About Celo
Celo is a platform built for mobile devices with lightweight identity protocols and stability protocols, dedicated to making financial DApps and cryptocurrency accessible to everyone with a cell phone. Its ecosystem includes a decentralized PoS blockchain technology stack, a native token, stablecoins and the Alliance of Prosperity.
With address-based cryptography, the Celo protocol maps a user's phone number to a public key address, eliminating the need to remember lengthy and unreadable addresses and allowing users to initiate transfers simply by phone numbers. In this way, Celo significantly lowers the barrier to accessing crypto financial services for the average user.
Celo supports smart contracts and is EVM compatible, a feature that makes it easy and fast for developers to build DApps on Celo, which offers lower gas fees and faster transaction settlement than Ethereum.
How Celo Works
Celo uses a dual token system to stabilize and expand the stablecoin market, and to promote the use of payment systems in emerging markets. Through the light client mechanism, it allows users to transfer and receive tokens directly using their cell phones.
Dual Token System
The Celo protocol has two types of tokens. One is stablecoins anchored to fiat currencies such as Celo Dollar (cUSD) and Celo Euro (cEUR), and the other is the system's native token, CELO. The dual token system is designed to help stablecoins maintain their peg by adjusting the supply and demand of CELO tokens.
Stable coins such as Celo Dollar (cUSD) and Celo Euro (cEUR)
In order to build a payment system with global reach and meet the needs of users in different countries, Celo supports the creation of multiple stablecoins, such as Celo Dollar (cUSD) anchored to the US dollar, Celo Euro (cEUR) anchored to Euro and Celo Real (cREAL) anchored to Brazilian Real.
Through reserves, Mento (Celo’s stability algorithm) and overcollateralization, Celo has built a relatively robust stabilization mechanism to ensure its stablecoins keep their peg. Here is an example of how the mechanism works, using cUSD as an example.
- When the price of cUSD is below $1
On the demand side, the Celo protocol sells CELO from its reserves and buys back cUSD in the open market to increase its demand and bring its price back to $1.
On the supply side, Mento incentivizes users to send 1 cUSD to the Celo reserve to redeem $1 worth of CELO and sell it in the market for a price difference, reducing the supply of cUSD.
- When the cUSD price is above $1
On the demand side, Mento incentivizes users to send $1 worth of CELOs to the Celo reserve to mint 1 cUSD and sell it in the market for a price difference, reducing user demand for cUSD.
On the supply side, the Celo protocol mints new cUSD and buys CELO in the open market to increase its supply and bring its price back down to $1.
In addition to its native token CELO, the Celo Protocol's reserve includes tokens such as BTC, ETH and Dai for overcollateralization to further improve system stability.
Native Token CELO
CELO (formerly known as cGLD) is Celo's native token, which can be used to participate in on-chain staking, governance, and payment of transaction fees, besides supporting the price stability of its stablecoin.
Mechanism
Through the synergy of three types of nodes: light client (light node), full node and validator node, Celo users can experience convenient cryptocurrency payments even in restricted environments such as small memory, weak computing power and poor communication bandwidth.
- Light Client: A software that allows users to connect their cell phones to full nodes in the Celo network without storing or maintaining a full copy of the blockchain. Users run the light client on their phones and connect to the full node to request a minimum amount of state to be downloaded to sign and send transactions.
- Full node: A bridge between the light client and the validation node, receiving requests from the light client and forwarding the transactions to the validation node.
- Validation node: Collects transactions received from other nodes, validates the transactions and generates new blocks based on Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism.
Features
- EVM compatible
- A dual token system
- Support for gas fees paid in stablecoin
- Light identity protocol
- PoS consensus mechanism
- Fast transaction settlement speed and high throughput
Learn More
How to use Celo
Let's take a look at how to use Celo with imToken. First download imToken (https://token.im) to create/import a wallet and add a Celo ccount.
Note: Check the website security certificate before downloading
If you did not add a Celo account when creating/importing your wallet, please navigate to "My Profile" -> "Manage wallets" -> "Add", select the ”Celo“ network, and confirm. Then, return to the wallet homepage to access your newly created Celo account. Now you can transfer/receive tokens and try out popular DApps on the Celo network.
Learn more: How to use Celo with imToken?
Study
cLabsIn early 2017, MIT graduates Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski and computer scientist Sepandar David Kamvar decided to form a team to start exploring the crypto world. In November of that year, they founded cLabs (Celo Labs) to start developing Celo.
cLabs is a service organization dedicated to the development of the Celo ecosystem and is a member of the Alliance of Prosperity, with corporate branches in Berlin, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and more.
In 2018, they announced the project to the world through a post Hello from Celo and received investments from well-known institutions such as a16z Crypto, General Catalyst and Social Capital.
The project's vision is to create an open financial system that will help billions of smartphone users around the world enjoy convenient cryptocurrency payments.
EVM-compatibility
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a virtual CPU for Ethereum to execute codes of smart contracts. EVM-compatibility means creating an EVM-like code execution environment that makes it easy for Ethereum developers to migrate smart contracts to an EVM-compatible chain without having to write the code from scratch again.
Basics of Celo
- The Celo protocol has two types of tokens: native token CELO and stablecoins such as cUSD and cEUR.
- Release time: April 2020
- Consensus mechanism: PoS
- Total supply/circulating supply: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/celo/
Price of CELO
Celo Block Explorer
Celo block explorer is an open source web tool that stays synchronous with the Celo network and allows you to view information about blocks, transactions, addresses on Celo.
More
- Celo official website: https://celo.org/