CELO – Making crypto as easy as texting

TL;DR : The Celo network is built for the real world and designed for fast, low-cost payments worldwide. A core feature necessary for unlocking real-world solutions is Celo’s design for simplifying cryptocurrency transactions by allowing users to send and receive crypto using their phone numbers as public key addresses. By leveraging the global mobile infrastructure, Celo makes crypto accessible to billions of smartphone users worldwide, and makes for a highly energy-efficient and planet positive network. Celo uses its own native token, CELO, to support its network validators and as a governance token. 

What is Celo?

Nowadays, pretty much everyone owns a smartphone, and we’re relying on it more and more for paying for stuff and moving money around, especially through e-wallet apps. It’s already a norm to go grocery shopping or to pay for your cab ride using only your phone, or even to split the bill over dinner by sending your funds to your friend’s phone number.

This kind of ubiquity and ease-of-use, is something that the cryptocurrency world is still looking for however. To send money using crypto, we still need to use very long hexadecimal code addresses that are impossible to memorize and are easy to confuse with other addresses. Add to that the fact that the majority of people don’t even have a crypto wallet, or find it too complicated to send funds that way.

But what if we could send crypto directly to someone’s phone number? If it were that easy, it is not difficult to imagine more and more people opting to use crypto for their day to day purchases. This vision is exactly what the Celo network has in mind with their plans of a decentralized financial solution through tapping the already existing global mobile network–making sending crypto just as easy and common as sending a text message over your phone.

There are over 6.84 million smartphones currently in use in the world, however many blockchain-based applications are not built for use on mobile devices. By leveraging lightweight nodes to enable mobile-first infrastructure and incorporating SocialConnect social mapping, the roughly 84% of all humans alive  that potentially have smartphones  can use it to send funds anywhere securely without having to go through banks, remittances, or any other kind of middleman service–presenting a viable and highly inclusive roadmap for global crypto adoption. 

How does Celo work?

Celo’s mobile-centric concept revolves around users being able to use their phone numbers as their public keys for sending and receiving cryptocurrencies, made possible through address-based encryption.

For those unfamiliar with how public keys work, we can use a simple analogy: A public key is like having your own mailbox. Anyone can drop a letter into your mailbox because it is out there in the open. In crypto, your public key takes the form of a long string of hexadecimal characters that can be shared with anyone. The difference is that through Celo, you can use your own phone number as your public key and share it with anyone to be able to receive cryptocurrencies. 

Meanwhile, these public addresses are registered and encrypted in a blockchain database ensuring that transactions and information are kept highly secure and that no single entity can have control over the entire network. 

This approach comes with plenty of advantages:

- Mobile numbers are simpler to use and store and are universally understood around the world. 

- This allows the system to send crypto funds even to users who do not yet possess a crypto wallet, as long as they already have an existing phone number.

- Using phone numbers as addresses requires less throughput than conventional blockchain transactions, allowing for faster transaction speeds and making it an ideal channel for transferring funds even in areas where internet resources are limited. 

Celo also utilizes its own multi-token ecosystem, consisting of CELO which is used to support the network’s validators and acts as a governance token for facilitating its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) infrastructure. In PoS, anyone with sufficient hardware can add their own node to the network and participate in validating transactions in return for CELO rewards. 

Celo also has a suite of stablecoins, including the Mento assets Celo Dollars (cUSD), Celo Euros (cEUR), and Celo Reals (cREAL), which are used as the currencies for transferring value across the network. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are also natively integrated with Celo and available as accepted gas currencies, removing the need for multiple currencies for a single transaction.

How to use Celo

Currently, there are a number of wallets that can be used to create an account on the Celo network and to start transacting using Celo-based assets, the full list which can be found on the Celo Native Wallets section of Celo’s official documentation. 

Ethereum migration

Celo mainnet launched as a standalone Layer-1 blockchain. However in 2023, core contributors cLabs proposed migrating Celo to a Layer-2 on Ethereum to amp network security and share liquidity resources. The network is still in its stages of transitioning its tech stack over to the Ethereum ecosystem, with the Dango testnet launching in early July.

Celo milestones and carbon neutral efforts

To date, Celo has recorded an average block time of 5 seconds, with over 400 million transactions processed at an average cost of only $0.0005 per transaction.

With its already low carbon footprint, Celo has also tallied over 1500 days of its operations as being carbon-negative, thanks to its Carbon Offsetting Fund which allocates 0.1% of the network’s base fees to organizations involved in conservation and carbon offsetting efforts. The implementation of Ultragreen Money expanded on these efforts by allocating 20% of every transaction fee on Celo to a new green fund dedicated to carbon offsetting. 

The CELO token

CELO is the native token that fuels the Celo platform. Its primary use is to secure the network’s staking protocol and as a reward for the network’s validator node operators. CELO is also used as a governance token for voting on community proposals, supporting overcollateralized reserves to stabilize the price of Celo-based stablecoins, as well as for funding various grant applications for building applications on the network. 

Ready to start with crypto? CELO is now available on PDAX.

Start your trading journey today!

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