Funding Celo Public Goods at no cost; a potential $40,000 yearly boost

^{By swapping $1M of the Mento Reserve assets into Glo Dollar, Mento is embedding zero-cost philanthropy into its treasury.} The $1M Glo Dollar holding will generate up to $40,000 in public goods funding each year. All of the proceeds of this holding are channeled to Celo Public Goods.

The $1M Glo Dollar swap is our biggest yet, following big buys from Shutter DAO, Polygon Labs, and Gitcoin.

Celo Public Goods are teams and individuals building a digital regenerative economy leveraging the Celo blockchain

The Celo Public Goods ecosystem is varied, with focus areas ranging from climate action to RWA. Here’s a glimpse:

• Kolektivo Labs is a systems innovation lab committed to enabling the full potential of human coordination.
• Toucan creates Infrastructure for climate action at scale.
• Plastiks creates engaging plastic recovery campaigns.
• ReFi DAO is a network society on a mission to regenerate the earth.

Explore all the teams building real-world solutions on Celo in this database. 

Working closely with Celo Public Goods stewards, Mento Community leaders, and Glo’s advisory board, we’ll ensure that our proceeds are distributed as fairly as possible.

The swap into Glo Dollar followed a vote on Celo’s governance forum: 60 voted 'Yes,' 4 voted 'No.'

The overwhelming majority voted in favor of allocating $1M of the Mento Reserve holdings to Glo Dollar. In total, 77 votes were counted, with a total turnout of 13,759,882 CELO.

Check out the full proposal here.

ELI5; how the Mento Reserve holding Glo Dollars supports Celo Public Goods

1. The fiat backing Glo Dollar is invested and earns revenue (similar to other stablecoins). The Glo Foundation receives its part of the revenue on-chain—all transactions are displayed on our website.
2. We donate 100% of our profits on these investments to public goods and charities—the user decides which public goods and charities—also shared on our website. In Mento’ case, all of the profits made from its Glo Dollar holdings are funneled to Celo Public Goods.
3. As a result, Mento is funding Celo Public Goods such as Flowcarbon, GoodDollar, and Silvi at no cost.

Check out ‘How it works’ for a more detailed overview.

What is Mento, and who is behind it?

Mento Labs is the core software engineering team behind Mento, an EVM platform used to launch and operate new stable assets. Mento Labs’ mission is to support financial inclusion and enable the global adoption of digital assets with transparency and stability.

The organization was founded in 2022 as a stablecoin and digital asset innovation lab.

Today the Mento Platform supports six decentralized stablecoins on the Celo blockchain including Celo Dollar (cUSD), Celo Euro (cEUR), Celo Brazilian Real (cReal), eXOF tracking the CFA Franc, Celo Kenya Shilling (cKES) and the Philippine Peso (PUSO), with more coming soon

The largest decentralized stablecoin on Mento, cUSD, launched in 2020 and has grown to a market cap of $35 million. It now has 4.7 million holders who have made over 231 million cUSD transactions.

The outstanding supply of Mento stablecoins is $33,107,776 at the time of writing. Mento stablecoins are backed by a basket of reserve assets, with a collateralization ratio of 4.01. $1M in Glo Dollar (USDGLO) will be added to the Mento Reserve’s holdings. 

Mento Labs is led by a strong team of economists, engineers and Web3 product experts; CEO Markus Franke; Chief Research Officer Roman Croessman; and CTO Bogdan Dumitru.