Crypto Can Be Real, and It's Real on Celo

Transcript

And for the next one, I want to bring on Marek to tell you about all the things that we can actually do with crypto being real on Celo. So, please give Marek a big round of applause. Amazing. Thank you, Karthik. That was a really great talk just now. Um heart. It was so intentional. I'm going to try to be as intentional, but I think uh it's going to be hard to follow that. Um Anyway, uh I'm Marek. I'm one of the co-founders of Celo.

Um and um today I'm going to be talking about something that's really near and dear to us, which is uh making crypto real. I'm here to tell you that crypto can be real. It doesn't have to be just monkeys uh and meme coins. It can be real, and more than that, it's actually real on Celo. And I'm going to try to make this fun for you guys. It's I know it's the early evening now, and so I've thrown in a few emojis as per my usual style, but this time around I want you guys to guess the emoji ASCII name when you see it. And we're going to keep track of who's doing the best at guessing emojis. And if emojis aren't your thing, I also threw

in a few stills of movies. And you can also guess which movie um this still is from. And so we can tally up the points at the end, and yeah, just have have a a little fun. Um Okay, so I think, you know, probably folks here are familiar with the common conception that, you know, crypto is not exactly uh thought of as, you know, something where a lot of real-world utility is happening. Um you know, Go-Aad here is joking that he only invests in projects that aren't targeting anything real.

Will not invest in anything sustainable. Um, and obviously that's uh a little bit of a shame. Um, but you know, I think you know, since folks here probably aren't even used to thinking about real use cases, I thought I would start by listing a few real world use cases where crypto can actually help. So, let's see. What do we have? Anybody want to guess this emoji, by the way? I hear some whispers, but The earth?

I don't mean what's the metaphor I'm I'm trying to convey. What is the actual name of the emoji? Like if you had to search for Globe is close. Okay, I'll give you guys this one and then you guys can guess the next one. So, this is earth, but earth is not the full name. It's earth_africa. Because as you guys might know, there's multiple earths. Um okay. So, the first use case is savings. And while I'm talking about this, feel free to try to guess what movie this is from. I'll give you a hint. It's a animated movie and there are lots of balloons.

Um, So, um, hedging against inflation, saving, you know, this is certainly a common use case um, that we're seeing in kind of the real world use cases of of crypto. You know, a lot of folks, especially in emerging markets, uh where there is a lot of inflation relative to the US dollar, are finding a lot of value in US dollar pegged stable coins. Um, and they're using them to hedge against inflation. It's too hard. I think I made it too hard. It was a pretty good clue. It's it's there you go.

Up. Nice. One point over here. We got our first point. Um, use case number two, sending money overseas. You know, wire transfers do exist, but they don't work on weekends. They can cost a lot of money. If you're sending from two emerging markets or from one emerging market to another, they can be quite expensive. Anyone want to guess this movie? Casino Royale. That's right. I heard a James Bond. Just yell it out. The first person to yell it wins. So, you got to just be quick. Uh you can yell while I'm speaking. It's totally fine.

Uh splitting a bill. Have you guys ever had to split a bill with folks who are out of town, out of the country? And you're just like, "Ah, crap. I have no way of paying you." Well, crypto can help with that. Big Short, over here. You guys know it, but you're not yelling it. You got to yell it. See, this is about making this fun and interactive. Get you out of your shell. Start yelling. Okay, borrowing money. And I'm not talking about, you know, taking a margin, using some collateral to borrow some money. I'm talking about borrowing money against future income. Uh like this person did. Um and um you know, that is something that we're seeing increasingly starting to happen on crypto, which is pretty exciting. So, uncollateralized loans backed by future income. Which, if you

think about it, that's how loans typically work from a bank, right? And so, now we're seeing more of that happening on crypto as well. We Crashed is correct. You got two points over here. Um next up, payments. I think this is the one that we're all thinking about probably when we think of real-world use cases, right? Sending value uh to pay for things, um either in the same country or overseas. Um certainly, you know, a very, very big use case and one that we're, you know, starting to increasingly see, you know, adoption on on crypto rails.

Anybody got this one? Notice the hands are bloody. John Wick. That's right. John Wick pays for everything with gold coins. Um Okay. So, you know, um probably the next logical question to ask is, you know, what is the most used chain for crypto payments today, right? Like, where is all of this activity happening? Maybe not for some of these other use cases, like, you know, lending and savings, but at least for payments, where is all of this happening today? I'll give you guys a hint.

Okay, just guess some chains. Anybody? Tron is correct, and this is Tron legacy, so you get that point. Uh that is what most people think is the most used chain for for things like payments. And, you know, certainly last year, uh that was definitely the case. Um you know, here we see Anthony tweeting about this, really giving Tron uh some credit for really focusing on solving real uh problems for people. But, if you look closer, this is from last November. This is outdated. And, it's outdated, I would say, by really only a week, not even a year.

Um because if you look at what the most common uh crypto project for payments is today, at least by one metric, which is daily active users using stablecoins, uh Artemis this week, really just 2 days ago, which was quite nice for this talk, uh tweeted this uh graph, uh which is showing that Celo literally just passed uh Tron, or at least la- uh is neck and neck now with Tron uh for daily active users who are transacting with stablecoins. So, freaking exciting. Um we have an emoji here for you. Anyone want to guess the emoji?

Trophy is correct. Uh we're pretty excited in the Celo community, of course. Um but, you know, it's not all trophies, certainly not if you look back. You know, I would say, uh yes. Um Do you have two points now? Or more? Ooh. Some points over there. You guys are going to be uh honest and tell me who has the most at the end. Um you know, if you look back, obviously the bear market was pretty brutal for everyone, but certainly for us, you know, focused on real-world use cases, I would say, you know, uh already I think crypto uh wasn't ready even in the last bull market for real-world use cases, and so entering the bear market was

particularly hard, but, you know, I think the Celo community um um started doing a lot of one-handed push-ups um and, you know, we pushed and we pushed and we kept working, and uh and, you know, the numbers really show now, right? So, Artemis actually has a whole tweet thread that I highly recommend folks take a look at. Um you know, they're showing here how the transaction volume uh has grown. This is over the last or since the beginning of the year, basically, and you can see it's a lot of the growth happened this year. And what's interesting is also a lot of the growth happened in different ranges of value as well. So, there's small transactions and bigger ones, uh and a lot of the growth kind of um

happened uniformly, which is pretty cool to see. Um and then a lot of this has also been driven by growth of stablecoin value on Celo, so USDT launched on Celo this year, same with USDC. And and I think that's really unlocked a lot of these um kinds of use cases, which is pretty cool to see. Um and then of course Mento was also there from the beginning and also um contributing really largely to a lot of these use cases. We have someone from Mento over here if you guys want to talk with them.

Um okay, so what's driving this? Anyone want to guess? This one, race car is correct. You know, it is Formula 1 week, so I had to use this this many car analogies, but I thought you guys would appreciate this one. Um so, on-chain payments are driving this in part, um and, you know, we have um a wallet called MiniPay on Celo, uh which is a wallet that is built into Opera Mini, which is a browser that has uh 500 million installs, 100 million monthly active users. That's over a percent of the global population is using Opera Mini uh worldwide. And inside Opera Mini, they launched a really nice self-custodial wallet that's only stablecoin based.

It allows you to send value to people in your contact list. It uses phone numbers as identifiers. And you can pay for transaction fees with stablecoins. And they are driving uh a lot of, I would say, payment type activity. Uh P2P payments. Um this is the kind of a chart showing kind of the growth of uh daily active users over time. But I kind of tricked you. Uh this is from last year, if you look closely. This is actually what I showed at Token last year. Uh and if you want to compare it to this year, you got to do this to the charts. Squish it a little bit. Then you can overlay it where we are today, uh which is pretty exciting to see. Um And and again, a lot of this has been uh due to um kind of MiniPay

uh launching on Celo last year and really kind of growing its user base. Um the savings use case is another use case that we're seeing on Celo, certainly. Uh people again who are hedging against inflation, who are trying to hold um you know, US dollar stablecoins, but also trying to earn a yield on on those stablecoins. And we have another really great wallet in the Celo ecosystem, Valora, uh that has a really, really nice savings product. Um that effectively allows you to earn some yield on your stablecoins without having to then go connect your wallet to a dapp and um kind of go through all of the uh effort that probably you guys are all aware of as kind of crypto-savvy people

when you want to say earn some yield from Aave. Uh Valora makes all of this easy. They have a a nice plug-in actually interface. And so, you can actually write your own plug-in for your own DApp if you have uh yield for stable coins. And then Valora can surface it to users without having to, again, connect wallets and even visit your DApp. And so, that's really lovely. Sending money overseas, um you know, just yesterday someone uh told me that they were comparing uh the Anyone want to guess this emoji?

It's very literal. I think it's cash with wings, but I'll give you that cuz that's pretty close. Um and um And so, this person did a test. They wanted to see, you know, what would be the cost to send money using Crypto Rails, using Moola Pay specifically, from Norway to Malawi. And how does that compare to traditional remittances? This is a very unique remittance corridor, right? This is not a common corridor, and so all the traditional remittance kind of offerings have really high fees, and so he wanted to see what it would look like to use Crypto Rails.

And what he found was, not surprisingly, that the non-Crypto Rails are really expensive, and even if you factor in fairly heavy fees for cashing in in Norway and then cashing out in Malawi, it still ends up being 30% cheaper than using MoneyGram. That is a big, big price difference. And I think what this shows is that, you know, we're on this we're at the start of a really interesting time when a lot of these legacy, you know, remittance companies are really going to have to start struggling against crypto because um the fees that these on and off-ramps are providing uh or charging are only going to go down, right? Because their fees will go

down as more adoption of crypto uh increases, right? And that means certainly remittance use case, but also all the other really great use cases that we talked about. Also non-real world use cases, right? Like people buying monkeys, people buying meme coins. All of that will also drive the fees down for these on and off-ramps. And so over time the on and off-ramps will end up being even cheaper than MoneyGram. And so it's going to be really interesting to see how this whole remittance industry plays out over time. Okay, the lending use case. So this is something that's relatively new.

You know, I talked about lending, specifically uncollateralized lending against future income. And certainly in places where it's hard to get access to that kind of income, we're seeing projects launching these types of protocols on Celo and doing really interesting things. Haraka is a really interesting project that is doing this right now in Kenya. They're using actually the Kenyan shilling by Mento protocol. Um and um they basically took this concept of a lending circle, which is a really nice way of using kind of your um almost your reputation, so to speak, in your local communities as collateral um uh that you can use to kind of guarantee

that you'll pay back a loan. Uh and they've been issuing these loans electronically in throughout these communities now in in Kenya. It's really fascinating project. If you're interested, definitely go to haraka_xyz. Um and again, they've been doing these pilots now and actually growing their users um in in Kenya, doing a lot of work on the ground. Very, very exciting. And the thing that they found, um which I think is a really interesting insight, is that people want to save in US dollars, but they want to actually borrow in local currencies or at least stablecoins pegged to local currencies.

And the reason for that is, you know, in hindsight, obvious, right? You don't want to borrow against an asset that's appreciating value relative to your income. You want to borrow in your in the asset that you're receiving income. And so for this reason um um we think that it's really important to have stable coins for every currency in the world. And so that's something that we're uh really excited uh um that Mento again um is kind of chasing in our ecosystem. Um you know, they have now these six assets um including the US dollar including the euro.

Um but also the Brazilian real, the Kenyan shilling, West African franc, uh and even the Filipino peso which they just launched last week. Um and so we're really excited for a future where you know, this list ends up being, you know, one stablecoin for every currency in the world. And we think that that will make it easier for folks like Haraka to then scale their offering to basically every market in the world where lending circles are an appealing way of borrowing money. And the nice thing about that is, you know, from Haraka's perspective, they can do that without having to rebuild any of their software, which they would have to if they were using very specific financial rails for every country in the world.

Okay, so that's um you know, some really exciting real-world use cases on Celo, but you know um given what we're working on um around Celo's transition from an L1 to an L2, I felt bad coming up here and not at least briefly touching upon that. Um some of you may have heard that Celo is transitioning from an EVM compatible L1 to an EVM compatible L2. And so I just wanted to spend literally just a few minutes talking about this. And the way to think about this is, you know, that we're taking really the best of Celo.

Uh all of these emojis that have names and points available for you guys. Um you know, it's the to pay for gas with tokens. Uh, there's mobile element where you can send money to phone numbers instead of just wallet addresses. And also this ultra green aspect which means that a portion of every transaction fee gets used to buy carbon credits and offset those carbon credits. All of that we've effectively distilled and packaged in a OP Stack and EigenDA based L2 um, that is, you know, sitting on top of Ethereum.

Um, and, you know, fairly recently we had this big milestone where we launched Dango, which is kind of a testnet version of all of this sitting on top of Holesky. Uh, and it's really exciting. We launched this at ECC. Uh, but you know, launching or transitioning an L1 to an L2 is a little difficult. You know, we like to think of it as just being kind of a hard fork. Um, and this is the best emoji I could find for something that's hard. Um, rock is correct.

Correct. Good guess. It's a hard one. Uh, and that's the double entendre right there. Um, and, you know, why is it hard? You know, we'd like to think that it's just a hard fork. Um, you know, at at certain block height um, the current client will stop producing blocks and the new client will start producing blocks. And so it's very similar to a traditional hard fork, but we like to think about it as a hard hard fork. Two rocks in a fork. And the reason it's so hard is, you know, because, you know, all of those users that we talked about doing having, you know, these real world use cases, they really, you know, they're sitting there in this plane at cruising altitude

relying on Celo. And what we're doing is while it's in the air we're rebuilding the engines, right? This is a difficult thing. Um, and uh, we want to be really thoughtful about it. And so um, you know, we have a road map that involves um, a lot of upgrades, a lot of tests. You know, we upgraded Dango or we upgraded the Alpha Horiz network through a fork to introduce Dango. In a few weeks, we're going to upgrade Alpha Horiz. For anybody here who builds at ETH Global events during these hackathons, anyone who's chased our bounties in the past, uh, will probably recognize the Alpha Horiz testnet.

That's the main developer testnet. We're going to upgrade that end of September. And so, by Devcon, if you're going to be building at Devcon, you're going to be able to build on a Celo L2 network. Then we're going to upgrade Baklava and then hopefully mainnet by the end of the year. Um, which is going to be pretty freaking exciting for us, absolutely. And then we're going to integrate with the cross wherever hard it is because, um, we're going to be OP stack compatible. Yeah, there you go. Um, and you know, I just wanted to kind of end on this kind of note. We're we're doing all of this because we have a lot of conviction, we have a lot of excitement for Ethereum becoming the settlement layer of Web3. You may have heard this before. If you follow Justin

Drake, you probably would have heard him talking about this. Um, you know, it's a big goal for Ethereum right now to, uh, scale by having, you know, thousands, maybe even more, um, chains, uh, rolling up to it. And we really buy into this vision and we really hope by, you know, transitioning from a layer one to a layer two, uh, that we can be this kind of case study for others to follow. And yeah, I think with that, I just want to end by saying I can't wait for all of you to get a taste of, uh, Celo two.

Uh, that's the closest, uh, reference to a Dango that I could find, uh, from a movie. I'll let you guys guess which movie that is. Anyone? Spirited Away is right. Nice. Cool. Well, thank you so much. That's everything for me. It's been a real pleasure.