EVM: The Celo blockchain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine
Mobile Applications: Highly intuitive and user-friendly
Phone Numbers as Accounts: Simple and memorable compared with traditional crypto wallet addresses
Optimization for Slow Connections: Plumo improves blockchain synchronization for users with slow internet connections

Weaknesses

Slow Transactions: The Celo blockchain currently supports 2.5 TPS (Transactions Per Second) as of June 2023
Regulation: Celo aims to operate in all countries worldwide, which may pose crypto-regulatory challenges in certain jurisdictions regarding cryptocurrencies

Basic Information

Celo is a global payments infrastructure for cryptocurrencies that focuses on facilitating financial transactions for mobile users. Its main goal is to provide access to payment options for people worldwide through any phone number. Thanks to this platform, users can quickly and easily make payments, regardless of geographical limitations and traditional financial systems.

Within the Celo blockchain, there are two native assets: CELO and cUSD, both of which have their roles and contributions to the Celo ecosystem. CELO allows holders to participate in decision-making and voting regarding the platform's future, while cUSD provides a stable, dollar-denominated value, making everyday financial operations easier and ensuring value stability.

Celo blockchain was created in 2017 by GoDaddy executives Rene Reinsburg and Marek Olszewski, along with MIT professor Sep Kamvar. From 2018 to 2020, they managed to raise over 46 million USD from investors through the sale of CELO.

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Functioning of the Chain

Celo brings simplicity and convenience to the payments process by enabling them to be sent as easily as a text message. This innovative payments infrastructure is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, regardless of their location in the world.

Celo platform consists of 3 parts:

Applications
Celo Blockchain
Celo Core Contracts

Applications

The Celo protocol serves as the fundamental building block of the Celo platform, offering a range of applications for end users. One of the main applications is the Celo Wallet, which enables users to easily and securely manage their accounts and make payments. These applications communicate with the Celo blockchain and utilize protocol innovations to execute transactions and trigger code through the Celo Core Contracts API.

An important feature of the Celo platform is the ability for third parties to deploy their own smart contracts that can influence their own applications. This provides a wide range of possibilities and flexibility for developers, expanding the application ecosystem on the Celo platform.

In order to provide certain features, applications on the Celo platform can also leverage centralized cloud services. For example, the Celo Wallet can utilize push notifications and transaction activity information channels provided by cloud services.

Celo Blockchain

The Celo blockchain is an open cryptographic protocol that enables secure and decentralized transactions for applications, allowing for the deployment and execution of smart contracts while ensuring their security and trustworthiness.

The codebase of the Celo blockchain is derived from Ethereum code and maintains full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for smart contracts. This means that applications developed for the Ethereum blockchain can be easily ported and launched on the Celo blockchain, creating portability and interoperability between the two blockchains.

However, the Celo blockchain also implements a consensus mechanism known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), which is used to achieve consensus among different nodes in the network and ensure resilience against Byzantine faults, which are errors caused by incorrect behavior or intentional attacks by some nodes in the network. This allows Celo to ensure network reliability and resilience even in the presence of dishonest behavior by certain actors.

Celo Core Contracts

This represents a set of smart contracts that run on the Celo blockchain and play a key role on the platform. These smart contracts encompass a wide range of logical functions that enable the operation and management of various aspects of the platform.

ERC-20 stable currencies: This allows the Celo platform to provide stable digital currencies whose value is tied to real-world assets or other stabilization mechanisms. This brings stability and trust to users when using cryptocurrencies within the Celo platform
Identity attestations: This mechanism allows users to verify and confirm their identity on the Celo blockchain. Identity attestation is crucial for various financial operations and interactions on the platform, contributing to increased security and trust among users
Proof of Stake (PoS): This mechanism serves as the foundation for network consensus and security
Governance: This mechanism facilitates decision-making among the Celo blockchain community and developers regarding future network updates

AMONG OTHER FEATURES, CELO INCLUDES

Telephone Numbers as Addresses

Celo provides an optional lightweight identity layer to the cryptocurrency space, utilizing the decentralized mapping of phone numbers to wallet addresses. By doing so, users can engage in transactions using the most common identity scheme with which they will already be familiar: their contact directories.

This identity layer on the Celo platform provides simplicity and convenience for users when conducting transactions, as instead of long and complex identification numbers or alphanumeric wallet addresses, users can rely on the phone numbers of their contacts. When making a payment, simply selecting the recipient from their directory will direct the payment to the correct wallet address.

Stability Algorithm‍

Mento (previously known as CP-DOTO) is a mechanism that enables users to influence the supply of fully stable assets based on their demand. Users can mint new Celo Dollars or burn them to achieve value stability. To mint a Celo Dollar, users can send CELO worth 1 USD to the reserve, and conversely, to burn a Celo Dollar, they can exchange it for CELO worth 1 USD.

The proper functioning of this mechanism requires an accurate Oracle value of the CELO market exchange rate against the US Dollar. The Oracle serves as a source of current and reliable market rate information, which is necessary for determining the value and exchangeability between CELO and the US Dollar. You can monitor Mento reserves here.

Plumo Ultralight Sync

Plumo is a solution designed to address the challenges faced by mobile nodes in the Celo network with limited resources when synchronizing with the Celo blockchain (Network). By utilizing zk-SNARKs, Plumo enables lightweight clients to verify the integrity of chain synchronization computations, providing assurance without the need for resource-intensive local computations. This significantly improves synchronization experiences for users in conditions where data and computational resources are limited.

Validator Groups

A validator group is a list of members with a fixed number that helps balance the information asymmetry between voters and validators. Validator groups contribute to trust and reputation by ensuring associated validators have known identities, have been operating their validators for a long time, and are regularly audited. In this way, groups can provide long-term credibility and security, which is advantageous when creating a validator network.

Any organization can create multiple validator groups if they want to control multiple validators or have the ability to swap specific machines or keys in case of hardware or connectivity failures. In this way, organizations can manage and maintain multiple group identities and reputations simultaneously, contributing to decentralization and enhancing network security.

Any account that meets the minimum deposit requirement in locked Celo can create an empty validator group, and the account owner can add, remove, or change the order of validators in the group at any time. However, there are several conditions to meet for adding a validator to the group, including available space in the group and sufficient locked CELO balance in the group account.

Validator groups are compensated through group rewards, which include rewards for validators earned by their members during a specific epoch. The account owner can also manage account metadata within the group, including unverified metadata and verifiable claims that can be verified off-chain.

Secret Pepper

To prevent leaks of phone numbers, which would be catastrophic for users, the Celo blockchain utilizes the Oblivious Decentralized Identifier Service (ODIS). In the context of ODIS, a "pepper" is a unique code (hash) that is created for specific data, such as a phone number, using a pseudorandom function (OPRF). This code is generated using a secret key that is shared among various ODIS operators.

In today's age, phone numbers are often exploited for advertising purposes or criminal activities therefore this service derives a user's identifier from their phone number and a secret pepper. The mobile wallet queries ODIS for the pepper to associate the phone number with an address on the Celo blockchain. The pepper provided by ODIS is cryptographically strong, making it impossible to guess through brute-force attacks or rainbow tables.

The ODIS system also has a limited read speed, which controls how many peppers an individual can request. This safeguards against attackers scanning a large number of phone numbers and attempting to compromise user privacy.

This approach ensures that the process of linking phone numbers to addresses on the Celo blockchain is secure and private. Users can trust the ODIS system and use their phone number as an identifying element for conducting transactions and communicating within the Celo ecosystem.

Development History

2017

‍‍Establishment of Celo

2018

‍June - Introduction of the Celo platform‍
July - Berlin branch launched‍
September - Launch of the Celo fellowship grant program‍
November - WFP (World Food Program) chooses Celo to offer blockchain-based cash transfer solutions in the fight against global hunger

2019

‍February - Chuck Kimble (former employee at Circle, Square, and Visa) joins the Celo team
April - Whitepaper presentation‍
November - Introduction of the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism in the Celo blockchain‍
December - Introduction of the new Wave grant program

2020

February - Introduction of the CeloSDK tool package‍
March - Establishment of the Alliance for Prosperity and introduction of the CELO tokenomics‍
April - Launch of the Wave 2 grant program‍
May - On-chain governance launched, and the Celo mainnet goes live‍
June - Launch of Celo Dollars on the mainnet‍
August - Collaboration with Summa (Leading Cross-Chain Architecture)‍
September - Launch of the Wave 3 grant program‍
November - Introduction of Plumo (ultralight client protocol)

2021

February - Celo receives 20 million USD from investors (total funding of 65 million USD since its inception)
April - Collaboration between Deutsche Telekom, Celo, and the addition of Richard Parsons (formerly worked for Citigroup and Time Warner) to the Celo Council, along with the launch of the cEUR stablecoin
May - Launch of the Wave 4 grant program, MetaMask available on the Celo blockchain, and an upgrade to the Celo blockchain called Donut
July - Celo partners with PayU, enabling its users to utilize cUSD
September - cLabs selected as one of the 15 finalists for the CBDC Singapore Monetary Authority, and the introduction of Provo (sandbox) for CBDC experimentation
November - Tim Moreton promoted to CEO of cLabs, and Rene Reinsberger becomes President of the Celo Foundation

2022

‍January - Launch of the third stablecoin for mobile payments, cReal‍
March - Upgrade to the Celo blockchain called Espresso‍
April - Celo Foundation launches the Connect the World global campaign‍
June - Celo Foundation launches Celo University Guild‍
September - Integration of Celo into the Brave web browser‍
November - Celo and Deutsche Telekom launch the T Channelange hackathon

2023

‍January - Presentation of Celo 2.0 by cLabs‍
April - Collaboration between Celo Foundation and Google Cloud to support sustainability-focused startups. Celo Network and Celo blockchain join the Chainlink Scale program

Even the Celo blockchain is not immune to technical issues, and in June 2022, an outage occurred, causing the entire blockchain to be down for approximately 24 hours. It's important to emphasize that this was the only such incident in the entire history of Celo; however, considering the chain’s ambitions to become a global payments network, it is unacceptable for such an outage to last 24 hours.

Team

Rene Reinsberg - Co-Founder and CEO

Rene Reinsberg, an entrepreneur, and MIT graduate, decided to found Celo, an open-source project with the aim of achieving financial inclusion focusing on emerging markets, where he is building a platform for stablecoins and an identity protocol that links wallet addresses to users' phone numbers.

However, Celo is not Reinsberg's first startup. In 2011, he founded Locu, a machine learning company that emerged from MIT. Later, this company was acquired by GoDaddy. Now, Reinsberg is immersing himself in his entrepreneurial journey in the cryptocurrency space.

Behind Celo, there are many people who take care of its operations and development. This team is constantly growing and has branches in Berlin, San Francisco, and Buenos Aires. Celo is not only focused on hiring engineers, as Rene Reinsberg stated: "Here, we need people with different backgrounds: from economics, finance, cryptography, user research, community, and more. We aim to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and is equally driven by our common goal."

Governance

The native coin of the Celo blockchain is CELO, which is used for:

Staking
Paying for transactions
Governance

Anyone can submit a proposal to change the Celo blockchain through the Celo Governance smart contract. You can find all the proposals here.

The process of approving a new proposal consists of four phases:

Proposal
Approval
Referendum
Execution

Every submitted proposal starts in the proposal queue, where it can gain votes in favor and therefore advance along the queue. Each day, the top three highest-rated proposals are selected for approval, but if a proposal doesn't progress to the approval phase within four weeks, it expires.

The approval phase takes place within a single day (24 hours), during which the proposal must be approved by the committee of approvers. Approved proposals move on to the referendum phase
The referendum lasts for five days, during which owners of Locked CELO vote "yes" or "no" on the proposal. Proposals that meet the required quorum move on to the execution phase
The execution of a proposal can take up to three days, during which anyone can trigger it

In the current proposal approval framework, governance is significantly centralized through a committee of approvers selected by the Celo Foundation. This system grants superior decision-making and approval authority over proposals. However, there is an effort being made towards decentralization and transferring the entire process to the DAO’s (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) control, aiming for a more decentralized governance structure in the future.

Revenue & Tokenomics

Since its founding in 2017, Celo has completed 7 funding rounds, raising over 66 million USD. These funds have been dedicated to supporting ecosystem development and network expansion. Additionally, they serve as a source of income through fees for utilizing the Celo blockchain. It is estimated that in 2022, these fees amounted to approximately 14 million USD. This revenue is generated through transaction fees and other related payments made by users on the Celo blockchain. These financial resources are used to fund network operations, maintain infrastructure, and support further project development.

Distribution of CELO:‍

30% - Staking and validator rewards
19.5% - Community grants
18.5% - Protocol contributors
12.5% - Pre-launch sales
12% - Initial reserve
7.5% - Operation grants

Allocation of CELO:

The image illustrates the gradual release of CELO into circulation over the months. You can find the detailed breakdown in the form of a table here.

According to estimates, the total amount of allocated CELO by March 2050 will be approximately 926 million, slightly lower than the originally planned 1 billion CELO. This reduction is a result of linearly decreasing epoch rewards from the year 2035 to 2050 by 50%.

Out of the mentioned 926 million CELO, 300 million CELO is currently allocated to stakers and validator rewards, while 100 million CELO is reserved for community grants. This grant program also includes 2 million CELO for a carbon-neutral fund. The remaining portion of CELO funds allocated for community grants consists of various funds focused on the Polychain Ecosystem Fund, grants for education and market adoption, strategic development initiatives, and other community grants. These funds will be gradually allocated over a period of 3 to 10 years.

Within the operational grants to date, 75 million CELO has been allocated to support network growth during the first 10 years. These grants aim to ensure sufficient financial resources for the operation and development of the CELO network in its initial phase, aiming to maintain and support the stable and successful development of the entire project.

As of the current date (June 7, 2023), validators have locked 299 million CELO in 78 validator groups, with the first 22 groups collectively holding over 52% of the voting power in the network. This situation indicates that decentralization is not yet very high, although the first 22 groups account for only a quarter of all validator groups.

Epoch rewards in the Celo ecosystem function similarly to block rewards in other blockchains. As new blocks are produced, new CELO units are minted and distributed, creating a variety of incentives.
These include:
- Rewards for validator and validator groups
- Rewards for hodlers of locked CELO
- Making payments into a community fund for protocol infrastructure grants
- Bolstering the stablecoin reserve if it is under-collateralized
- Making payments into a carbon offsetting fund

The Uniqueness of the Chain

Plumo

Celo, as a blockchain platform focused on mobile devices, aims to facilitate prosperity worldwide, especially in emerging markets. However, in these regions, access to data tariffs and advanced device hardware is limited. As a result, data scarcity and underpowered devices pose significant obstacles for users who want to synchronize and communicate with the blockchain network using lightweight clients.

Traditional lightweight clients in Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains usually require every block header to be downloaded, resulting in a linear increase in data consumption as new blocks are added. This approach becomes increasingly impractical over time, causing even lightweight clients to take several minutes to synchronize.

Plumo addresses this issue by introducing zk-SNARKs, a cryptographic technique that enables efficient computation verification without the need for local execution. Thanks to Plumo, mobile nodes and resource-constrained nodes can synchronize with the Celo blockchain more quickly, and with lower data requirements.

Paying Stablecoin Fees

Celo offers a convenient feature that allows users to pay transaction fees using multiple stablecoins. Instead of being limited to a single cryptocurrency for gas fees, users have the option to choose from various stablecoins available on the platform. By accepting multiple stablecoins as payment for transaction fees, Celo aims to eliminate the inconvenience and complexity associated with storing and managing multiple blockchain coins.

Mobile Numbers as Addresses

Celo's unique purpose is to make financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. One of the barriers to using many other platforms is the requirement to use 30+ character long hexadecimal strings as addresses, which are hard to remember and susceptible to errors by users. Indeed, their usage is so cumbersome that the prevailing method of exchanging addresses is usually through copying and pasting via an existing messaging channel or using QR codes in person. Both approaches are interactive protocols, and therefore do not cover many use cases in which people would want to make transactions.

Celo offers an optional lightweight identity layer that begins with the decentralized mapping of phone numbers to wallet addresses, allowing users to transact with each other using their contact address book. This innovative approach simplifies the transaction process and makes it more intuitive by leveraging existing contact information, allowing users to easily send and receive funds by selecting contacts from their address book, thereby eliminating the need to remember complex addresses or rely on error-prone copying and pasting methods.

How the Network is Secured

As of now (June 7, 2023), there are 68 validator groups and 110 individual validators responsible for the Celo blockchain.

The Celo blockchain utilizes a slashing function to penalize validators. When a validator is found to be acting maliciously, a portion of their staked CELO will be confiscated.

SLASHING CATEGORIES

Provable - When a provable error is reported, the reporter receives a reward taken from the validator's stake, while another amount goes into the community fund.

Persistent downtime - A validator which can be shown to have been absent from 8,640 consecutive BLS signatures will incur a slashing penalty of 100 CELO, have future rewards suppressed, and will be ejected from its current group
‍
Double signing - A validator which can be shown to have produced BLS signatures for 2 distinct blocks at the same height and in the same consensus round but with different hashes will incur a slashing penalty of 9,000 CELO, have future rewards suppressed, and will be ejected from its current group

Governed - For misbehavior which is harder to formally classify and requires some off-chain knowledge, slashing can be performed via governance proposals. These conditions are important for preventing nuanced validator attacks.

ENFORCEMENT MECHANISMS

The protocol has three means of addressing validator misbehavior. Each slashing condition utilizes a combination of these mechanisms.

Slashing of validator and group stake - Some slashing conditions require a validator to deposit a fixed amount of CELO as a stake. In such cases, the group that selected this validator for the given epoch is also reduced by the same fixed amount if the condition for reduction is proven. The validator's or group's deposit may be forfeited upon registration or upon withdrawal during the slashing period (60 days for validators, 180 days for groups), and before the withdrawal of the amount from the Locked Celo contract
‍
Suppression of future rewards - Each validator group initially carries a specific slashing penalty of 1.0. All rewards for the group and its voting members are weighted by this factor. If a validator violates the rules, the group that selected them for the epoch in which the misconduct occurred has their slashing penalty reduced by half. This penalty remains in effect until the next slashing event, at which point it is reset to a value of 1.0 after the reset epoch has elapsed
‍
Ejection - When a validator is slashed, they are immediately removed from the group of which they are a member at that time (even if the group is not the one that elected them at the time of the misconduct). Since no changes to the set of active validators can be made during an epoch, this means that the elected validator continues to participate in consensus until the end of the epoch

Nodes

Validators play a crucial role in securing the Celo network through their participation in the Celo Proof of Stake protocol. They are organized into groups called validator groups, which are an ordered list of individual validators.

Given the importance of security and the availability of validators, it is expected that they will have a "proxy" node in front of each validator node. In this setup, the proxy node connects to the rest of the network, and the validator node communicates only with the proxy node, ideally through a private network.

To run a validator node, you need to have a minimum of 10,000 CELO for registering the node, and 10,000 CELO per member validator to register a validator group.

For optimal configuration of the Celo validator tool, it is recommended to run two instances continuously:

Validator node: Should be deployed to single-tenant hardware in a secure, high-availability data center
Validator proxy node: Can be a VM (Virtual Machine) or container in a multi-tenant environment (e.g., a public cloud), but requires high availability

Hardware requirements

CPU - 4xCore 64 bit 3GHz
RAM - 8 GB
SSD - 256 GB and backup HDD
Network - At least 1 GB input/output Ethernet with a fiber internet connection, ideally redundant connections and HA switches, 24/7 online

For exact node settings, use this guide.

Benefits

Network security support
Delegate fees
Rewards for new block creators

Voters

In the Celo blockchain, the concept of voters is used instead of delegates. Voters have the ability to vote for different groups of validators and receive rewards for their participation in voting. To participate in voting, you first need to lock your CELO in the Celo Wallet. Once you have done this, you can start voting for your preferred validator groups.

Benefits

Your CELO is not at risk with the validator
Rewards for voting
No fees to validators

Road Map

cLabs, the company responsible for leading the development of the Celo blockchain, has presented its vision for 2023 and the near future, calling it Celo 2.0.

The cLabs vision for the next chapter of the Celo project involves becoming the best platform to launch, and to expand any Web 3.0 project that supports regenerative economics.

According to this proposal, they aim to achieve the following:

Deep alignment with the Ethereum Road Map
Celo believes in deep integration with the Ethereum community and full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The Celo project builds upon the Ethereum blockchain and brings innovations focused on usability, mobile accessibility, and global payments. Celo has become the first significant layer-1 blockchain compatible with EVM Proof of Stake, offering high transaction throughput, fast block times, and instant finality. Celo has also contributed to the adoption of EIP-1559 in Ethereum and has on-chain governance. The Celo project aims to bring even closer integration with Ethereum, such as supporting the use of ERC-20 tokens and planning to expand support to other Ethereum tokens. Celo has a strong community of validators with outstanding results in security and operability. The project continues to explore possibilities to enhance operational and economic security and resilience against attacks

Horizontal scalability by making Celo an incredibly rollup-friendly chain
cLabs supports the use of layer-2 rollups to achieve horizontal scalability in the Celo ecosystem. Rollups provide a secure and flexible structure for subchains and are preferred for their flexibility and security, relying on a single honest full node on the subchain. cLabs is actively working on rollup development and aims to offer Celo as an environment for testing and developing L2 applications. They also plan to expand the Celo Proof of Stake mechanism to allow multi-staking, which will facilitate the acquisition of a high-quality validator set for L2 and reduce capital costs. Celo already has instant finality and offers precompiles for deploying rollups. In the future, the focus will be on improving consensus and network throughput. cLabs also plans to adopt proto-danksharding for cost-effective blob storage and is working on interoperability solutions between different L2 solutions. They are collaborating with Hyperlane on researching new possibilities in this area‍

Making Celo the fastest EVM L1
cLabs is focused on improving block speed and network throughput of Celo as an L1 for L2 builders. They are collaborating with Mysten Labs on researching distributed systems and concurrency to propose extensions to Celo with full EVM compatibility and optimized performance of a single chain. They also plan to collaborate with the validator community to scale node specifications and conduct benchmarking and optimization of client implementations. cLabs aims to replace the consensus engine of Celo, integrating transaction sequencing with high throughput, and the team are exploring the possibility of using Narwhala. Additionally, they are exploring the design of transaction execution parallelization across all cores of server-class machines without compromising EVM compatibility. The goal is to leverage the potential of transaction commutativity and eliminate limitations of EVM implementation and traditional smart contract designs‍

Refining CELO tokenomics and rewarding contributors
cLabs proposes changes to the Celo protocol that could impact the value and emission of CELO. As the native asset, CELO was launched with a fixed supply of 1 billion coins and is used to reward validators, voters, and fund development through the community fund. In the current implementation of EIP-1559, a portion of transaction fees is sent to this fund. cLabs suggests automatically burning this portion of fees, which could result in CELO deflation under certain conditions. Additionally, the possibility is being explored for chain governance to utilize fees from the community fund to buy and subsequently burn CELO, potentially increasing its value for holders. These changes could have a significant impact on the value and nature of CELO‍

Providing a top-tier developer experience
cLabs is focused on providing the best toolkit, services, and API interfaces to Celo developers. Due to its compatibility with EVM, most tools used on the Ethereum platform are already functional on the Celo platform. cLabs actively works on identifying and addressing development needs for builders. In the past three months, they have introduced Celo Safe, a Gnosis-compatible multisig, improved the developer faucet, and ensured the smooth integration of ethers.js and RainbowKit. In the near future, cLabs plans to enhance support for Foundry, ensure full compatibility for WalletConnect v2, and more. The company also emphasizes delivering the best developer experience by providing documentation, educational programs, and sample code to help developers navigate the Celo environment seamlessly and migrate their projects from Ethereum, regardless of their level of Web 3.0 experience‍

Powerful building blocks for wallets and applications
cLabs actively expands the offering of building blocks that facilitate faster progress for developers on the Celo platform. In July, 2023, they introduced the composite liquid staking protocol, stCelo, which is already being utilized by over 2,000 accounts, and secured 1.3 million CELO. The company has also developed ReFi protocols, including Spirals. The development plan for the stCelo protocol includes the ability to manage larger asset pools for real-world use cases, stake in larger validator sets, and participate in chain governance

In January, 2023, cLabs announced the public beta version of SocialConnect, an enhanced version of the original decentralized phone number mapping on the Celo platform. The new system allows for the secure mapping of social identifiers to addresses and is wallet-driven, making the mapping process easier and optimizing SMS delivery for key markets. New cryptographic mechanisms implemented in the ODIS system ensure privacy in the mapping process, even when accessed by smart contracts. Companies such as Libera, Kaala, Node Wallet, and Valora have joined the SocialConnect beta program. Once fully deployed, users of these wallets will be able to transfer funds to each other using only phone numbers

Ecosystem

The Celo blockchain has over 30 active projects in its DeFi ecosystem.

The three largest of them are:

Mento - Algo-Stables
Curve Dex - DEX
Uniswap - DEX

Celo is operated by the Celo Foundation Grant program, which aims to support both new and existing developers interested in expanding the Celo ecosystem. This grant program serves as a means to provide the financial support and resources necessary for the development of innovative projects. You can submit a grant application using the online form found at this address.

It is important to note that the Celo Foundation Grant program is not a source of venture capital funding. Instead, applicants are expected to have a viable product or offering that brings value to the entire Celo ecosystem and community. The program is focused on supporting projects with potential and the ability to propel the Celo ecosystem forward.

Community

Celo has created a cozy atmosphere on its Discord server, which is perfect for beginners in this ecosystem. On the Discord, you will find all the useful information that will help you understand Celo and get started with using it. You can meet other community members, share your insights and opinions, and receive valuable advice from those who already have experience with Celo. What I particularly like about the Celo Discord is the voice channel called "Office Hours," where a team member is available at specific times to discuss your issues and provide support.

For more advanced community members, there is also the Celo forum, which is where important changes in the Celo blockchain, its future functioning, and direction are discussed. It is a place where engaged community members can participate in discussions and exchange opinions regarding Celo. The forum is suitable for those who want to follow and contribute to the development and direction of the Celo ecosystem and stay informed about current happenings. Here, they can also share their thoughts, propose ideas, and actively engage in shaping the future of Celo.

The Twitter presence of the Celo blockchain is also quite large, showcasing all sorts of current information that is happening on, or related to the blockchain. By following Celo on Twitter, you will have access to important announcements, updates, and events concerning the Celo ecosystem. You can also learn about new project collaborations, development updates, financial innovations, and many other interesting events associated with Celo.

The Celo YouTube channel is packed with content, including over 370 videos that thoroughly acquaint you with the functioning of the blockchain and its ecosystem. You can watch tutorial videos that explain the basics of Celo, including its concepts, technologies, and capabilities. Additionally, you'll find videos focused on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), discussing trends, challenges, and benefits of this new form of digital currency. On the channel, you will also come across various "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions, where Celo team members answer community questions and provide more detailed information about various aspects of the project. You can also listen to interviews with key personalities and Celo team members who share their experiences, thoughts, and visions regarding the blockchain.

Partners

Investors

Partners

Celo has a highly significant initiative called the Celo Alliance for Prosperity, which serves as a platform for projects and companies that want to actively engage in expanding the use of Celo as a payment method worldwide. This alliance provides a space for collaboration and support for partners who share the same vision of financial inclusivity and development.

Where to Buy

If you want to buy on a DEX (Decentralized Exchange), only one is currently available:

Uniswap

When buying on a CEX (Centralized Exchange), always check if it supports CELO. The CELO coin is the 52nd largest cryptocurrency, so almost all CEXs support it.

For example:

Supported Wallets

Ledger Nano X - The most widely used hardware wallet on the market. When paired with your software wallet, you gain greater security for your cryptocurrencies

Celo Wallet - Software wallet

Analyst Opinion

Celo is a blockchain protocol that has been developed with the needs of mobile merchants in mind, aiming to enable fast and affordable cryptocurrency transactions. Its native coin, CELO, plays an important role in the ecosystem as it enables Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus and contributes to the creation of a stable monetary framework through an associated stablecoin.

Stablecoins play a significant role within Celo, and I was particularly intrigued by the transparency of the Mento platform. It's great to see how the entire Celo ecosystem leverages stable cryptocurrencies and the benefits it brings.

The main advantage I see in the Celo blockchain is the ability to map phone numbers to addresses, which could greatly improve mass cryptocurrency adoption and acceptance. In this regard, I see tremendous potential, and the cLabs company behind Celo is striving to create a conducive environment for this adoption. Their initiative, the Celo Alliance for Prosperity, is a first step that showcases what this adoption could look like.

I will certainly be following the further development of the Celo blockchain and closely monitoring its successes. If their plan, which in some respects mirrors that of Ethereum, leads to successful implementation and wider adoption, they could even muscle their way into the top ten largest cryptocurrencies on the market.