas that target merchants and remittance users in emerging markets.
• University student clubs: We would love to support student groups worldwide to build the blockchain education programs and curriculum they want according to their needs.

Promote use of Celo

• Earning programs. Proposals that help people to earn Celo assets for eg: microwork.
• Referral, rewards and cashback programs: Proposals that enable Celo users to refer their friends and family, transact, and earn rewards using Celo assets.

Blockchain Ecosystem Inspired Projects

• Community Reserve: Community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure to bring more stability and transparency for the world. How would it look on Celo?
• Decentralized Monetary Organizations — As part of the Ubeswap prize, introduce a Decentralized Monetary Organization.