First Month Retro: Celo Public Goods’ Proof of Impact Campaign

Published on
June 12, 2025

Intro: Proof of Impact

In May, Divvi partnered with Celo Public Goods to launch Proof of Impact: a results-based reward campaign for apps consuming gas on Celo Mainnet – gas consumption being a reliable proxy for network activity. 

Instead of relying only on manual and resource-intensive retro-funding mechanisms, Divvi’s protocol allows DAOs like Celo Public Goods to automatically and transparently reward onchain outcomes.

The set-up for CeloPG was straightforward: gas usage on Celo was chosen as the onchain KPI  and the Divvi reward pool smart contract was funded by CeloPG. Divvi then began tracking and attributing gas usage to registered apps, and rewarding builders permissionlessly. 

This enables builders to register for CeloPG's campaign without preparing a time-consuming application or wait time. After the builder integrates 10 lines of code, Divvi can attribute their users' impact! 

How Calculating Gas Usage Works

If you’re a builder in web3, you’ve heard of gwei: it’s the gas fee every onchain transaction has to pay. You also know that the price a user pays for their transaction varies based on the volume of traffic on the network. What you might be less familiar with is how the math behind it works.

To understand how to calculate the fee for a transaction, it is first important to know what the variables in the formula are:

Gas usage = the units of gas consumed by a tx

Gwei = the price of a unit of gas


The formula to calculate how much a user pays in gas fees is:

Gas fees = gas units x gas price (gwei)

Divvi calculates builder rewards based on the total gas consumed by the transactions their app referred in a given reward period. Each builder’s reward is proportional to their share of total gas consumed by all registered builders in that period.

It’s important to note here that gas fees (meaning: the price paid for the gas consumed) is not factored into the reward formula.

Reward Formula:

Builder's Reward Share = (Builder's Gas Consumption) / (Total Gas Consumption by All Builders participating in the Divvi campaign)

Now that we’re a month into the CeloPG campaign, let’s take a look at the results. 

How did it go?

The easiest way to examine the results yourself is to look at the Divvi's Dune Dashboard for the Proof of Impact Campaign. 

The diagrams below look at the first round of rewards from May, and show that there was one app that had a notably higher proportion of gas usage compared to the others. In the second diagram we’ll exclude that app to get a perspective on all other apps’ impact. 

Diagram 1: May Reward Distribution for CeloPG Campaign 

Diagram 2: Without Top Earner in May Reward Distribution for CeloPG Campaign

As you can see, the gap between the first and second place apps is quite large, and then again between the second and the rest. You can already see on the Dune board that the second round competition is starting to level out; this was a breakout performance in the first round. 

Growing the Pie vs Traditional Funding

With traditional funding, builders often compete for winner-take-all funding opportunities where only a select few walk away with rewards. Let’s compare that setup to Divvi’s Proof of Impact campaign to understand how the mechanism changes the long term outcome. 

Traditional Grant Path

How it starts:

  • Top projects, whether from popularity or existing funding, gain access to early rewards
  • Moats start to form that prevent competition from getting funding
  • Small builders have to focus on Keynesian Beauty Contests and impact tracking instead of shipping results

How it ends up:

  • Early mover advantage creates cost efficiency— due to the moat around ecosystem subsidies— such that competition is squashed and innovation slows
  • Grants start to dry up as the ROI continues to decrease
  • Small builders and innovators migrate to other ecosystems
The Divvi Path

How it starts:

  • Top projects earn the most in proportion to their usage and resulting onchain impact, regardless of outside factors
  • Competing projects earn in direct proportion to their impact as well
  • Small builders also get a share, albeit much smaller in comparison to the bigger players

How it ends up:

  • Competition works against the formation of an early mover moat
  • Protocols are incentivized to increase funding as the ROI continues to improve as more builders compete for rewards
  • Small builders continue to earn more as the overall size of the pie goes up for everyone, while still being free to focus on building and shipping instead of reporting metrics and promises to a Grant Council.

What’s Next?

Looking at the data for Round 2, we see builder registrations and gas consumption double within the first week: it is apparent that competition is growing and more builders are lining up to get funded for their impact. This round is already bigger than the last one, and Divvi isn’t slowing down!

There is active support ready for any builder who wants to get paid for onchain user activations. The best way to get started and stay up to date on new campaigns is to join our Telegram Group

Divvi has also been cooking up something entirely new that will address proportional weighting for reward payouts to provide an additional incentive for newer and smaller apps/builders that won’t have as high of volume right away. This will be a new style of campaign that funding protocols can opt-in if they want a campaign that targets a more specific kind of growth incentive. 

Stay tuned on telegram!