December 1, 2022: You Had Me at $CELO 👋📱
Curve launches on mobile-first chain Celo
Curve has launched onto another blockchain. Say hello to Celo!
What exactly is Celo? Does the world need another blockchain at a time when crypto is bleeding out to zero?
Celo launched as a mobile first blockchain. This is no mere marketing gimmick, the mobile friendly nature is central to the protocol. Celo essentially took the Ethereum EVM and tweaked it to be more mobile friendly. For instance, they rethought public keys to tie them closer to, say, a phone number or email address.
This concept allows you to do some fun things that could improve the user experience and hasten adoption. For instance, you can wire somebody money by phone number even if they haven’t set up a wallet.
What else do mobile phones have? Contact lists. Their white paper specifically describes how they could turn your contact list into a trust network.
“Once there exists a decentralized mapping of phone numbers to public keys, it can be used to bootstrap a reputation system that helps users determine the trustworthiness of any new users they may transact with.”
The white paper outlines a basic algorithm to compute a user’s reputation known as EigenTrust.
Given the prevalence of mobile phones in the developing world, Celo has put appropriate thought into the use case. Noting the important of “user-initiated dollarization in hyper-inflationary markets,” Celo includes native stablecoin functionality built on an elastic coin supply model, complete with a Celo Dollar.
One can immediately grasp how a mobile-first blockchain could scale well across the globe. Mobile phones are the internet in some parts of the world. Celo has a shot at bringing mass adoption, and they’ve done their homework to make adoption easier.
The current launch of Curve on the chain is quite early stage, with a single seeded pool of just six figures.
At market peak Celo had over $1B in TVL on chain, but in the current bera this has slumped to ~$100MM in TVL per DeFiLlama, an amount that’s notches it just ahead of Bitcoin.
The launch of Curve onto Celo could become promising. Last year they announced a $14MM incentives program, although this value may have been denominated in 2021 dollars. Farmers may want to keep an eye on the chain, in case incentives do manifest.
The chain is putting a heavy emphasis onto building out their DeFi ecosystem. They’re offering up to $100MM in grants through their DeFi Development Fund for “Web3 projects committed to making DeFi accessible to everyone.”
Consequently, the Celo blockchain punches above its weight in terms of DeFi offerings. In addition to Curve and other Ethereum stalwarts, Stake DAO is making the jump to Celo to use their Votemarket to provide a rewards program.
At the moment, Defi TVL on Celo is dominated by Mento Finance, a Celo-based exchange with about 75% of the chains’s TVL. Mento provides exchanges among the chain’s main stablecoins.
In a bera market there’s not much more productive use of time than building for better times. Celo developer activity has been quite active on this front.
We still tend to spend most of our time on Ethereum, but we’re quite aware that successful sidechains have consistently been good bets. Celo is unique among sidechains in having distinctive market positioning and a clear-cut use case. Worth keeping an eye on it.
Disclaimers! Author has no exposure to Celo or anything on it.
Interesting project.
We'll keep an eye on him.