CELO Blockchain – The Hidden Blockchain for Businesses and 10x Investors?

by Arthur · August 15, 2022

This article is a complete guide about the Celo blockchain (CELO). The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) the domain has been all over the news for the past two years, reaching an evaluated value of more than USD 11 billion LOCKED in the DeFi lending market alone. Celo can be one of the profitable projects. Is CELO blockchain the hidden blockchain for businesses and 10x profitable for investors? Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

Table of Contents

What is Celo Blockchain (CELO)?

Two of the main obstacles to the large-scale use of cryptocurrencies as payment tools are ease of use and purchasing power volatility. Celo is the blockchain that addresses these issues with an address-based encryption strategy and a stable value.

According to the white paper, Celo’s goal is to allow smartphone users anywhere in the world to have a method of using financial services. It includes sending money to phone numbers and paying merchants. In this, it uses phone numbers as public keys for cryptocurrency transactions. The network also supports the composition of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps) as part of decentralized finance (DeFi). The main network was launched in April 2020.

Celo blockchain is specifically a mobile solution that is made of the following three elements:

Lightweight for a more comfortable user experience.
Resilience tool for stable value coins
Incentives and guidelines for management.

The above features create a proof-of-stake smart contract platform. It is founded on Ethereum. The Celo protocol is backed by a tentative digital asset called Celo coin. It is ERC-20 compliant and is used to facilitate token delivery via decentralized exchanges. The platform has two born tokens. CELO is a proof-of-stake (PoS) token and it is used for transaction fees, governance contributions and other important functions. In the future, the platform plans to accept various stablecoins. It already uses the Celo Dollar (CUSD) stablecoin.

How does Celo work?

The Celo network relies on three supporters to help run the platform:

Easy customers – The first is the applications that run on the users’ mobile phones, for example Celo’s mobile wallet.
Validator nodes – In this, laptops or machines participating in Celo’s consensus instrument confirm transactions and create new blocks.
Full nodes – In this, machines act as the route between Validator nodes and mobile wallets, accepting proposals from clients and sending transactions to validator nodes.

As mentioned earlier, the network relies on Lights Clients, Validator Nodes and Full Nodes to complete the Celo work as its essence supporters. Light Clients are the network’s applications that operate on the user’s mobile devices. An illustration of such an application is the mobile wallet Celo. Validator nodes are computers that collectively contribute to and participate in the network’s consensus mechanism. They also confirm transactions and form new blocks.

Now these nodes accept requests from light clients and send transactions to validator nodes. CELO owners are in custody for voting in Validator nodes. Celo also relies on the Proof of Stake governance instrument called Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). The network uses BFT to keep its distributed network of machines in sync. To become a validator node, users must stake 10,000 CELO tokens. According to the configuration of the network, there can only be 100 validators at a time. These validators each receive a reward from a portion of the block reward for validating the transactions. Nevertheless, full nodes also gain rewards from costs provided by light clients.

What makes Celo unique?

The whitepaper further states that Celo is a blockchain network that uses user email addresses or phone numbers as public keys for transactions. Its selling attribute is also that it primarily concentrates on smartphone users. The network claims that the growing number of smartphone users without cryptocurrency wisdom is worrying. Still, building a service that uses both technologies acknowledges that deciphering a future problem.

This is why Celo bridges the huge gap between them and expands the global use of cryptocurrencies. The essence of the protocol also allows users to take advantage of the benefits of DeFi, as it also supports the design of DApps and smart contracts. Another notable feature of Celo is how the blockchain automatically calculates transaction fees. This allows users to pay transaction fees for the service in any currency.

What is CELO Token?

CELO is an ERC-20 token and the local token of the Celo network. It is also a utility token with benefits across governance and network security and is used for network payments. Token holders can vote on network governance assessments via staking. This means that they can use their assets to participate in elections by voting on clusters of validators. Holders can also stake the token to secure the network and participate in consensus while creating rewards. Alternatively, the token also protects payment for on-chain transactions in the network. Holders will require the Celo Developer Wallet to send, acquire and exchange CELO using decentralized phone number validation.

At launch, 600 million tokens were unlimited to users. The developer intends to release the remaining 40% reserve via fees and rewards. The developers are also collecting around 120 million tokens that will go to a pool created to support CUSD. This reserve will support the validity and price strength of CUSD and other stablecoins in the network. The token is available for purchase and trading on many exchanges, such as Coinbase, Bittrex, Binance and DigiFinex.

How to buy CELO Crypto?

Since September 3, 2020, CELO has been available for purchase and trading on Coinbase. Nevertheless, listed below are the five steps to buy the token on Coinbase;

Signing up on Coinbase is the first for beginners. First, download the Coinbase app or use the exchange’s website. This method is actually easy and done after providing few KYC details. You must also confirm the information you have provided. It is worth mentioning that only verified accounts will have access to the Coinbase trading platform. Nonetheless, current users will only be required to log into their accounts.

Step 2 – Fund your account

Now, after creating an account or logging in, you need to fund your Coinbase account. This will make buying CELO extremely easy. Funding is direct and with either a bank transfer or any compatible debit/credit card, your account is now funded.

Step 3 – Buy CELO Crypto

After having sufficient balance, you can buy CELO tokens. Click on trade, select CELO from the search field and enter the amount you want to buy. You will then check and verify the amount and pay fees for it. The new assets will automatically appear in your account and you can choose to keep, trade or sell them. You also need to make sure you have a wallet so you can keep it safe.

Is CELO the hidden blockchain for businesses and 10x profitable for investors?

CELO could be a game changer as it has already achieved various milestones. Some of the milestones are as follows:

1) Deutsche Telekom

Make mobile payments on Celo: Image source: Celo Medium

Deutsche Telekom created a strategic investment in Celo native digital asset (CELO) and joined the Celo Alliance for Prosperity as the first mobile transport employee. They also became a validator on the Celo network. This cooperation is related to Celo’s goals and the benefits Deutsche Telekom delivers to its customers worldwide, the bulk of whom mainly use their phones to access financial benefits.

By building on Celo’s mobile-first platform, mobile carriers like Deutsche Telekom can quickly incorporate mobile-friendly blockchain-based applications and help clients in unique, meaningful ways. Deutsche Telekom is leading this action, and it will be exciting to see how mobile operators and other companies take advantage of all that the blockchain and cryptocurrency market has to offer.

2) Celo Euro (cEUR)

The CELO team has established Celo Euro (cEUR). This is other local Mento stablecoin on the mobile payments platform. This cEUR produces a brand new money transfer for the EU where users can quickly and easily send digital money between nations with a phone number. It’s as easy as sending a text message and can be done in as little as 5 seconds for less than $0.01. Integrated with the unlimited nature of Celo’s platform, the CELO team can enable a mobile-friendly design of digital money that can be used by the 6 billion smartphone users worldwide.

3) Optics

The team has also introduced Optics. It is a new gas-efficient bridging initiative that combines Celo with Ethereum. Optics allow interoperability between layer-one blockchains. It is trustless, non-custodial and designed to reduce gas costs for users. This suggests that permissionless developers can create configurable cross-chain applications, easily move tokens and data between chains, and allow users to run existing applications on-chain.

4) PayU

PayU, one of the largest payment providers for emerging markets, is empowering its nearly half a million providers to accept cUSD as a payment option. PayU’s vendor and customer base is mainly focused on high-growth markets such as Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, so maintaining a decentralized, super-secure algorithmic stablecoin provides access to USD and EUR-backed digital assets protected from the volatility of some fiat money and cryptocurrencies more extensively. This incorporation is a major effort to make digital assets more comfortable for customers to use and for vendors to accept. This can really accelerate the adoption of stablecoins in more communities around the world.

5) Valora

When the cLabs team launched Valora in February, the rapid growth in user adoption was greatly exceeded. It has since persisted on this upward rotation. At the time of writing, Valora has more than 200,000 users with credit and 53,000 monthly engaged users in more than 100 nations. This bash showed that Valora has evolved to become more than a project on the Celo platform and has prospects to scale even more. That drove the findings to make Valora an autonomous, stand-alone business, with Jackie Bona—as cLab’s head of consumer growth for Valora—as CEO. The Valora team also raised a $20 million Series A to fuel the company’s expansion.

6) Donut Hard Fork

On May 19, 2021, the donut hard fork was executed. The Donut Hardfork is an indisputable hardfork that contains many compelling network upgrades that push Celo to become more gas efficient, improve interoperability, and allow Celo users to connect to widespread tools like MetaMask.

Important updates from Donut Hardfork:

CIP-20: Toolkit for counting cryptographic operations valuable to smart contract developers.
CIP-25: This will help increase potential bridging to Solana, Cosmos and NEAR.
CIP-35: Pushes Ethereum transaction styles available on Celo, which will allow access to all of Ethereum’s tools.

Conclusion

Celo is an open platform that supports various services, including distributed applications, smart contract extension, and global payments. The various milestones can make this a profitable investment.