By unveiling today its exclusive “DeFi for the People” program, Celo is bringing together the best of the decentralized finance industry to serve a goal as noble as it is ambitious: bringing DeFi to 6 billion people. In the service of this vision, a first budget of 100 million dollars which Celo intends to make the starting point of a global movement, at the service of the greatest number.
And Finance for all
Press release – 100 million dollars. This is the amount that the Celo project has just announced with the aim of financing incentive programs and awareness actions around Decentralized Finance. “DeFi for the People”, as the program is called, has a simple and concrete objective: to bring decentralized finance within the reach of all those who own a smartphone, in other words 6 billion people around the world.
Celo has already been covered on the Corner Journal, whether it’s covering the project’s partnership with Deutsche Telekom or the recent Donut upgrade that allowed the network to ensure maximum interoperability between different blockchains, all in a mobile environment. A mobile environment that holds a central place in the company’s strategy, which aims nothing less than to slip the power and unprecedented potential of DeFi into the pockets of a maximum number of users equipped with smartphones.
Chainlink, RabbitHole, The Graph and Wrapped.com are also among the partners in the areas of awareness and infrastructure. The new program will spend more than $100 million on outreach, scholarships and financial incentives. Most project participants will contribute half of the incentive programs.
Fully integrated, the well-known products of the “no-loser lottery” PoolTogether, the Valora wallet or Sushi now sit alongside newcomers such as Moola Market or the DEX Ubeswap and are available now.
If reward mechanisms are already available for PoolTogether on Celo for example, incentive pools will be launched for other DeFi projects and protocols in the coming weeks and months. The gas-efficient Optics interoperability protocol is also expected in the fall of 2021. Facilitating communication between blockchains, it will allow users to transfer their assets between Ethereum and Celo without difficulty.
Tomorrow’s Finance will be Decentralized, or not
Decentralized finance has been growing dramatically for several years, but its adoption is still limited to the inner circles of the purely crypto and generally affluent community.
Indeed, out of the five million current users of DeFi applications worldwide, less than 10% live outside of developed countries. DeFi for the People aims to change this by bringing together developers to make DeFi’s products more accessible and easy to use for those who need them most.
For billions of people, the cell phone is the most valuable tool they have and their only means of accessing the internet. The Celo platform has therefore been designed for mobile use and, with more than one million wallet addresses in 113 countries, it offers a unique opportunity for any smartphone owner to benefit from the advantages of decentralized finance.
1 billion users in 5 years
CELO is concerned with concrete actions. In Colombia, for example, a pilot program was launched at the beginning of the pandemic to provide access to unsecured micro-credit on Celo for unemployed people, enabling them to purchase a motorized two-wheeler to make deliveries via the Rappi application.
well-equipped, some project members have been able to double or even quadruple their income. And this is just one example of how decentralized finance can immediately make capital available to millions of people, especially in emerging countries where access to traditional financial services is limited.
“DeFi for the People seeks to bring decentralized finance to everyone by expanding use cases and mobile access. We are excited to be involved in major projects in the DeFi ecosystem with the goal of growing the user base by over a billion within five years.”
Celo co-founder Rene Reinsberg.
DeFi giants in line with Celo
Soon Aave will land on Celo accompanied by a $20 million incentive program.It will be recalled that Aave is an open-source, non-custodial liquidity protocol designed to allow its users to earn a return on the cryptoassets made available in the protocol and to borrow assets. Lenders earn interest by depositing digital assets into purpose-built liquidity pools.
“The launch of Aave on the mobile-first Celo platform could enable six billion people with smartphones to access the crypto universe, unlock the value of DeFi and make it more accessible.”
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Companies
An automated market maker (AMM) protocol, Curve uses market-making algorithms to increase the liquidity of its own markets unlike traditional decentralized exchanges. On Celo, Curve will offer its users a decentralized platform to trade and make money with their
cryptocurrencies.
“Celo’s internal stability mechanism makes the platform very attractive for payments and will encourage the adoption of stablecoins. We are happy to participate in the democratization of mobile payments and DeFi.”
Julien Bouteloup, Curve Core Team member.
As for Sushi the leading DeFi platform that facilitates trading, lending and earning returns, its Sushi users will be able to trade assets with the Swap feature and bring liquidity to Celo. Rewards and incentives related to yield farming will be available soon. With Celo, Sushi users will be able to take advantage of faster transaction speeds and lower fees through secure, Ethereum-enabled transactions on Celo’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network.
“Sushi’s MA, Kashi Loan and other BentoBox products provide users with the building blocks they need to connect to a global financial system without authorization. Leveraging the mobile-first products offered by Celo and its non-crypto-native UX, Sushi is helping to accomplish this mission and take decentralized finance even further.”
Joseph Delong, CTO at Sushi.
DeFi for the People builds on Celo’s mobile-first approach to make the world of crypto and DeFi accessible to everyone. It is an initiative that is also open to developers and entrepreneurs who feel like changing the world. To learn more about the movement, visit the official project website.
