Celo is a mobile-first platform that makes it easier to access financial dApps and crypto payments. Read more!
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco Bay Area, US, Celo was started by three founders Marek Olszewski, Rene Reinsberg, and Sep Kamvar. Also known as cLabs, Celo is a mobile-first platform that makes it easier to access financial dApps and crypto payments. The ecosystem comprises a decentralized PoS blockchain technology stack, a native asset, a stablecoin, and the Celo’s Alliance for Prosperity.
To date, Celo has raised $66.5 million in funding. Its lead investors include Polychain, DTCP, and a16z crypto. Some of Celo’s other investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Electric Capital, Greenfield One, Valor Capital Group, and many more. So far Celo has had six funding rounds, with the latest round on April 20th, 2021. In terms of acquisitions, the only acquisition by Celo was in the form of Summa, one of the premier providers of cross-chain architecture and interoperability as a service solution for the blockchain industry.
As for platform statistics, Celo has facilitated more than 38 million transactions so far, with an average block time of five seconds. To understand what makes Celo such a highly used and preferred platform, we need to delve deeper into its solutions.
The Celo Solutions
The mission behind setting up Celo was to create a financial system that would bring prosperity to everyone. It believes in the values of unique purpose and connectedness. The value of unique purpose says that everyone has their unique path of growth, while the value of connectedness believes that people live primarily in connection to another. The coming together of uniqueness and connectedness is what makes the solutions of Celo wholesome and complete.
Mobile-First Solutions
Celo assets were devised for mobiles. It is due to this reason that Celo is often seen as the harbinger of the mobile-first movement. Its ultralight mobile client and phone verification protocol makes it possible to seamlessly send, spend, stake, and earn crypto from mobile phones.
Its native token, CELO, is available on more than 20 exchanges globally. Holding CELO brings an earning opportunity along with an authority to take part in the decision-making process of the platform.
Apart from its native token, CELO also has two stablecoins: Celo Dollars (cUSD) and Celo Euro (cEUR). As their names suggest, these stablecoins algorithmically follow the US Dollar and Euro. Multiple well-known crypto assets, such as BTC, ETH, DAI, and CELO, back these stablecoins. Both of these are available on several exchanges worldwide.
Development Solutions
Celo makes it convenient to build decentralized applications and assets for smartphones that can seamlessly move across chains, carriers, and countries. The EVM compatibility of Celo makes it easier to build and port dApps. You can code in Solidity.
Not only does Celo works well with native mobile dApps, but it is also interoperable with MetaMask and other well-known Ethereum developer tools. It also allows many-to-many cross-chain communications. You can build the bridges you need.
Celo dApps and DeFi
Celo makes it possible to send crypto directly to contacts without having to worry about the average 42-characters long crypto wallet addresses. Defi solutions built on Celo include the likes of Ubeswap and Moola. While Ubeswap aims at democratizing access to DeFi through its mobile-first decentralized exchange, Moola is a mobile-first platform for borrowing and lending assets on Celo.
The Celo wallet is a free and open-source wallet for the network. Anyone can find its source code on Github.
The Celo Terminal, available for download on Mac, Windows, and Linux, helps manage everything related to Celo. You can manage your accounts and also access dApps.
The Celo Platform USP
As a platform, the advantages of Celo are multiple and multifaceted. Apart from having a range of platform-native stablecoins, supported fully by multiple ERC-20 tokens, the platform has mobile phone number mapping to public keys for accessible peer-to-peer payments and financial dApps. Its mobile phone synchronization is hyper-efficient with fast syncing for ultralight clients.
The smart contract platform is fully programmable. You can pay for gas in stablecoins.
The CELO Consensus
CELO’s consensus protocol follows the Istanbul implementation or IBFT. The platform has worked extensively on IBFT to update it as per the needs of the latest go-Ethereum releases. It has also improved the correctness and liveness issues, improving its scalability and security. The consensus protocol is run by selected validator nodes.
Although the permissible limit of active validators can be changed by governance proposals, it currently stands at 100. The platform leverages the PoS protocol to determine the active validator set, it also updates it at the end of each epoch, which is a fixed period of one day approximately.
The Celo Governance
The governance format is a formal on-chain one. The governance process becomes useful in managing and upgrading the protocol for various reasons, such as upgrades for smart contracts, the inclusion of new stable currencies, or modification of the reserve target asset allocation. The platform uses a quorum threshold model to determine the number of votes needed for a proposal to pass. The changes happen through Celo Governance Smart Contract, which acts as an "owner" for making modifications to other smart contracts on the protocol.
Celo Ecosystem Tokens
CELO tokens have a maximum supply of 1 billion. While 60% of the supply was already available at the time of the mainnet launch in April 2020, the rest of 40% was up for gradual release via fees and rewards and various vesting schedules.120 million CELO tokens go towards a reserve that maintains the validity and price stability of CUSD. CELO tokens leverage the PoS consensus mechanism and stringently structured election process to determine its validators. CELO complies with the ERC-20 standard. It is available for trade on multiple exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase Exchange, Gate.io, KuCoin, and more.
The CELO dollar is also available in multiple markets, including KuCoin, Bittrex, OkCoin, and more. The CUSD trading pairs include USDT, BTC, USD, and more.
The CELO Euro is available on KuCoin and Ubeswap. Its trading pairs involve CELO, USDT, and BTC.
The CELO Alliance
The CELO alliance believes in people on the network learning from each other and taking collective action to solve real-world problems. One of the alliance projects - Laboratoria - hosted a design-a-thon with young female coding students in Mexico, who explored the concept of Blockchain hands-on. The alliance also collaborates with the World Food Programme to bring financial tools to refugees. There are multiple benefits of becoming a member of the CELO Alliance for Prosperity.
For instance, you can connect with like-minded individuals to grow your idea. You can become an active participant in building and shaping improvements to the CELO platform. You can attend special programs and events, get access to education and support, and expand your reach to help more communities.
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