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The Road to One Billion Users: A 2023 Recap From Celo Foundation President, Rene Reinsberg

Celo Foundation
The Celo Blog
Published in
10 min readDec 11, 2023

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Happy holidays from the Celo Foundation! 2023 has seen newfound momentum and expectation-exceeding highs throughout the Celo ecosystem — a testament to building through the bear, our Foundation team, and the broader community’s shared approach to navigating the downturn since the latter half of 2022.

This year, Celo celebrated its three-year anniversary since launching on Earth Day 2020 and has fast become the chain of choice for everyday users around the world. Not only has Celo surpassed 324 million transactions, but it is also among the top 10 chains according to daily active users (DAUs; ranked at #6), thanks to our diverse dApps and partners such as Masa Finance, GoodDollar, LayerZero, and Opera Minipay (more on this later), with TokenTerminal citing over 3,268.2% growth in DAUs year-to-date.

Nansen’s Chain Paradise further cites Celo as the industry leader in multichain activity with a 178% change in active addresses over the last six months (see below). More recently, Celo also saw a 1,277% rise in transactions and processed 20M+ transactions within 24 hours to reach a peak of 275 transactions per second (TPS) — no small feat for an EVM compat.

(Source: Nansen’s Chain Paradise)

And it’s no wonder. The Celo ecosystem is among the most passionate, mission-driven group of individuals I have had the privilege to encounter, all of whom are working towards a collective good. Beyond leveraging technology to accelerate solutions for the wicked problems of our time, our global community is laser-focused on building and driving real-world adoption despite the macro headwinds, so much so, that industry leaders have taken note:

(Source: X)

So in looking forward to 2024, let’s take a quick look back. We began the year by introducing #CeloEvolution, a new modular brand identity co-created with our community over 75 meetings and 150+ hours. Shortly after, our fellow contributors at cLabs unveiled a technical roadmap for Celo 2.0 to bring deeper alignment with the Ethereum roadmap, focusing on horizontal scalability and launching Ultra Green Money.

Of course, returning home to Ethereum was (and continues to be) an integral focus of cLabs’ proposal to migrate Celo from an EVM-compatible L1 to an Ethereum L2, which was first announced during EthCC this July. The industry response to this was overwhelmingly positive in support (over 1.5M+ impressions on social; Celo trending on X with 170K posts) that Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin weighed in alongside Ben Jones (Optimism), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon), Dankrad Feist (Ethereum Foundation), and many more.

Momentum for Celo’s L2 (also #CEL2) hasn’t wavered since, with the first of two hardforks required for the migration taking place on September 26th (read all about the Gingerbread hardfork here), cLabs’ roadmap for evaluating CEL2’s foundational framework being released, and the recent integration of EigenDA on testnet in less than 48 hours.

The Celo Foundation, together with Celo Co-Founder Marek Olszewski and Geometry’s Head of Research Kobi Gurkan, launched L2 Unplugged — a recurring X Space series delving into rollup innovations with key thought leaders. Featuring Vitalik, EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan, Dankrad, and L2BEAT co-founder Bartek Kiepuszewski, L2 Unplugged is coming to your favorite podcast platform soon!

2023 saw a number of integral partnerships too, including Google Cloud and Chainlink, with Animoca Brands and Telefónica joining the Celo Alliance for Prosperity and committing to run validators on Celo. Real-world assets on Celo continue to grow, buoyed by emerging market solutions with Untangled Finance launching on Celo following its $13.5M raise, the introduction of the community-led consortium Credit Collective, and Huma Finance’s deployment on Celo, whose credit platform facilitates more than $10M in onchain loans per month.

At DappCon in Berlin, Opera launched MiniPay, a new ultralight (2MB) dollar stablecoin wallet built on Celo to onboard millions of mobile users across Africa to Web3. With the ability to send and receive transactions in less than 5 seconds and sub-cent fees, MiniPay is integrated with the Opera Mini Android browser (90% market share; 100M+ users) and provides seamless onboarding using Google credentials. Currently available in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, it solves existing market concerns (e.g., high fees, unreliable service uptimes, lack of mobile data access to complete transactions) and is on track to cross 1M user activations over the coming month, making it one of the fastest growing products in Web3 and fintech.

(Source: X)

Throughout the year, our presence at global events was in full force, thanks to Celo’s global community, from EthDenver to EthSafari in Kilifi, our first-ever Co:OPERATE unconference (co-hosted with Chainlink) during EthCC in Paris, sponsorships of EthGlobal hackathons (Tokyo, Paris, New York, Istanbul, and India), and various speaking engagements, workshops, panels, builder breakfasts, and happy hour events at Korea Blockchain Week, Token2049 in Singapore, and DevConnect in Istanbul, among others (see below for a comprehensive events list).

So, what’s in store for 2024? The value of real-world use cases will be more imperative than ever to demonstrate the long-term viability of blockchain technology. Mobile-first innovations will continue to play a key part, with MiniPay being a prime example of this, broadening access to decentralized applications (dApps) and stable assets to enrich local financial systems and empower communities.

Expanding upon the notion of regenerative finance (ReFi) and Web3 will further take shape. As the industry’s “Home of ReFi,” the Celo ecosystem has seen strides in tokenized carbon credits and plastic recovery, for example. Having joined the AI + Environment Summit in Zurich last month, spending time with the X Prize finalists EthBioDivX, a team comprised of experts and leaders from Celo ecosystem projects SimplexDNA, Gainforest, and Interspecies Money, it’s clear that protecting and regenerating biodiversity (a $125 trillion economy) is the next frontier, alongside decentralized science (DeSci) for transparent, open-source, and onchain collaboration.

We’re also seeing increased decentralization across Celo, with regional DAOs launching in Africa, Europe & Korea, and with proposals in Latin America and India in progress. Celo is nothing without its community, and seeing contributors improve upon and better our governance processes, funding real-world credit solutions, or creating independent grant programs complements and strengthens the work of the Celo Foundation.

Above all else, your continued belief in the Celo community and mission is of critical importance. None of our success would have been achieved without your contribution and support in making Celo the thriving ecosystem it is today.

We have come a long way, and it is with deep gratitude that I, along with our Celo Foundation team, thank each of you, whether a builder, founder, partner, validator, governance member, marketer, ambassador, or everyday user, for choosing Celo and making our shared mission — to create the conditions of prosperity for all — a more complete and realized vision.

Cheers to the road ahead, and wishing you a Happy New Year,

Rene

A Year in Review: Celo’s 2023 Highlights

Key Milestone Moments for 2023: (in no particular order)

Key Growth Metrics for 2023:

  • 209 Monthly Active Developers
  • 324M+ Total Transactions, up 200M from 2022 and 71M in 2021 (+62% Y/Y)
  • 200M CELO Total Value Locked, compared to 166M CELO in 2022 (+20.48% Y/Y)
  • 3.9M+ Total Active Addresses, up 1.3M (+190.94% Y/Y)
  • +3,268.2% Daily Active Users (DAUs) on Celo year to date
  • Reaching a peak of 275 transactions per second (TPS), 21M daily transactions

Ecosystem Partnerships & Launches for 2023: (in descending date order)

Building Blocks and Infrastructure Deployed on Celo in 2023:

Key Developer Engagement & Events for 2023:

Key Conferences & Community Events for 2023:

Celo Blockchain
News
Blockchain

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Celo Foundation
The Celo Blog
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Written by Celo Foundation

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A mission-driven foundation responsible for education, community engagement, and ecosystem support of the Celo platform.

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