This year has been one of incredible growth for the Celo community.

Over the past 12 months, the Celo Foundation added 32 employees and three board members, and made great strides in supporting the further development of Celo’s open platform and mobile-first technology. As a whole, we deepened our commitment to creating a future where people everywhere can thrive from financial inclusion, a healthy environment, and connection through innovative technologies.

The achievements of the various projects and organizations in our ecosystem are particularly impressive when considering them against the backdrop of the ongoing global pandemic. In 2021, as we witnessed people worldwide adapting to the “new normal” dictated by COVID and its ever-changing variants and resulting restrictions, we saw play-to-earn games, NFTs, and DeFi and payments use cases tip our industry into the mainstream conversation.

Celo’s earliest use case was as an infrastructure powering peer-to-peer payments, especially on mobile devices. Today, our mobile-first partners and initiatives are doing so much more. The Valora mobile app, which launched in early 2021, shortly before spinning out as a stand-alone company, is now used in over 120 countries. Mobile DeFi on Celo now allows more people to access decentralized exchanges and provides lending opportunities, as demonstrated by Ubeswap’s high percentage of mobile traffic (86%) from mid-Sept. through mid-Oct. And through the Defi for the People initiative, launched in August, we are accelerating the path toward providing anyone with a mobile phone access to the same financial tools and services used by the top 1%, including credit and stable, low-risk yield.

On the environmental front, we aim to balance the goals for a more inclusive financial system with the health of our planet. The Climate Collective, a community effort launched in October, will strive to fight climate change by tokenizing rainforests and other carbon-sequestering assets. This effort will build and iterate to include stake-to-preserve opportunities (for forests, for example), oracles that instrument and report on the ecological state of forests and soil, and exchanges and NFT marketplaces that create liquidity for natural capital-backed assets.

Finally, one of the most exciting developments of the year came just a couple of weeks ago, when the popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter announced its plans to build an open source, decentralized version of its application on the Celo blockchain. Commerce will continue to be a potent force for strengthening community. Efforts across the Celo ecosystem in 2021 included the launch of mutual credit protocols, such as Resource. We see many more opportunities on the protocol and application levels around community currency projects, vertical marketplaces, community-created games, small-group cultural production, and community DAOs.

As we close out the year and look forward to continuing our mission to create prosperity for all in 2022, let’s review in more detail some of the most significant achievements for Celo and our partners in 2021.

February 10: Introducing Valora

Valora, the first mobile peer-to-peer payments and remittance app built on the Celo blockchain, was inspired by the idea that everyone should have full control of their money, and that sending money should be as easy as sending a text message. In late July, Valora spun out of cLabs (with a $20M funding round led by a16z) to become its own entity.

April 16: The Celo Foundation Welcomes Richard Parsons to its Board

The Celo Foundation was founded with a mission to support a financial system that creates the conditions of prosperity for all. Richard brings deep expertise in traditional financial services to the Foundation Board, as well as a perspective that is key to realizing our vision for a new ecosystem of financial products and services.

April 20: Deutsche Telekom Joins the Celo Ecosystem

Deutsche Telekom, a leading telecommunications company with more than 242 million mobile customers, disclosed a strategic purchase of CELO and joined the Alliance for Prosperity as its first mobile carrier member. This partnership allows the carrier to seamlessly integrate all of the mobile friendly solutions in the Celo ecosystem and serve customers in new, meaningful ways. Deutsche Telekom also became a validator on the Celo network.

April 22 : Launch of the Celo Euro (cEUR)

cEUR, the second native stablecoin launched on the Celo blockchain, algorithmically tracks the Euro. The new asset feeds a remittance market for Europe, enabling users to quickly and inexpensively transfer digital money across borders as easily as sending a text. Like cUSD, cEUR supports not only users, but also developers interested in building on Celo, and organizations looking to innovate with digital money through blockchain-based products and services for the benefit of their customers.

July 22: NFT Projects Love Celo

Artists and others are putting a lot of thought into the marketplaces and the blockchains they use to mint their works. Discover the growing list of projects that rely on Celo to create NFTs, including Award Pool and, riding the Q4 Celo/NFT momentum, Ariswap.

August 19: Mobius, the First Cross-chain Stableswap DEX built on Celo, is Announced

Mobius is a decentralized exchange that enables users to easily trade assets of similar value, including cUSD-USDC and even cBTC-wBTC, with low slippage and fees. Now a member of the DeFi for the People initiative, Mobius helps to accelerate the adoption of decentralized finance among the 6 billion smartphone users worldwide. Learn how to use Mobius.

August 30: Unveiling of DeFi for the People

DeFi for the People is a collaboration of global crypto organizations united by a common goal: bring DeFi to the 6 billion smartphone users around the world via Celo. Projects integrated this year include Sushi, PoolTogether, 0x, Valora, Ubeswap, and Moola Market.

September 13: Celo Goes Cross-Chain

cLabs launches Optics, a protocol for gas-efficient and trust-minimized interoperability. Unlike other cross-chain communication systems, Optics is neither a custodial bridge, validator-based bridge, nor header relay. Instead, it leverages an optimistic bridging mechanism to enable radically cheaper communication between chains, while still preserving decentralization.

September 22: Mysten Labs Joins the Celo Ecosystem

By collaborating with Mysten Labs, a startup led by Novi’s former Head of Research Evan Cheng, we set our sights on Celo becoming the fastest EVM chain, with up to 140,000 transactions per second. The partnership marks a significant milestone for furthering the usability and scalability of the Celo platform.

September 28: The First DeFi for the People Hackathon

For the Make Crypto Mobile Hackathon, Celo committed $2.5 million in prizes and seed funding to Web3 project developers building mobile-first DeFi solutions for the 6 billion smartphone users around the world. More below.

September 28: The Introduction of Provo — A Value-add Sandbox for CDBC Experimentation on Celo

Provo enables central banks to explore and experiment with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and other digital assets in risk-free permissioned and/or permissionless environments on the Celo platform.

October 6: The Celo Climate Collective Is Introduced

The Climate Collective is a community-driven effort to fight climate change by tokenizing rainforests and other carbon sequestering assets. The collective, which featured 10 companies at launch, including Curve Labs, Kolektivo, Moss, and Regen Network, aims to add tokenized trees to the Celo Reserve over the next four years, so that Celo stablecoins can be backed, in part, by rainforests.

October 11: New Celo Foundation Board Members Announced

Jai Ramaswamy and Morgan Beller are the newest members of the Celo Foundation’s Board of Directors. Board members support the Foundation in several ways, including engaging in strategy development and oversight, attending all Board meetings, and serving on committees.

November 11: Tim Moreton Appointed CEO of cLabs

Tim Moreton’s leadership at cLabs has been instrumental to the growth and success of Celo. Tim is an excellent technologist and key contributor to Celo, as well as a valuable thought partner for the ecosystem. There is no better person to lead cLabs as we continue to grow.

December 8: Kickstarter Announces Plans to Move Its Platform to the Celo Blockchain

Kickstarter makes a “commitment to a more open, collaborative, and decentralized future” by choosing the Celo network to host its new decentralized protocol. In their article published on the Kickstarter site, Perry Chen, Founder of Kickstarter, and Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter CEO, explained why they opted for Celo:

We’ve chosen Celo, an open source and carbon negative blockchain platform, as the best technology and community on which to build the protocol. We’re inspired by the Celo ecosystem’s thoughtful approach to building the technology they want to see in the world.

Developers will start to build in early 2022, aiming toward a full transition later in the year.

The DeFi for the People Hackathon was held from Oct. 8-Nov. 28. Over 2,300 people from 135 countries participated, presenting over 200 projects, 52 of which secured prizes.

Judging took place Nov. 29-Dec. 13, and the grand prize winner, Revo, and 11 first place winners were announced on December 16. Revo is a project that allows users to directly exchange any ERC20 token for a staked, auto-compounded position in an underlying yield farm. Congratulations to all!

2021 was also a great year for the Celo community and our ecosystem of partners.

Turkey — The Celo community in Turkey has grown tremendously. The largest blockchain project in the country, TrueFeedback, moved its platform to the Celo blockchain.

Uganda — New Celo Alliance for Prosperity members in Uganda include Kanzu Code, Jaza Energy, and Muda Exchange. Two new cash-in/cash-out partners are Binusu and Bit2big. Muda Exchange, one of the largest exchanges in the region, is planning to list cUSD this month. Spe Taxi company now accepts cUSD as payment for its transportation services. Finally, Kanzu Code has integrated its cUSD savings product into its banking platform.

South Africa — Adoption in the region continues to grow. CELO is now listed on Valr Exchange, and both cUSD and CELO are now available on ChainEx. New Alliance for Prosperity members include BitFlex Fintech, Vision Africa, and several organizations received grants, including Valr, United Africa Blockchain Association, Crypto University, and BitFlex Fintech. Three educational campaigns were conducted with Valr and United Africa Blockchain Association. And finally, Yoma and Zlto are ready to build and run pilots on Celo.

Europe — European exchanges that added CELO include Bitpanda and eToro, and new partnerships include Moonpay and Ramp. Finally, Opera Wallet added support for Celo stable assets.

Exchanges — Binance added new CELO trading pairs, OKEx added staking support for CELO, FTX enabled CELO futures, and Blockchain.com listed cEUR.

As crypto adoption in general increased in 2021, awareness of Celo also grew in exciting ways.

Blockchain Metrics

*As of 12/8/21.

Social and Blog Year-Over-Year Growth Metrics

Valora Metrics

Since its launch earlier this year, Valora has grown to become a fantastic gateway to the Celo ecosystem for users around the world.

We are proud of all the Celo partner project announcements and integrations made this year, and of the global Celo community as a whole. We thank everyone for working to increase adoption of the Celo blockchain and grow the ecosystem, and we look forward to another successful year in 2022.

As we enter the new year, please take time to share your favorite projects on Twitter, and be sure to tag us: ​​@CeloOrg.