Why Talent Protocol is launching on Celo first
Celo? Why for chain’s sake would you launch on Celo?
Well, no one has ever said it, but you could clearly tell that some people were thinking that when we talked about the Talent Protocol launch.
It’s true that Celo isn’t the most popular or active blockchain. The TVL on Ubeswap, Celo’s DEX, is quite a bit lower than TVLs on other blockchains. Polygon, the other chain that we were looking into has more traffic and users. However, we made the conscious decision to go with Celo as our first blockchain for several reasons.
Mission Alignment
Quote from the Celo website:
Celo’s mission is to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity — for everyone.
That sounds pretty similar to the Talent Protocol mission:
To empower undiscovered talent by giving any growth-oriented individual the ability to launch a personal token, raise capital and build a community of committed supporters.
We felt this alignment was very important. Both Celo and Talent Protocol work on making sure that web3 tools reach the people that need them the most, not just those privileged enough to have access to them. For us, this trumped possible concerns over the accessibility of Celo.
Mobile-first
The internet is moving to mobile and where the internet moves, decentralized applications will move as well. Given how clunky most of them still are, it feels early to think about it, but at Talent Protocol we’re running a marathon, not a sprint race. That’s another reason for choosing Celo, it’s a mobile-first network and will force our developers to think and develop for mobile use.
Celo Camp
Celo Camp is Celo’s virtual blockchain accelerator for companies building on Celo. Talent Protocol got accepted into Celo Camp Batch 4 and this sealed the deal on choosing Celo as “our chain.” The experience of going through Celo Camp was more than worth it for several reasons:
- Learning and exchanging experiences with other members
- The sense of community: several people have launched their talent profiles as a result and one of them even became an investor
- The prosper sessions we had every Monday were quite good to balance out the pressure you go through when launching a new project.
In the end, we also made it to the final demo day (and only one in three projects does). So Celo Camp was a win according to every metric.
EVM Compatibility
Unlike some more popular blockchains, Celo is EVM-compatible. Ethereum is still the king of dApps, and Talent Protocol will definitely be on Ethereum and Ethereum compatible chains in the future. For that reason, it made sense to launch on a chain with lower gas fees that will make the transition easy.
The Future Is Multichain
No matter how you look at it, it’s more probable than not that there won’t be one blockchain to rule them all. Successful DApps will have to be on several chains, and we are building Talent Protocol with that in mind. There is a decent chance that our initial launch on Celo might be a “stealth launch” and we do a “launch with a big bang” at a later point 😉.
Conclusion
Even if Celo is not as big as other layer-ones, it was a perfect match for our near future. We have plans to deploy on other chains at a later point, so you can be sure that you’ll be able to support talent no matter what 🤝.
