You might recognize this as that one Coinbase earn coin with that funny animation about the girl and her mom. No? If not, check that lesson out even if you might not earn any CELO as it does an amazing job of summarizing just what problems CELO aims to solve. What does it do? It gives everyone who has a cellphone number their own wallet address.
Background
This blockchain was founded in United states in 2017 (most the top 100 seems to be founded in 2017) with the idea to help developing countires adopt blockchain. Phone users are increasing exponentially while crypto lags behind and is quite slow, so why not give every phone user their own blockchain? Following this idea CELO launched its testnet in 2019 and roughly half a year later the mainnet was released, making this coin fairly fresh. The coin has around 50 major companies backing it and claims to have over 400 million users worldwide (indirectly). In the summer of this year they also released the Donut hard work which allows compatability with the Ethereum network based tools. This also allows the network to work together with Solana, Cosmos and NEAR as well.
Network
The network consists of one coin and two stable tokens, one of these being quite rare, more on that later. The network itself runs on 141 validators in a PoS network where coin holders can help the growth of the network by allowing their coins to be used to verify transactions. The native coin CELO can be used to pay for gas fees and transfer funds or value between users easily. Unlike any other blockchain, the public key is tied directly to a phone number isntead of a generated address. You simply verify you own your phone number with CELO and you get access to all the funds associated with the number. This allows users to quickly and easily send money abroad and to phone users that aren't too tech savy, CELO does most of the work for them.
The network also has two stablecoins that can be used without having to worry about volatility. Those stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar and suprisingly, the European euro. A stablecoin pegged to the Euro is quite rare, especially as the Celo Euro is very stable. All three of these coins/tokens can be easily sent to any of the world's phone numbers.
Use cases
The main use case is to help transfer money between users. This is fairly easily done with the network as you don't even need to be set up when recieveing the funds as you can retrieve them afterwards. The use and idea is mundane and CELO executes it flawlessly. You can also stake the coin to receive passive income and promote network health.
Celo today
The coin and network has been growing steadily with it seeing a recent boom in value. One of the main reasons why this coin has been as succesful as quickly as it has is due to the wide range of backing companies investing in the network itself. Celo still stands to survive the test of time and fight against most of its scary blockchain bretheren and see how it fares.
