CELO – a simple, inclusive financial ecosystem built on blockchain

CELO project, at its core, has one novel mission – to make accessible financial tools to about 6 billion smartphone users worldwide. CELO utilises the power of blockchain technology to enable peer-to-peer banking and make the financial experience around blockchain simple and user-friendly. It is an open-source ecosystem of technologies, organisations and individuals sharing a common vision – build a financial mechanism that creates conditions of prosperity for everyone.

CELO is built on Ethereum Virtual Machine and uses an ultralight mobile client, making it easy for the developer community to build dApps for smartphones across the globe. Designed with real users in mind, the platform is driven by a trust ecosystem where it is easier to verify collateral, in comparison to fiat-backed tokens in a banking ecosystem.

It has several technical innovations which makes it a truly powerful P2P financial ecosystem. The platform's on-chain public key infrastructure links mobile numbers to public keys, doing away with unfriendly, long crypto wallet addresses and bringing the contact person's name into the picture.

CELO is fast, a welcome change from other blockchain initiatives often bogged down due to the long waiting time for nodes to download bulky transaction history before the exchange of funds can be initiated. CELO uses Zk Snark cryptography and enables instantaneous blockchain verification without the need for complete transaction history and allows users to send funds within seconds.

The Celo U.S. Dollar (cUSD) is the first stablecoin that can be exchanged directly using just a mobile phone number, allowing users to make fast, low-cost transactions on the go. The algorithms working in the backend constantly monitor and adjust the stablecoin's demand-supply dynamically, thus making the system risk-averse and open to adoption at a global scale.

Celo stablecoins can be in any denominations – Celo US Dollar (cUSD), Celo Euro (cEUR), Celo Brazilian Real (cREAL). The stablecoins are globally accessible and protected from market volatility. CELO, alongside other crypto assets like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), DAI and more serves as a reserve asset for cUSD, cEUR, and cREAL.

The Celo community is the greatest asset for the platform – everyone who owns Celo has a say in how the platform evolves and grows over time. The collective experience from different domains and stakeholders – ranging from the public sector, technology, non-profits and corporates- makes CELO a one-of-a-kind thriving initiative built to empower the commons and usher in an inclusive financial system.

The community is guided by two core values – unique purpose and connectedness. This, in turn, strives the Celo Foundation to contribute towards greater global goodness – education, environmental health, community engagement and ecosystem outreach. This is primarily driven by the large community which adheres to the tenets of an open, transparent platform built to innovatively put to use blockchain technology to solve some of the world’s acute problems.

Climate Collective is a community of companies tokenizing natural assets to back Celo stablecoin. This initiative is built at the intersection of web3 and climate action and propelled by Celo’s carbon-negative blockchain. The ultimate objective is to accelerate regenerative applications and progress the Regenerative Finance (ReFi) ecosystem.

PROVO is another initiative centered around provisioning a sandbox environment for digital asset experimentation on the Celo platform. This initiative aims to bring together key elements for the banking ecosystem and regulatory authorities to experiment on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Celo is a stablecoin that is easy-to-use, accessible and practical with reduced cost of payments and remittances with a stable ecosystem for cross-country transactions. Celo foundation, building upon its partnerships with global and regional exchanges to make Celo stablecoins available globally for trading. All the transactions happen in a decentralised way using smart contracts that exist on the Celo platform.

Valora Wallet, a non-custodial global payments app built on Celo, allows users to pay, send and store Celo dollars, Celo Euro and Celo Brazilian Real with a rewards and incentives mechanism in a secure manner and with minimum transaction fees. Valora makes full use of Celo stablecoins to transfer funds instantaneously, even with the receiver not having a crypto wallet and for newbies just entering crypto world.

Celo facilitates DeFi using Ubeswap, which is a mobile-first decentralised exchange democratising access to DeFi for all. Moola is another great platform built on Celo that is used for borrowing and lending assets of Celo.

Celo is a part of WazirX's Rapid Listing Initiative, which enables trading through deposits on WazirX through Binance. Users get an end-to-end secure framework to deposit, trade and withdraw Celo using WazirX in the INR and USDT market.

WazirX has come up with an exciting giveaway schedule for 10 days starting 21^st March till 31^st March. These include signup rewards worth $40 CELO, YouTube Live with Alex Witt, Head of Finance, Celo Foundation to know what’s and how’s of CELO platform, AMA with Rene Reisenberg, Founder, Celo Foundation with about INR 23,500 in offing as prizes. Exciting Trivia on WazirX Instagram channel around CELO with prizes of INR 4000 to try out your CELO knowledge. There are a couple of Gleam giveaways, Quizzes and, to end it all, a mammoth 76-hour-long Highest Trader Kaun Marathon slated from 28-31 March with prizes worth INR 23,60,000 for the top 400 CELO traders.

Not only this, WazirX and CELO have an exciting welcome offer for new users with a total of INR 15,70,000 worth of CELO tokens to any 500 users who sign up, buy/deposit CELO on WazirX!