Money can be beautiful
Today we would like to review one of the most important projects in our portfolio. A project with high goals and rapid development.
Meet one of the blockchain projects that is working to make cryptocurrencies available to everyone which means it brings the era of decentralized finance closer and simplifies the payment process. This is Celo.
Celo’s core mission is outlined by the mission and goals of the Alliance for Prosperity.
Celo doesn’t just want to be the first mobile and highly secure blockchain network. Celo wants to achieve this in order to expand the mission of financial inclusion and improving the well-being of people in virtually all parts of the world that have been far away from the financial system. This is why the mobile app is so important to Celo.
“The Alliance for Prosperity gives us a fresh chance to build, interoperate, and secure new financial services applications”
Gigi Gatti, Grameen Foundation
Finances that has been transferred from mobile devices are growing every year. Exclusively in 2020, approximately $196 billion in foreign exchange transactions were carried out through mobile money agents. This is a compelling statistic, supported by the fact that there are more mobile agents than commercial banks.
Celo Foundation forms the Alliance for Prosperity. It is a large team of people, projects, companies, foundations, investment funds, service providers and other organizations — all committed to improving the financial well-being of people in the world’s poorest regions.
“With a public launch, the Celo Foundation was created. The Foundation is a US-based non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open source Celo platform. Guided by the Celo Community Principles, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community participation and work with ecosystems — activities that support and encourage an inclusive financial system that creates conditions for everyone to thrive. ”
These improvements can take various forms and have been assigned by the Celo Foundation in subsequent niches: receive, acquire, create, earn, teach, give, multiply, borrow, save, send, store and protect.
Celo is recognized as the premier major blockchain project that has identified social influence as central to its mission.
“Our hope is that this Alliance will start unlocking the potential of internet money”
Katie Haun, Andreessen Horowitz
In addition to impact directly on poor and communities, companies within the Alliance are also empowered to act with each other to create even greater well-being for the citizens who are assisted by the Alliance.
Simplicity
Instead of leaving complicated, long lines of letters and numbers as blockchain addresses, Celo users can send and receive cryptocurrencies using their mobile phone number. The Celo team decided to use the mobile phone because it is so free and easy to understand. In some regions of the world in 2020 there were no cables to connect to the Internet, but mobile phones are quite common there.
To use mobile phones, the Celo protocol needs to be lightweight and fast. Reaching 6 billion mobile devices worldwide, it was also scalable. The main significant aspect in terms of user experience is that Celo is simple to use.
Celo simplifies blockchain transactions
The Celo team simplified the user experience by getting rid of the large public keys on the user side and replacing them with the mobile phone numbers most of us are used to. They are also easier to remember and enter in the form as an address.
Using the Celo platform
However, the Celo app is the preferred way to send Celo Dollars (cUSD), the platform stablecoin, it is not required. Users can send cUSD via WhatsApp whenever they want, but in order to retrieve the cUSD, the recipient will need to download and install the Celo wallet. When a wallet is created, the mobile phone number is associated with the wallet address, and the cryptographic hash of the phone number is stored in the blockchain.
Everything is so simple that during the Reddit AMA, one of the first sponsors dubbed the Celo project “WhatsApp for the money.”
How does Celo work?
While Celo appears to be very basic to users, it is as technically reliable as any competing blockchain project. Celo applies the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The founders chose PoS because of the simple use of resources. The system uses both validators and nodes to validate transactions and keep the network secure.
Celo currently employs a failover consensus algorithm in which a designated set of validator nodes are used to reach an agreement on the validity of transactions sent to the network. This method of consensus allows an agreement to be reached on the validity of transactions, even if one third of the nodes are malicious, defective, or offline. There are quite a few other effective blockchain projects using PoS consensus, including Cosmos, Tezos, and Algorand. Well, in the near future, Ethereum will also switch to the Proof-of-Stake blockchain.
What are Celo Assets?
There are currently two cryptoassets in use on the Celo network. These are Celo dollars (cUSD) and Celo (CELO).
cUSD
Celo Dollars or cUSD are Celo stablecoins. It is backed by the stocks of other digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and tied to the value of the US dollar. The team said it will expand the stablecoin offerings to cEUR and cGBP.
CELO
Celo Dollars can be minted or burned at any time to maintain stability and peg to the US dollar. The same does not apply to CELO, which has a fixed delivery. In fact, due to this fixed-supply cryptocurrency, Celo maintains price stability, as well as most of the blockchain management operations.
Users with the required number of CELOs (and cGLDs) can join the network in the validators property, and can propose and vote on protocol changes. Any offers also require a small number of CELOs to be sent to the smart contract, where they are blocked. If the offer is ultimately approved, these funds are refunded after a three-day waiting period.
Voting after protocol changes is also performed by blocking CELO in the same smart contract. Again, voters can revoke their CELO after the three-day waiting period. This waiting period is intended to prevent attacks on the network.
A CELO is not just a blockchain, it is a community of ideas aimed at improving the quality of people life.
More importantly, we are driven by purpose — to solve real-world problems such as lack of access to sound currency, or friction for cash-transfer programs aimed to alleviate poverty.
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