Rails for the Real World

Transcript

[applause] >> My name is Liz as Kartik mentioned. I'm COO of Celo Core Co. That's the merged entity between Celo Labs or C Labs and the Celo Foundation. I'm also the only thing standing between you and a cocktail or rushing home to watch game three of the Knicks. So, it is my privilege to be here. Um day one today has been amazing um of Eth Con. Thank you so much again to Kartik and the Eth Global team for organizing such a dynamic and insightful evening of of or full day of activities.

The projects, the possibilities, the protocols [snorts] about the future have been really sort of uh unimaginable and endless. But, here's the thing about the future. You actually have to build it, right? It's not just about prototyping or white writing a white paper. You've got to build it and that is what we do at Celo best. Building to become an L2 of Ethereum preserving the whole state of the network from our launch as an EVM compatible L1. Building to capture 840,000 daily active users at its peak. You name it, we've most likely done it. And I think just a show of hands here if you've heard of Celo, could you please raise your hands?

Think it's a good number of you, about like 30 to 40%. So, that's promising and I think after this, I promise you that you'll learn something that you haven't already even if you know about us. So, what is Celo? Celo is the number one blockchain for stablecoin payments with a mission from our very origins and genesis to create the conditions of prosperity for all. We've had unique innovations early on when we launched on Earth Day of 2020 over six years of archetyping technical features that today people take for granted. The ability to pay for gas with multiple ERC-20 tokens, including native USDC and USDT, with Tether's USAT and XAUT0 coming

soon. It just passed through governance. Sub-cent ultra-low gas fees, a mobile-first focus, and multi-currencies. That differentiation has really led us to high-value partners coming to Celo, like Tether, as I mentioned before, Circle, the USDC issuer, and Opera, publicly traded on the Nasdaq, a Fortune 500 company that has over 500 million monthly active users of their browser that they service regularly. Um in [snorts] addition, we have, of course, all of the blue chip sort of labels from wallet providers and infrastructure providers, Oracles, you name it, DEXs, um and centralized exchanges, all

supporting the Celo network, which is really sort of a benefit of having been around for as long as we've have, which over 6 years we just celebrated our anniversary of. Um some really great high-level stats, our entire network has seen over 1.3 billion-plus total transactions. On average, as I had mentioned, we have around 600,000 daily active users. Those are folks with a verifiable phone number, um and over 263 million dollars in total value secured as a chain and network. Um 6.2 billion dollars of monthly stablecoin trading volume we just reached this year also as a peak, which was super exciting for us.

Um and so together we're really building these programmable rails for global finance, and more specifically for everyone, anywhere, and users of all experience levels to benefit from the blockchain without even understanding that what they're using is crypto, because that's so abstracted away, and we've made the UI UX really seamless. So from day one we've wanted to realize this vision to become the global Venmo for crypto and I will show you how we've been achieving that and the sort of rails we've been using to get to where we've been going. Um from a native stablecoin standpoint, you might think that there are other sort of bigger chains and ecosystems who lead

the pack, but it's actually Celo that has over 25 plus stablecoins in US dollar denominations or uh local currencies from the Kenyan shilling to the Nigerian naira, the Philippine peso to the Colombian peso. We're the number one transport layer for USDT, which means that Tether's USDT sees over 5 million weekly active users of the stablecoin, albeit in smaller denominations, more sub $10 per wallet um because we are dealing with primarily emerging markets.

So the volume is perhaps less than another chain that maybe has a handful of whales using the stablecoin, but we've really found product market fit in literally piercing the real world so people can use stables every day for airtime, data, to stream music, um to pay for a creative project in in Nairobi. And and that's really really exciting. Um as I mentioned with being the number one chain for Tether and growing, that chart to your right shows since we've implemented native USDT um with the ability to pay for gas with USDT too for frictionless payments, that number has just gone up into the right um peaking again at 5 million uh ahead

of Tron, which is actually only at 3 million and everyone else. Um so that's a fun fact about Celo you might not have known before you joined us. We also lead for uh Tether gold um or as a tokenized commodity. We have over 100,000 uh holders of tokenized gold, which is really, really exciting. Over 90% of XAUT0's growth comes from our chain, again, which is pretty remarkable. People just stack gold, and we have really exciting cashback programs through our MiniPay wallet, which Opera built. I'll get into that later.

Um and so, I think we're one of the top five chains for RWA holders, which is, again, really exciting when you look at the metrics and understand that these are everyday people in the world who are holding this to hedge against local currency inflation and volatility. USAT, Tether's genius compliant stablecoin issued by Anchorage, is the next to come to Celo after Ethereum, the next chain after all of them or ahead of all of them, um which is also really exciting. And we have some day-one use cases lined up with Self, our privacy protocol that verifies your humanity.

And if you're able to verify with Self using a biometric ID or passport, you can actually go on to Google and claim money through their mainnet faucet and airdrop, which is super exciting. And that would be USAT cash. So, the all teams are sort of sprinting to line that up, which should be coming soon. Same with Tether Gold. I think I had shared this before. $4 million in transaction volume to date with people just using mini apps to buy gold directly with stables and to receive cashback. Opera MiniPay, the browser company that I mentioned before, which is a a huge co-collaborator of ours, 15 million wallets that they've activated of the small fraction of their 500 million user base.

They also have 80 million users coming online soon that hold points on their browser, which will be able to cash redeem on Celo and on chain. So, we're bringing so many more people online, which is really, really exciting. 430 million lifetime transactions. It's available in over 60 plus countries. It's a standalone wallet available in Android and iOS stores with um 50 plus mini app ecosystem. So, again, the ability to sort of use your stables and not just kind of hold it somewhere, which is really, really exciting. So, this is something that we've been working with them on for a few years now, and they've just again also kind of only gone up into the right in terms of their exponential growth. Um we have

tons of sort of road shows that we go to bring on the right projects, um whether it's Southeast Asia, Indonesia, um Africa has also historically been a huge focus for ours, and we just extended our partnership towards the end of last year with Opera through 2020, um which is really exciting for us. Uh sorry, 2030, which is really exciting for us. And even more interesting is that Opera actually received through governance, um by our community, a 160 million Celo allocation. So, as a publicly traded company, they actually hold Celo, not dissimilar to sort of a dot, which is really, really cool.

Up down, uh if we're talking about the rails for everyday use and the real worlds, we have so many interesting local currencies that lend itself nicely to on-chain effects and effects markets. Um everything from sort of the G7 currencies to, again, the Nigerian naira or the Kenyan shilling. Um that's all tradeable on Up Down, our uh Perpster X. Uh that's a native to Celo and built by some core contributors of the ecosystem, which is also really exciting. It's trying to sort of chip away at that 7.5 trillion dollar FX opportunity, which is a huge growth area for, I think, any ecosystem. Um Self, as

I'd mentioned as well, is an exciting privacy protocol that leverages uh biometric IDs and passports to NZK proofs to allow you to prove yourself and self-disclose what elements of your data you actually want to reveal, whether you're over the age of 21, whether you're not from an OFAC sanction country. It's really light sort of pre-KYC work in addition to so many other various use cases with the sort of agentic and AI era taking off, it's it's more um necessary than ever to be able to really prove yourself. And as mentioned, we have a long-standing partnership with Self and Google Cloud to unlock these really neat use cases

leveraging USAT. Um you also currently are able to as a verified human via Self have boosted search credits on Google AI's search tool for web3 builders, which is also a great perk as well. Um and you can also go on Aave or Velodrome if you're sort of trading and in the world of DeFi to get boosted yield, which is also really kind of novel. So here's a sort of recap of sort of where Self has been. They recently acquired Loom, a really exciting startup, and new CEO Burjui Shah, he's the head of AI at Uber formerly, and they're just doubling down on how we can in this sort of new era that we're in

leverage the right tools for i- identity. So we've never had stronger fundamentals becoming and reaching that vision of the global Venmo of crypto and making it as easy as it is to send a text message to anyone in the world as it is to send crypto in a digital asset. What does that mean in terms of mindshare? We've been on CoinDesk speaking about it. Vitalik came to our uh L2 anniversary party. We just celebrated the one-year anniversary of becoming an Ethereum L2.

Um we're regularly sort of shortlisted on Grayscale's assets under consideration, which is really exciting. We work with a lot of third-party data partners like GrowThePie, Token Terminal, to create these sort of best practice research analytic reports that kind of dive into the stats of our ecosystem and really sort of verify all of that on chain. Bankless, I believe, called us one of the most undervalued projects, which was also really exciting. I think Ryan and David both had their minds blown when they looked at sort of our GrowThePie stats in terms of daily active usage.

And we're regularly leading through our DevRel team a lot of the agentic activity work. So, if you go to 8004 scan.io, you'll see all of our agents are actually the top five, top 10 against some of the bigger chains. And that's really really exciting with the most feedback, etc. Other sort of industry praise, I think you guys saw Jing earlier on stage. She's called, you know, Celo underrated AF.

We are also part of the superchain. We've had Vitalik shout us out, which is great. He's been a big supporter. I think he regularly sort of espouses how our ecosystem and community sort of reflect the best principles of Ethereum and sort of doing work for people who need it most. And then we're also one of the top chains for tokenized commodities as previously shared out on Token Terminal more recently. I think the list is endless. I think even Jason Chaskin from EF talked about how we showed the playbook of becoming an L2 and all of the added benefits that we were able to sort of realize from that shift in just getting the network cost down, which was great.

Here's a quick recap of our daily active addresses. Our chain revenue has also been up on average since mid-April. We had a tokenomics overhaul, which was really exciting for the community, and since we've been able to increase a minimum base base fee and architect a number of returns back to the community so they can vote on whether to burn or continue to fund the community. Um and so we've actually hit an all-time high just a few weeks ago of $18,000 in a day. Um and on average we're at around 4,000 right now.

Um for just an exciting sort of growth trajectory to hit in the sense that this business of selling block space is not dead. It is very much alive, especially when you have sort of the activity and the usage that we've been able to achieve. And of course we can't do this um without a community that is fully decentralized. And so for us, we work with a lot of regional DAOs that are a network of incredible self-starters around the world um from Mexico to Colombia and all around Latin America, primarily Brazil and Argentina. Um Celo Europe. Um that team is really plugged in actually with the UNDP's work and their fintech accelerator, which is quite exciting. Um Celo Arabian of

course Africa DAO, which is comprised of a lot of our former ecosystem contributors. Um Celo Celo in Thailand, Celo Korea, Philippines and India. So a lot of these folks work in our community on our behalf and show up at places including ETHGlobal hackathons when we can't be there on the ground personally. That's also been super exciting um and important for us to have um because they hold us accountable. And just a quick overview again of the ecosystem and what it looks like. As mentioned, we have, you know, Aave, Velodrome, Curve, all of the sort of big players, Uniswap V3 and four, safe integration, MetaMask, the works. It's uh really kind of exciting to see how

there's a full-blown ecosystem. I think our marketing team's stat is about a thousand projects in over 150 countries, all of which sort of contribute to these hero metrics of on-chain activity and transactions on the regular, which again has been consistent now for a well over a year. And with that, I'm happy to sort of wrap. And yeah, if anyone has any questions, feel free to find me after this and enjoy the rest of your evening. Nicks and four.