Opera Launches MiniPay, the World’s Lightest Payments Wallet, To Onboard Its Millions of Mobile Users Across Africa to Web3

• The 2-megabyte, self-custodial stablecoin wallet seamlessly sends and receives transactions in less than 5 seconds with sub-cent fees
• Built directly into Opera Mini, Opera’s popular Android browser, millions of users throughout Africa will be introduced to the benefits of stablecoin payments & decentralized applications (dApps)
• Opera chose to build MiniPay on Celo because of Celo’s unique features, such as SocialConnect and FiatConnect, to enable a best-in-class mobile payment experience
• MiniPay’s rollout begins in Nigeria, expanding to Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and the entire continent in the coming months

Opera, the global web innovator with over 319M users worldwide, unveils Minipay¹ — a new web3 payments wallet built on Celo. Offering instant and seamless financial transactions, MiniPay is integrated with the Opera Mini browser for Android users, making it easier and more affordable for individuals across the African continent to send and receive funds, all leveraging Celo’s core infrastructure benefits and features, including:

• Sub-cent gas fees (and the ability to pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens, e.g., stablecoins)
• Settlement in seconds (due to 5-second block times)
• Seamless access to Celo’s rich ecosystem of 1,000+ dApps, from locally-focused (e.g., impactMarket) to global decentralized finance (DeFi) blue chips (e.g., Uniswap)
• Celo’s mobile-first compatibility with SocialConnect (a privacy-first naming service protocol that maps wallets to mobile phone numbers) and FiatConnect (an open on-/off-ramp API standard)
• Tapping into Celo’s vibrant Africa community, with a strong focus on regenerative finance (ReFi), grown since mainnet launched on Earth Day 2020

Introducing MiniPay: Empowerment Through Innovation

Africa is experiencing poor infrastructure, high unemployment rates, and currency instability. Even the continent’s strongest currencies, such as the South African Rand, are considered one of the world’s most undervalued currencies. This presents a unique opportunity to offer a more stable way to store and send money using digital assets.

Opera, in collaboration with Celo Foundation, designed and built MiniPay, which offers instant wallet-to-wallet fund transfers with minimal fees using mobile phone numbers and easy onboarding and key backup through Google. For on-ramp solutions, Celo’s robust network of FiatConnect partners, such as Fonbnk and Bitmama, helped integrate cUSD, one of the stable assets on the Mento Protocol, which tracks the value of the US Dollar (USD).

This easy-to-use wallet enables users of all experience levels to transfer digital assets for everyday use with speed and efficiency through an intuitive user journey and abstracting the “Connect Wallet” button native to many crypto interfaces. Simple and frictionless, this is one of Web3’s smallest wallets (Coinbase Wallet is 194 megabytes, while MetaMask is 68 megabytes), launching first to Opera Mini users in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, and compatible with a broad range of low-powered mobile devices.

“We are thrilled to unveil MiniPay, a cutting-edge collaboration between Opera and the Celo Foundation that directly addresses existing concerns around how payments are made in the region. Users in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa have indicated² that even when satisfied with their current payment solutions, there are still lingering concerns about high fees, unreliable service uptimes, a lack of transparency around transaction progress, and mobile data access. Therefore, this partnership represents a pivotal moment in the world of digital finance, allowing individuals across Africa to send, receive, and ultimately earn money in a permissionless way,” said Jørgen Arnesen, Opera EVP Mobile.

Opera and Celo: A Vision for Permissionless Payments

As one of the key stewards of the Celo ecosystem, the Celo Foundation is dedicated to bringing affordable and accessible DeFi to mobile users around the world. This work and Opera’s focus on improving access to the digital world are complementary missions, with an initial partnership dating back to 2021. Opera emerged as a tech pioneer in the African market more than 17 years ago, unveiling its unique data-saving technology through Opera Mini, one of Africa’s most popular apps and recognizable brands. Today, Opera has over 100 million users across the continent.

The Celo blockchain, whose community mission is to create the conditions of prosperity for all, first launched on Earth Day 2020 and sees a thriving ecosystem of active builders, developers, founders, and community members committed to blockchain technology’s positive impact. With over 1,000 global projects in more than 150 countries, the Celo blockchain is carbon-negative and mobile-first, with many enterprise and institutional partners, including Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Google Cloud, Grameen Foundation, Kickstarter, and Mercy Corps Ventures.

“Few companies have the global footprint, local insight, and technical capabilities that Opera brings to the Celo ecosystem; I am excited to work even more closely with their team on what I see as a key building block to help realize Celo’s mission at scale,” said Rene Reinsberg, Celo Co-Founder and Celo Foundation President. “By integrating the self-custodial MiniPay wallet directly into the popular Opera Mini browser, existing and new users will access a truly seamless experience with fast, transparent transactions on the Celo blockchain and be introduced to dApps and projects built on Celo that provide meaningful benefits for people in their every day — this is the ‘killer’ use case the Web3 industry has been waiting for.”

Following a vote by the Celo community in July to migrate from a Layer-1 blockchain to an Ethereum Layer-2, the Celo network will undergo technical upgrades to see increased security and scalability while maintaining low gas fees, bringing more real-world use cases to the Ethereum community.

This technical migration, led by the Celo community and core contributors, including cLabs, opens the door for even more Ethereum-compatible dApps to be built for MiniPay, reimagining the future of on-chain finance for community advancement and inclusion in the new digital economy.

For devs interested in building for MiniPay, click here.

(1) Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities or tokens.

(2) Research conducted by Opera via Pollfish and Sparrow in July 2023. The total number of respondents from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa was over 5,700.