Celo Ecosystem: A mobile-first blockchain building for prosperity

Celo has chosen to be a blockchain that is best suited to mobile devices out of a slew of blockchains with different goals and objectives. Since mobile phone users are a primary focus of Celo's business strategy then, how does Celo plan to reach them?

Celo Overview

What is Celo?

Celo is a mobile, carbon-neutral blockchain that makes decentralized financial (DeFi) tools and services accessible to anyone with a mobile phone – bringing the benefits of DeFi to the users of the 6 billion smartphones in circulation.

Celo enables native and non-native digital assets–both cryptographic and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)–to circulate freely across devices, carriers, and countries. This makes money mobile, global and accessible all around the world

Celo’s Core Features

Mobile-friendly: Mobile phone number mapping to account addresses for a seamless user experience on platform-native dApps such as impactMarket or Valora.

Open: Celo uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol. With its interoperability, Celo will be able to facilitate transactions between other smart contract enabled layer 1 blockchains such as Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Near, and others thanks to the Optics, a new gas-efficient bridging standard that connects Celo with Ethereum.

Ultra-accessible with Ultralight Mobile Client: The ultralight client is a zk-SNARK-based system that enables mobile and resource-constrained Celo network nodes to sync to the Celo blockchain faster and with less data. 

Gas Payable in Multiple Stablecoins: Users can pay transaction fees by the available stable coin. Therefore, it helps remove the troublesome need to store multiple blockchain coins.

Celo Coin (CELO) Key Metrics

• Token Name: Celo
• Ticker: CELO
• Blockchain: Celo Blockchain
• Token Standard: Updating…
• Contract: 0x471ece3750da237f93b8e339c536989b8978a438
• Token Type: Utility and Governance
• Total Supply: 1.000.000.000 CELO
• Circulating Supply:  367.204.495 CELO
• All-time low ATL: 0.8$ (May 22, 2020)
• All-time high ATH: 9.82$ (August 30, 2021)
• Exchanges: Coin98 Exchange, Binance, Coinbase, Ubeswap, etc. 

Celo Blockchain Statistics

• Chain ID: 42220
• Total Blocks: 11,173,895
• Average Block time: 5s
• Total Transactions: 95,142,951
• Wallet Addresses: 5,163,810
• Average Transaction Fee: $0.00003339
• CELO holders on-chain native: 25,920.
• Marketcap: $2B
• FDV: $3.1B

Roadmap and Development Progress

• 2017: Celo’s whitepaper first published
• 2019: Launched Alfajores & Baklava testnet network
• 2020: Mainnet Launched on Earth Day & cUSD went live
• Q3, 2021: Launched $2.5M Crypto Mobile Hackathon and $100M DeFi for the people incentive program 
• Q4 2021: Announced the Celo Foundation’s Wave IV Grant Recipients
• Q1 2022: Launched cREAL Brazil-based stablecoin and Celo Camp Batch 5

As a result of the $100M incentive programme announced in Q3 2021, Celo used to attract a significant amount of cash into the ecosystem; however, the money at that time was purely speculative because the Celo ecosystem was not mature enough to sustain it. With only a handful of builders remaining since then, this ecosystem has been gradually forgotten over the course of the past half year.

In the years since, the Celo team has organised a number of camps for entrepreneurs and developers who want to build, launch, and/or scale their projects on the Celo Blockchain in order to create products that are innovative and breathe new life into this ecosystem.

Investor & Partner

Previously, Celo has participated in seven rounds of funding with the following investors. Funding amounts were disclosed in some rounds but not in others. a16z, Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others are among the prominent venture capital funds and industry experts who have invested.

Celo Ecosystem Overview

How it began

How it's going

On Celo, there are currently over a hundred active projects. Each sector of this mobile-first blockchain will be examined to see how current projects are doing.

DEX

UbeSwap: A native DEX on the Celo blockchain, UbeSwap has a total value of $33 million (February 13th, 2022). Ube's trading volume is now between $1.5M and $3M, giving the Trading volume/TVL ratio at 5-7%.

Compared to DEXs on other blockchains, which has this ratio around 10-15%), the Ube's ratio is quite low. Current APY on Ube Dexs has dwindled to 40–90% for liquidity providers (excluded stablecoin farming pairs).

Mobius: Celo’s cross-chain stableswap exchange. Mobius's TVL now stands at around $37M. But there is a noticeable decrease in the trading volume as the market direction shifts, which currently stands at $2M (5.4% of the Trading volume/TVL ratio).

Sushiswap: A multichain AMM that supports Celo. SushiSwap's TVL on Celo is now $31M (it peaked at about $110M in TVL in November 2021).  The SushiSwap deployment has been a safe haven for first-time Celo visitors because of its well-established reputation.

Mento: On Celo, Mento serves as an AMM for native tokens that are created on the platform. It is developed by Celo Foundation and now supports: CELO, cUSD, cEUR, cREAL. This AMM currently has $320M in TVL. 

Symmetric: Another DEX now has $2M in TVL.

→ DEXs have become a vital part of every ecosystem as money flows deep into a single blockchain through DEXs. From August to September of last year, Celo's TVL and trading volume both dropped significantly.

In general, the DEX on Celo is not exceptional compared to other blockchains, as evidenced by low transaction volumes and the lack of cash flow in this ecosystem.

Lending

Moola Market: The second-largest TVL on Celo is held by Moola Market, a native lending protocol. Currently, there is $57.3 million in TVL with a 6.8% Market Cap/Borrow Value ratio.

When compared to other notable lending protocols in other ecosystems, such as Venus at 14% in BSC and Compound at 23% in Ethereum, this ratio of Moola Market is quite lower.

→ To improve the efficiency of capital in ecosystems, lending is an essential sector in any ecosystem. Lending will allow for the development of additional applications in the future, such as derivatives, leverage farming, and so on. However, this blockchain is being forgotten by the cash flow, as evidenced by the TVL and volume, due to Celo's dearth of noteworthy innovation

Synthetic

Kresko is a composable, capital-efficient synth asset protocol on Celo. It generates yield on unused crypto assets by minting krAssets such as stocks, commodities, etc. Currently, the Kresko project is still in the early stages.

Stablecoin

There are currently the following types of stablecoins available on CELO:

• cUSD: $94M.
• USDC: $9M.
• cEUR: $40M.
• USBL: A crypto backed stablecoin that has nearly $150K USBL in the market. The daily volume of this stablecoin is only around $2K.
• cREAL: The new stablecoin pegged to Brazil's fiat has just launched on January 28th, 2021.

→ When compared to other blockchains, the total amount of stablecoins issued on this ecosystem is close to $140M, which is not a particularly impressive figure. The fact that only retail investors are involved in the ecosystem is demonstrated by the small cash flow.

Infrastructure

Oracle

• The Graph: The Celo Foundation has committed $150K in grants to subgraph developers in order to create Celo-based products. Graph is also known as one of the most well-known credit protocols for indexing and querying blockchain data. 
• Chainlink: Chainlink, as the market's largest giant oracle protocol, contributes to the establishment of a solid foundation for the Celo blockchain and an accessible entry point to a more open and decentralized world.
• Band Protocol: In its early days, the Celo blockchain had a long-standing relationship with Band Protocol (2020). A strong relationship between the two was demonstrated when it was selected as the oracle provider at Celo Camp.

Celo has also integrated with other protocols such as Parsiq, Bitquery, Dapp Query, Figment, and others.

Bridge
 
AllBridge, Celer Bridge, Wrapped, Optics, etc. are some notable "silk roads" that bring new money from other places into Celo and vice versa.

→ Celo's bridges are sufficient in both quantity and quality. Consequently, users will be able to move into this ecosystem whenever they wish to explore this new territory.

Explorer 

Celo Explorer now has supported tracking all information within the ecosystem in intuitive ways such as charts, visualization data, transactions, etc. 

Wallet

As a vision of blockchain for mobile phones, Celo has released Valora as a native wallet that supports linking phone numbers with crypto wallet addresses, making it easier to transfer assets with only phone number information. Users can also have other options with Metamask and Coin98 Wallet to meet the need for multi-chain crypto wallets.

→  In short, the infrastructure in Celo Blockchain is pretty adequate to serve the Dapps in the system. Developers can come and build products on Celo with the help of these infrastructure protocols.

As Celo also supports EMV-compatibility, it makes it easier for builders from EVM-compatible blockchains to move and port existing projects into Celo, such as Sushiswap, Beefy Finance, Autofarm, etc.

Staking Platform 

As a CELO holder, you can choose from a variety of platforms, such as ChurroFi, SavingsCELO, celovote, etc., to generate passive income from your coin. These staking protocols have a user-friendly interface with a simple and elegant design.

Yield Optimizer

• Pinnata: A cross-chain leveraged yield farming protocol on Celo. The Pinnata Token Launch was originally scheduled for January, 2022, but was postponed due to front-end issues and legal reasons.

• Beefy Finance: Another famous multi-chain yield optimizer protocol that supports 14 blockchains. Beefy’s TVL on Celo now has nearly $3M, ranking only at the 11th between 14 supported chains. 
• Autofarm: A multi-chain DEX and yield aggregator that supports Celo. The current TVL of this protocol on Celo is around $500K

→ This sector on Celo has not yet reached maturity because there are no strong native protocols running in it, and exotic multi-chain projects such as Beefy Finance and Autofarm are dominating the TVL, indicating that the sector is still in its early stages.

Launchpad 

Celo Starter and CeloLaunch are two launchpad platforms that are part of the Celo ecosystems.

CeloLaunch has assisted in the launch of six projects to date, of which only three were on the Celo blockchain and the other three were on the BSC blockchain, indicating that the Celo blockchain is not a desirable destination in the eyes of projects.

Gaming/NFT

• CeloPunks: It was a fork from Punks on Ethereum that sold out in less than 10 minutes. There is now a floor price of 9 CELO (27$) for a single punk, and a ceiling price of 70k CELO ($210k).
• MetaCelo: A P2E metaverse NFT game built on Celo. The game's user interface is very similar to that of the Mario game. It has also been launched on CeloLaunch, raising a total of 320.000 cUSD.

Other projects in this sector are Into the Verse, Pixelava, Createsafe, etc. 

→ The gaming and NFT segments on Celo have not yet provided particularly noteworthy or innovative to attract players from other blockchains. Celo still needs to make an investment in a high-octane game in order to accelerate the growth of this segment.

Celo Ecosystem Predictions

One of the Celo's issues is that the community doesn't pay much attention to this ecosystem, which is evident in the project's Twitter pages with only 200 - 9,000 followers. It is also important to note that ecosystem development is influenced by social signals as it reflects the community size and the number of supporters of the project.

Celo has become less appealing in the eyes of users as a result of the loss of cash flow, demonstrating that the TVL of Dapps is extremely low when compared to other blockchain ecosystems.
As a result, the desire to develop new, highly innovative products in this ecosystem is unattractive, as developers do not want to invest their time and resources in an environment that is not fertile (unless they receive grants from the Celo Foundation).

A significant push is needed for the Celo Ecosystem, perhaps in the form of incentive programmes, in order to establish its own competitive advantage as a blockchain that is designed for mobile devices.

In contrast to other blockchains, Celo is taking a completely different approach by reaching users who are new to cryptocurrency through mobile phones. As a result, it is necessary to design a straightforward, easy-to-understand user interface that is as familiar to this target audience as the way they interact with banking apps in the traditional world.

It will be necessary for Celo to develop a marketing strategy that targets the appropriate audience and distinguishes them from their competitors' competitive advantages.

At this point, all we need to do is keep an eye on Celo's progress. They are still constructing and organizing hackathons and camps in order to incubate new projects that may breathe new life into the Celo ecosystem. 

Conclusion

To conclude, that is all you need to know about Celo and its emerging ecosystem. I hope you’ve gained valuable insights to understand the future potential and find opportunities in the crypto market.