What is CELO?

CELO is a mobile-centric crypto payment network that functions as a worldwide payment infrastructure. The company’s primary objective is to make global financial operations accessible. This network enables payments to and from any phone number in the world.

The CELO blockchain can be used to construct decentralized applications in addition to basic payments. These decentralized applications may include one that enables anybody to participate in a society’s universal basic income scheme. It may also serve as a platform for social cause crowdfunding.

To run its blockchain, two native tokens are used. The first is CELO, a governance asset utilized for protocol amendment voting. And the second is cUSD, a stablecoin matching the US dollar’s value.

The official blog for this network is an excellent place to keep up with the project’s current development status. Here, you can also find the dApps being developed on it.

Who Created CELO?

As of 2017, CELO was co-founded by Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, both GoDaddy executives, and Sep Kamvar.

Rene Reinsberg is the founder of Uncharted, a General Catalyst Partners Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He was in charge of developing new products at GoDaddy to assist start-ups and small businesses in establishing and expanding their operations.

Dr. Marek Olszewski is also an advisor to Flori Ventures. He also founded Locu, and he served as the company’s CTO. Marek was a Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL before joining Locu. He’s worked at Google, Microsoft (Research), and Sun Microsystems in the past (Labs) and is presently an Angel Investor.

Lastly, Sep Kamvar led the MIT Media Lab’s Social Computing group. As a way of impacting social software on urban planning and education, he has assembled an interdisciplinary team. His team includes computer scientists as well as electrical and mechanical engineers. The team also includes designers, urban planners, educators, and permaculture farmers.

How Does CELO Work?

Mobile phone numbers are more familiar to the public than cryptocurrency public keys, owing to the daily use of mobile phones. CELO takes advantage of this and uses a user’s telephone number to protect public keys.

Its original asset is “CELO”, which users may earn by “staking” their currencies to protect the network through the proof-of-stake algorithm.

Stablecoins like those developed by the team have lower volatility than many other cryptocurrencies. This is because they are tethered to fiat currencies like the dollar. With CELO, you may experience many of the advantages of cryptocurrency without the volatility.

As mentioned earlier, the network’s second most important asset is the CELO dollar (cUSD), which is linked to the US dollar. Alternative global assets may be tied to CELO stablecoins, such as the euro or barrels of oil. It is agreeable that these assets may be desirable in other communities like Coinbase.

Is CELO a Good Investment?

To be clear, CELO is a risky idea for the Web3 and crypto sectors. Still, it is a sound one that aims to be like WhatsApp for DeFi.

The CELO Foundation is now innovating alongside this network’s development to target scalability and acceptance. This ensures the value of the stablecoins on which the CELO ecosystem eventually relies. However, this investment opportunity should be approached with prudence and constraint, like all cryptocurrency investments. But it has a positive long-term outlook.