What is Celo? Celo is a platform acting as a global payment infrastructure for cryptocurrencies that aims to target mobile users. In addition to making basic payments accessible, it has also made a point to support the development of decentralized applications or dAPPS on its blockchain.
Apart from running the operations on its blockchain, the network operates two native tokens. They are:
- CELO, a governance asset for voting on changes to the protocol
- Celo Dollars (cUSD), a stablecoin mirroring the value of the US dollar.
Who are the founders?
The Celo (CELO) was co-founded in 2017 by Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, who were executives at the web hosting firm GoDaddy, along with Sep Kamvar, an MIT professor and Marek Olszewski a Google executive.
How does Celo work?
Celo is a global platform working towards including every smartphone user in the world within the crypto ecosystem. To state it more clearly, by using phone numbers as public keys, it aims to introduce billions of smartphone owners around the globe, which also includes smartphone users without banking access, to transacting in crypto.
There will be more than seven billion smartphone subscribers by 2025 but there are currently less than 0.1 billion cryptocurrency users.
Many people have smartphones and lots of those people use applications as their digital wallets to easily send money to friends and other users. Anyone who owns Celo can help operate the network.
The benefit of using these applications is that they are super simple. In many ways, Celo is trying to satisfy the same market while bringing all of the advantages of cryptocurrency to the average smartphone user.
Apart from that, Celo’ s applications are easily equipped on users’ mobile devices, for example, Celo mobile wallet.
Key features of Celo
- A platform for Mobile DeFi: The Celo protocol provides a wholesome platform to the Celo community that can create stabilized value digital assets.
- Fast & light transactions (optimized for fast mobile phone synchronization).
- The ability to send currency to phone numbers (lightweight identity protocol that maps hashes of phones numbers to public keys– making it easier for anyone with a mobile phone to send and receive digital currencies to anyone in the world)
- Automatic deduction of transaction fees and the option to pay gas fee (as low as $0.01) in stable currencies.
- Stable coins, starting with cUSD, backed by a decentralized reserve to help provide stability, transparency, and auditability.
Growth cycle
Until the beginning of 2021, Celo’s price generally stayed around $1.70 except for a quick spike in price late that August, where it jumped to around $4 before going back down. In 2021, it saw more dramatic price swings as it started to pick up new users.
Celo is the first integrated stable coin for the Opera browser. This is a big step for this coin as it slowly starts its journey to becoming an easily accessible coin for the general public. Opera is a relatively small browser, but still has more than 380 million users worldwide who might start to use it.
Its project has a team of extremely reputable developers and only has a market cap of $1.2 billion. Price swings usually show an increase in activity on the network.
There was 600 million CELO (previously called cGLD) at mainnet launch. The remaining 400 million CELO will come in the form of epoch rewards distributed to network validators and the Community Fund.
Where to Buy Celo
The best place to buy Celo in Africa is on the Bitmama app. It goes without saying that we are a safe and secure platform. Another wonderful reason to buy Celo on Bitmama is that we are stakeholders in the growth of Celo in Africa. Our team was physically present at the Celo Connect conference which happened in Barcelona, Spain. Check it out here
You can invest in Celo for a number of reasons including; ease of use, privacy, scalability and flexibility.
Once you have an account on Bitmama, you can buy Celo in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya right now, and use it as a part of your crypto portfolio.
Download our app on iOS or Playstore to start buying Celo today. You should also join our crypto community to get more information about Celo and other cryptos.
