Celo is a blockchain-based ecosystem created to drive crypto adoption among smartphone users. It was launched in a fully functional state in April 2020 by Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, two ex-executives from the web hosting platform GoDaddy, along with Sep Kamvar and Marek Olszewski. What sets it apart from other platforms is that transacting in CELO and its stablecoins takes only 5 seconds, incurs fees as little as $0.001 and enables users to pay fees in the Celo asset that they are using.
The Celo Platform boasts superfast mobile syncing with the network and claims to be hyper-efficient through lightweight clients on devices. It is also dApp-friendly and allows developers to code decentralised apps on its blockchain. It even features interoperability with MetaMask as well as Ethereum based development tools.
How does Celo work?
By replacing public keys (the addresses of crypto wallets) with unique mobile numbers, the Celo Project aims to include all those without banking access into the decentralised finance framework. Thus, it acts as a facilitator for global crypto payments by connecting all the mobile phones in the world.
The Celo Project can be broken down into four essential components:
1. Celo Platform: The decentralised, proof-of-stake blockchain protocol
The Celo Platform has 100 network validators (or nodes) who run the blockchain’s proof-of-stake (PoS) operations. It uses the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) mechanism, which interconnects all nodes on the network in real-time. A node must ‘stake’ at least 10,000 CELO coins in order to gain voting rights on proposed changes. Staking involves pledging tokens to the network for developmental purposes and gaining validator rights in the process.
The platform not only has multiple native stablecoins but is also ERC-20 compatible, which means that the Ethereum blockchain powers it. The platform maps individual mobile phone numbers to crypto wallet addresses, thus making it a peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile…
