Freedom, Money & Air Protocol’s Celo integration
Money was created as a medium of exchange for goods and services, to facilitate the exchange between people. But money has become part of a huge enterprise that involves various actors from big companies to governments, which may try their best but often neglect the most needed. Some restrictions as currency and capital controls and inaccessible and/or expensive digital payment methods affect the free market exchange of assets. This translates to a closed financial system in which people are not able to use, move and/or access money.
Air Protocol’s mission is to leverage public blockchains and their cryptocurrencies to enable a truly free and open financial system that’s accessible to everyone. We believe in free markets and that to buy, sell, or exchange legally acquired property or money is a basic human right.
We have chosen to leverage the power of blockchains, we are convinced they’re essential to create a new free and fair financial system. Since Satoshi Nakamoto published his paper on Bitcoin a new financial ecosystem has been enabled. A way of transferring online payments without the need of intermediaries, dependence on governments and ridiculous fees.
Some groups are already trying to help by giving access to people to cryptocurrencies through exchanges, however these are facing resistance through banning and censorship as they rely on the current financial system and governments policies who don’t want to lose control over the current “financial status quo”. Because of these, Air Protocol was created as a decentralized, open source protocol that enables censorship-resistant and trust-minimized on-chain to off-chain asset exchange. This is achieved by creating a mesh to enable peer-to-peer transactions of money, assets and goods.
Currently Air Protocol is working with Celo, a great blockchain which mission aligns with ours:
“Our mission is to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity — for everyone.” — Celo
Using Celo blockchain, Air Protocol, has created a mobile app to be able to send remittances. This app is one example of what developers can achieve by using Celo and the Air Protocol. Air Protocol provides the infrastructure to create decentralized P2P markets and Celo provides the blockchain to exchange and store the crypto assets safely.
Participating in the Celo Camp has been a great experience. We are proud to say that we started 240 teams around the world and now we are among the 7 finalists! This process has been very rewarding and has brought us many valuable things: it allowed us to meet other teams around the world that have similar goals to us, it gave us the opportunity to talk with wonderful mentors who have lots of experience in the business, ux and technical fields, and learn from them. Being in the Celo camp has helped us enhance many aspects and make adjustments to have an even stronger and solid project, as well as making our project become better known in the community.
We are happy to be part of Celo’s community, which has been warm and helpful, and we couldn’t agree more with what they believe: a future where everyone can prosper.
