Sarafu Wallet - Development Announcement
A Public-Good Wallet for Celo’s Cosmo-Local Future
Hi everyone! We have something exciting to announce - the development plan of Sarafu Wallet! But first let me introduce Grassroots Economics.
We’re Grassroots Economics Foundation, long-time contributors to Celo’s real-world adoption. We run validators and RPC - and coming indexing infrastructure, ship open tooling (Sarafu.Network++), and support place-based pilots where people use vouchers + commitment pools to access zero-interest, in-kind repayable credit. Over the last years we’ve worked with champions across more than a hundred locations to make everyday agreements legible on Celo - QR and NFC cards, USSD flows, POS integrations, and simple reporting so communities can see their own reviews and impacts.
We’re building where people already live economically (neighbors helping neighbors) with rails that make those everyday agreements visible, simple, and safe on Celo.
Grassroots Economics – roles
Protocol stewards: design and maintain voucher & commitment-pool standards, public dashboards, and tranche/guardrail logic.
Implementation partners: train local “champions” (ToTs), help configure pools, and publish human-signed monthly reports.
Open-source maintainers: keep Sarafu.Network and Sarafu Wallet forkable, documented, and community-owned.
Core Grassroots Economics Team
Will Ruddick — Founder / Protocol & Field Steward. Leads cosmo-local credit design, community facilitation, and partnerships; anchors alignment with Celo’s public-service ethos.
Mohamed Sohail - Engineering & Governance. Owns wallet architecture, pool registries, and KPI/oracle integrations; liaison to Celo DAOs and on/off-ramp partners.
Njambi Njoroge - Operations Director and Field Testing Guru. Works with a team of Grassroots Economists and local champions across Kenya and growing globally.
William Luke - UX developer - in charge of Sarafu.Network, dashboarding and visualizations.
Aude Peronne - Ecosystem Director and Field Steward. Connects us to social and environmental systems. Biomimicry and bioregional restoration. On-site hub designer and coordinator at Mnyumbuni Kilifi Kenya.
Regional Champions (ToTs) - Local Stewardship. Train merchants, schools, and groups; operate QR/USSD rails; collect stories and verify fulfillment.
Pool Stewardship Councils - Coordinate tranche gates, exception handling, and integrity reviews with Celo stakeholders.
The Objective
To develop and maintain Sarafu Wallet, a fully open source, non custodial and cross platform wallet that qualifies as a digital public good under UN/DPGS standards. This wallet will prioritize financial inclusion, privacy, and ease of use globally exclusively on Celo. It will natively support cosmo-local credit - acting as a credit-card across a network of liquidity pools.
Why this matters now: millions already extend small, trust-based advances. Sarafu Wallet turns those promises into clear, on-chain receipts - interest-free, in-kind repayment, locally stewarded, globally interoperable.
Note that we will still support the https://Sarafu.Network dApp - which has been a testing ground for many of these flows and functions and is in use across the world. The problem with the dApp is using existing wallets like Valora, Meta Mask, Rabby or other wallets makes the system incredibly hard for many users and doesn’t have the native features our community needs.
Sarafu Wallet is two things, clearly: a crypto wallet, and a new way to move money as zero-interest, in-kind credit (marketplace of offers).
It holds your assets like any wallet - and it also lets your community route credit with vouchers and commitment pools. One app, two super powers.
Current Celo Wallet Ecosystem
Celo Native Mobile Wallets Comparison (see the spreadsheet here)
With the exception of Valora and its forks, most wallets are proprietary, creating vendor lock-in. Also, most of the current wallets have limited support for local contexts.
Sarafu Wallet will be different. It intends to:
Adapt to your community, not vice versa
A key innovation of Sarafu Wallet is our Community Configuration System, which transforms a single open source wallet into a customizable platform that serves diverse communities worldwide through dynamic configuration. Community Configurations define:
Integrations, though a standardized interface. Choose off-ramps, on-ramps, any protocol
Token (Voucher) listing
Offers (goods and services) as well as Wants
Liquidity Pools (Commitment Pools) to provide a network exchangeable of offers and wants
Default language
GPS enabled - so you can easily find offers of people and vendors around you.
Theme & Branding
Feature flags
RPC nodes
Hopeful ambition: one codebase, countless communities - each with its own configuration, all interoperable on Celo.
How it works (schematic)
Here is a high level draft schematic of Sarafu Wallet :
1) New wallet—why this one?
Most wallets weren’t built for everyday exchange or low-tech contexts. Sarafu Wallet is open-source, non-custodial, Celo-first, and privacy-first—with USSD/QR/NFC, POS flows, readable receipts, and community configurations so your town, campus, or co-op can use the same wallet in its own language and rules.
2) New way to move money—how it works
You mint a voucher (a gift card for your goods/services) and stake it in a commitment pool. Against that, you can draw what you need now (e.g., cUSD)—zero interest. People redeem your voucher later, or swap their voucher in to hold the claim. Credit routes through the network of pools so neighbors can pay each other today and settle in-kind over time. It’s a community credit rail inside your wallet.
Learn about the idea here: Cosmo-Local Credit—From the Ground Up
How it works (plain language)
Add your offering. You publish a product or service, and the app wraps it as an ERC-20 Voucher (a gift card redeemable for that offering).
State what you want. You set what you’ll accept in return for your offerings - stablecoins and/or other vouchers.
Form your pool. Your issued vouchers + your accepted assets create your own Commitment Pool (your personal/liquid “tab” with the community).
Discover & trade. All pools show up as Public Offerings in a marketplace view, filterable by GPS/location, tags, and preferences.
Route credit, cosmo-locally. If you hold any supported token/voucher, you can swap through the network of pools to reach what a vendor wants. This lets you obtain goods/services on credit (interest-free), settled later in-kind or by swap—voucher replacing voucher.
Mutual aid ready. Groups can create shared accounts and give members credit access to their pool, operating like Waqf-style endowments or Mweria/rotating labor associations - with on-chain receipts and light guardrails.
Grassroots Economics example - Coastal Kilifi Bio-Region Pool
In Kilifi, a school, a grocer, and a community clinic each list what they offer as ERC-20 vouchers: tuition & meals (SCHOOL), staples by weight (FOOD), and consultations & meds (CARE). They stake a seed of their own vouchers into the Kilifi Bio-Region Commitment Pool and set what they’ll accept in return (cUSD and selected local vouchers).
A parent pays part of school fees by swapping FOOD → SCHOOL through the pool: the grocer’s voucher routes to the school, the school voucher goes to the parent.
The school then uses some of its SCHOOL vouchers to swap for CARE (school health day at the clinic).
The clinic swaps CARE for FOOD to restock its nutrition program.
A repair co-op joins later, issuing REPAIR vouchers; the clinic swaps CARE → REPAIR to fix equipment, and the co-op takes FOOD for wages.
Everything is discoverable by GPS in the wallet, so neighbors see nearby offerings and prices. Every mint, swap, and redemption is on Celo, creating interest-free, in-kind credit that circulates locally (voucher replacing voucher) while the pool’s tiny swap fee funds dashboards/oracles for community reporting.
Partnership invitation: DAOs, universities, cooperatives, and city programs can drop in their own configurations, vouchers, and pools, instantly creating local credit commons that speak the same language.
Be Celo exclusive
This is the only soft lock-in the app intends to include. All Celo specific features not available on other chains are expected to work here, notably, eip 7702 batching, account and fee abstraction. Advanced users will still be able to change the chain ID in order to use the wallet on other chains e.g. recover funds sent to the wrong chain. However, additional support on certain features may not be provided.
Strategic upside: by going Celo-first we can ship the best possible UX for account/fee abstraction, batching, low fees, and mobile-first inclusion (QR/NFC/USSD, POS).
Support ENS
ENS will have first class support and be a core feature. We intend to provide infrastructure for users to bring their own ENS names and register subdomains for their community users.
Built around EIP 7702
Given the new activation of the Isthmus Hard Fork, we intend to build the app around EIP 7702 unlocking a lot of potential around how EOA wallets function. Users may opt into smart features.
Privacy first
Non-collection and sharing of data to 3rd parties by default. However, communities may be able to activate certain flags to allow this upon user opt-in - such as sharing product information.
Trust grows where privacy is respected. Our default is no third-party data sharing, ever.
Celo’s Mission Alignment and Strategic Opportunity
Directly advances Celo’s vision of "prosperity for all" by removing barriers to financial tools.
Enhances Celo’s utility for real-world use cases. Commitment pooling, interest free loans e.t.c
Positions Celo as a leader in ethical Web3 infrastructure
Creates a foundational tool for onboarding the next billion users (Celo vision/mission 2030)
Others can build services on top without centralized permission.
Connectedness: Communities customize their experience while remaining interoperable
Community ownership, no single entity controls the infrastructure.
Fork friendly by providing a low footprint codebase and complete instructions for reproducibility.
Call to partners: plug your on/off-ramps, POS, identity, and analytics into this open interface; help us make Celo the home for everyday credit.
Goals
Beyond Traditional Metrics. We measure returns in:
Human impact (attestations of community and user reports)
Developer freedom (Open source, forkable)
Community empowerment (Creation of local economies)
Network resilience (reduce dependence on centralized services)
Total value (stable coins and all user generated tokens in liquidity pools)
We’ll publish weekly dashboards and monthly human-signed reports—receipts that anyone can verify.
Governance & Transparency - Sustainability mode
Tiny swap fees on pools (configurable) → auto-route a share to the Sarafu Protocol Pool (Community Fund) to pay for oracles, dashboards, audits, and inclusion rails.
Governance: a Sarafu Voting Token (SVT) will govern the Protocol Pool (fee share, allowlists, grants, audits).
Anti-Fragile Utility: SVT confers access rights to the Protocol Pool over time (fee credits/liquidity routes), strictly no borrower interest.
Distribution: TBD with the community/Treasury (public-goods first, transparent schedules, clawbacks for non-performance).
Non-extractive by design: no borrower interest. Tiny pool fees (bps) fund oracles, dashboards, and light stewardship—a community flywheel, not rent-seeking.
Why Build this as a Non-Profit Foundation and AGPL3.0 Open Source?
The VC Model Fundamentally Conflicts with True Public Goods (Extractive monetization, user lock-in, cherry picking profitable markets, potential vendor lock-in):
This work exists to build what the market won't.
Profit-driven apps ignore unprofitable users, unbanked remain excluded.
Built as culturally adapted, community owned infrastructure.
Free from profit pressure, we focus on impact.
Our promise: fork-friendly code, reproducible builds, and community ownership - so no one is locked out or locked in.
AGPL Licensing ensures reciprocity and sustainability while guaranteeing user’s freedoms.
For the anti-copyleft crowd who may say AGPL = bad, please read: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/19/2024-04-19-Copyleft-is-not-restrictive.html
Ask
We're posting this announcment to gather feedback and refine our approach. We're looking for:
Technical feedback on the architecture
Suggestions for additional features
Partnerships with existing Celo projects
This infrastructure will serve as a foundational public good for the entire ecosystem, enabling anyone to participate in the Celo economy without barriers.
Thank you for considering supporting this important work. We believe Sarafu Wallet can become a cornerstone of financial inclusion infrastructure, truly embodying the principles of a public good while advancing Celo's mission.
If you can provide fiat inclusion rails, contribute engineering, UX designs, testing, offer integrations, or co-steward pilots, we’d love to partner. This is very much needed - and together we can make Celo the place where trust gets rails.
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