Celo ReFi Stack
14 ReFi BUIDLers Deploying on Celo Blockchain
It seems every month there is a new Layer 1 announcement with the next “Ethereum killer.” Just this year we have seen explosive growth, at least in token value if not in developer adoption, for Aptos and Canto.
In recent posts I have highlighted the emergence of regenerative finance (ReFi) as a space to watch in 2023. The growing acceptance of the need to address climate change, combined with persistent coordination challenges to achieve climate action at scale and the growing concerns regarding lack of transparency around current carbon markets are all important factors driving growing interest from BUIDLers to look for ways to tackle climate challenges with crypto rails.
As a BUIDLer myself, my company just went through an exhaustive review of blockchain protocols to deploy our own ReFi project called WheelCoin. We explored five criteria in choosing which blockchain protocol to deploy the on-chain components for WheelCoin including tokens and NFTs. They included: 1) commitment to carbon neutrality or carbon negative; 2) a vibrant ReFi community; 3) Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility; 4) Scalable low cost transactions and mobile support; and 5) Support for deployment and growth.
We reviewed several blockchains who qualify in all if not most of these categories including but not limited to Celo, Cosmos, Hedera, NEAR and Polygon, before landing on Celo. Celo is not the most well known amongst the crypt community, but they are punching well above their weight class (or fully diluted valuation, FDV) especially in the ReFi space.
I’d like to highlight here the vibrant ReFi BUIDLer community in the Celo ecosystem as that was the criteria which most influenced our own decision. The Celo founder team has been committed to impact under the motto “Prosperity for all” from the beginning and has been carbon negative since they launched their mainnet on Earth Day 2020. Celo also founded the Climate Collective “to build a trusted market for high-quality, digital environmental assets that enable people and the planet to thrive. By using mass-coordination tools to solve mass-coordination problems, we’re advancing planetary health and a regenerative financial system.”
All this has helped Celo have an authentic pitch to ReFi BUIDLers. Today, Celo hosts more than 1,000 projects from over 150 countries. Some of the ReFi projects being scaled by BUIDLers in the Celo ecosystem include:
EthicHub recently won the INATBA Award for Most Exciting ReFi project for their pioneering work to leverage crypto rails to crowd invest in unbanked farmers in the Global South.
Flowcarbon are amongst many early leaders in tackling the transparency issue with carbon markets by bringing carbon credits on chain.
Gainforest is leveraging a Measure2Earn gamification design to embrace decentralized science for the measurement and rewarding of sustainable natural stewardship.
Good Ghosting leverages DeFi tools to facilitate more inclusive access to financial and savings for underbanked populations.
Impact Market is a newer project built on Celo to leverage DeFi and other crypto tools to support financial inclusion and universal basic income (UBI) for the unbanked and lower income populations.
Into the Verse is a pixelated earth-based metaverse gamifying life on earth including real world DeFi financial inclusion and basic income (UBI) within and outside the game.
Kolektivo Network leverages DeFi tools on Celo to enable local communities to launch, fund and govern regenerative projects with local impact.
Moss enables consumers and corporations to more transparently acquire and retire carbon offsets. They recently partnered with Brazil’s largest airline, GOL, to their 20 million annual passengers to leverage Moss’ on chain offsets to reduce the climate impact of their flights.
Plastiks gamifies and tokenizes rewards for users around the globe to enable on-chain certification of plastic waste collection and recycling.
Silvi Protocol focuses on reforestation and is bringing more transparency, digitization and tokenization to the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of reforestation efforts initially in Africa.
Spirals is leveraging Celo’s DeFi tooling to engage crypto users in helping to support and fund verifiable climate impact.
Toucan tokenizes carbon credits and has built a middleware solution so that other BUIDLers can embed tokenized credits into their own projects as well.
WheelCoin is the first Move2Earn game embracing Impact2Earn to accelerate the adoption of green mobility services around the globe.
Wildchain gamifies wildlife conservation by engaging users in a wildlife metaverse setting where they can earn token rewards geared to protect endangered species in real life (IRL).
Those are just a small collection of 14 ReFi projects being built and deployed in the Celo ecosystem.
Three trends can be observed from this small sample and my broader observations of ReFi BUIDLers on Celo. First, as is true with the entire ReFi climate space, several projects are directly involved in digitizing and creating more transparency to the carbon markets. This is nothing new and is really the most prevalent use case for ReFi BUIDLers date. Second, many ReFi BUIDLers on Celo are leveraging DeFi tools for impact outcomes such as Good Ghosting, ImpactMarket and Kolektivo.
Finally, another trend I am noticing from ReFi BUIDLers on Celo and other chains too is the growing interest in using gamification to achieve impact. Just on this list we have GainForest, Plastiks and Wildchain, plus WheelCoin.
In a recent post I analyzed this trend and concluded that there are at least two archetypes of ReFi impact gamification approaches emerging from the bear market BUIDLers: Play4Impact and Impact2Earn. Play4Impact, like Wildchain for example, seek to make a fun game that attracts a large amount of users with the primary outcome being increased impact (e.g. preservation of wildlife). Meanwhile Impact2Earn leverage gamification mechanics tied to impact with the outcome more economic (tokens, discounts on buying or using impact products, etc.).
Conclusion about Celo
While Celo is clearly an emerging leader in attracting ReFi builders, it also has some challenges. As mentioned, the broader awareness of Celo in the crypto community is low, as is the market value of the Celo token. Perhaps as a result there are fewer venture funds that focus on the Celo ecosystem compared to the larger blockchain ecosystems. Celo does have their own BUIDLer programs and are taking applications for Batch 7, while two newer funds with a deep Celo focus are Flori Ventures and Verda Ventures, a new growth stage fund launched by Celo’s former CFO.
The Celo leadership will need to accelerate their marketing efforts aimed at the global crypto BUIDLer and venture community in order to remain relevant and attractive for ReFi BUIDLers. This will likely need to involve podcasts and more Celo sponsored events such as their partnership with ETH Denver for the Climate Summit.
A few runaway successes from the Celo ReFi community wouldn’t hurt either. Stay tuned as maybe one of those in this post could be the next gigacorn, defined as a project which is able to achieve 1 billion tons of carbon reductions.
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