For the next topic, I'm calling Marek up to the stage to explain how crypto really works at Celo and what we can do with it . So, please welcome Marek with a big round of applause. Awesome. Thank you, Karthik. What you just said is very good.
Yes, it is heartfelt . That was very intentional . I try to be just as intentional . But, I think it's a little difficult to follow. Okay, I'm Marek.
I am one of the co-founders of Cello . Today I'm going to talk about something very near and dear to us , which is making crypto a reality. I'm here to tell you that crypto can be real . It doesn't have to be limited to just monkeys and meme coins . This may be true, and moreover, it is actually practiced in the cello.
And I'll try to make it fun for all of you . I know it's evening now. So, I also added some emojis as per my method. But this time, I want you to guess the ASCII name of an emoji when you see it . Let's keep an eye on who's guessing well .
In case you don't like emojis, I've also added some movie stills. You can also guess which movie that still is from . At the end, let's count the points and have some fun. Okay, you know that many people think that crypto doesn't have much use in the real world . Gwart is joking here , saying that he only invests in projects that have no real benefit.
Don't invest in things that are not stable at all. That's really a bit sad . But, let me start by saying some things that crypto is useful for in the real world . Okay, let's see. What do we have?
Can anyone guess the name of this emoji? There are some whispers , but Earth? I'm not asking about the metaphor I'm talking about. What is the real name of that emoji? If you need to search, Globe is close by.
Okay, I'll tell you this one, you guess the next one. So, this is land, but land is not the full name. This is the Earth Underscore Africa, because as you know know , there are many lands . Um, okay. So, the first use is savings.
And while I'm talking about this , try to guess which movie this is from . I'll give you a clue. It's an animated film and it contains a lot of balloons . So, beating inflation, saving, that's definitely a common use case for real-world uses of crypto. Many, especially in emerging markets, where inflation is high relative to the US dollar , are seeing greater value in stablecoins that are pegged to the US dollar.
Um and they are using them to combat inflation . This is very difficult. I think I made this too difficult . No, that's a good omen. That's it, that's it.
Up. Good. Here is a point. We got the first point . The second use is to send money abroad.
There are wire transfers, but they don't work on weekends. They cost a lot of money . If you are sending from two emerging markets or from one emerging market to another, they can be very expensive. Can anyone imagine this movie? Casino Royale.
That's true. I heard it was James Bond. Just shout loudly. The person who shouts first wins. So, you have to be fast.
You can shout while I'm talking. That's completely wrong. Sharing the bill. Have you ever had to share a bill with someone out of town or out of the country and felt like you had no way to pay them? Well, crypto can help with that.
Big Short here. You know, but you're not shouting. You should shout. Look, it's about being fun and interactive , so let go of your shyness and start shouting . Okay, borrowing.
And I'm not talking about taking out a margin, about borrowing with some mortgage. I'm talking about borrowing against future income . Like this guy did. And we're seeing that happening more and more in crypto, which is very exciting . So, mortgage-free loans backed by future income.
If you think about it, that's how loans from banks usually work, right? So, now we are seeing more of this happening in crypto as well. Vee Crash is the correct answer. You got two points here. The next item is payments.
When we think about real-world applications , I think we're all probably thinking about this , right? Sending value to pay for goods, whether in our country or abroad abroad . Certainly, this is a huge use case and one we are starting to see more of in crypto networks . Can anyone tell me what this is? Notice that the hands are bloody.
John Wick. That's right. John Wick pays for everything with gold coins. Okay. So, the next question to ask now is, which chain is the most used for crypto payments today?
Where are all these activities taking place ? Maybe for other uses, such as loans or savings, at least for payments. Where is all this happening today ? I'll give you a clue. Okay, name some chains .
Anyone? Tran is right and this is Tran's legacy, so you get that point . Many people think that it is the most widely used chain for things like payments. And, the same was certainly true last year. Here we can see Anthony tweeting about this, giving Tran credit for focusing on solving people's real problems.
But, if you look closely, it's from last November. This is outdated outdated . I would say it's outdated, just a week , not even a year. Because, given what is the most common crypto project for payments today, at least according to one metric, which is daily active users using stablecoins users using stablecoins , Artemis tweeted this graph this week, just 2 days ago, that would be very useful for this discussion . This shows that Celo has literally surpassed Tron , or at least is now on par with Tron in terms of daily active users transacting with stablecoins .
So, it's very exciting . We have an emoji for you. Can anyone guess that emoji? Trophy is the correct answer. We're very excited in the cello community , for sure.
But, it wasn't all trophies, certainly not looking back. I would say yes. Um, do you have two points now ? Or more than that? Oh.
There are a few points there. You will have to honestly say who has the most points at the end . Um, if you look back , we know that the bear market was very tough for everyone, but especially for us, those of us who were focused on real-life use cases , I think even in the last bull market, crypto was not ready for real-life uses , so it was very difficult to enter the bear market, but the Selo community worked very hard, we tried hard , and the results are now showing in the numbers , right? Artemis posted a whole tweet thread on this, which I recommend everyone check out. They are showing how transaction volume has increased here .
This is a change from the beginning of the year , and you can see that the most growth has been recorded this year. Moreover, it is interesting to note that growth is also occurring across different value ranges . It's great to see growth happening equally across all of these, small transactions and large transactions . The increase in the value of the stablecoin Selolo also contributed greatly to this growth . USDT launched on Cello this year , as did USDC.
I think it opens the door to many more use cases like this think it opens the door to many more use cases like this , which is very interesting to see . And Mento has also been there from the beginning and is contributing to these use cases on a very large scale . We have a representative here from Mento, you can talk to them if you want to. Okay, what is the reason for this? Can anyone guess?
This, race cars, is rightly said. It's Formula 1 week Formula 1 week , so I had to use a lot of car emojis , but I thought you'd like it. On-chain payments are also partly responsible for this. We have a wallet called 'MiniPay' on Cello , which is built into the Opera Mini browser , a browser that has 500 million installs and 100 million monthly active users . More than one percent of the world's population uses Opera Mini worldwide .
In Opera Mini, they launched a very nice self- self- custodial wallet that is completely stablecoin-based . This allows you to send money to people in your contact list . It uses phone numbers as identification symbols . And you can pay transaction fees with stablecoins . And they are encouraging many types of payment activities .
P2P payments, this is a chart showing the growth of daily active users over time, but I'm misleading you a bit. If you look closely, this is from last year . This is what I showed at the Token event last year . And if you want to compare this to this year , change the charts a little bit and put it on where we are now, it's very interesting to see . And again, a lot of this was due to the launch of Moola Pay on Celo last year and the growth of its user base .
The savings use case is another use case we see in Cello. Those seeking protection against inflation are looking to not only own American dollar stablecoins, but also earn income on them. And in the Selo ecosystem we have another great wallet called Valora. It has a very nice savings product . This allows you to earn returns on stablecoins without having to connect your wallet to the app and do all the hard work that crypto savvy people do to earn returns from Aave .
Valora makes all of this easy. They have a very good plug-in interface , so you can write a plug-in for your own app if you have a return on stablecoins. Then Valora shows it to users without connecting wallets and without them visiting your app. That would be really great . Sending money abroad.
Just yesterday someone asked me if anyone could guess this emoji? This is very clear . In my opinion it's a feathered coin, but I'll accept it because it's so close . The person took a test. They wanted to see how much it would cost to send money from Norway to Malawi using cryptocurrencies, specifically MiniPay .
And they examined how it compares to regular remittances. This is a very special remittance corridor, isn't it? This is not a typical corridor, so all traditional remittance services have very high fees , which is why he wanted to see what it would be like to use crypto rails . What he found was , not surprisingly, that non- crypto rails were very expensive. Even taking into account the hefty fees for cashing in Norway and cashing out in Malawi, it's still 30% cheaper than MoneyGram .
That's a very big price difference. What this shows is that we are at the beginning of an interesting time , where many of the older remittance companies will have to compete with crypto , as the fees charged by on- and off- and off- ramps continue to decrease , right? Because as crypto usage increases, their fees decrease, right? This means that this applies not only to the remittance issue, but also to the other great issues we have discussed. Even things that have nothing to do with the real world, right?
For example, people buying monkeys, buying meme coins. All of this also reduces the fees for these on and off- on and off- ramps . So, over time these on and off- on and off- ramps will be available at a lower price than MoneyGram. So, it will be very interesting to see how this remittance industry changes over time . Okay, now about the lending process.
This is a relatively new thing. As I said, lending, especially unsecured loans based on future income. Certainly where it's difficult to get that kind of revenue, we're seeing projects launching such protocols on Celo and doing interesting things . Haraka is a very interesting project that is currently underway in Kenya. They use the Kenyan shilling through the Mento Protocol .
They took the concept of Lending Circles , which is a great way to use your name in your local communities as collateral to guarantee that you will repay the loan you take out . And they are now lending electronically across these communities in Kenya. This is a very wonderful project. If you are interested, definitely check out the Haraka.xyz website.
And again, they're doing a lot of work on the ground now, doing these pilot projects, growing their users in Kenya. Very, very exciting stuff. What they found , and I think this is a really interesting point , is that people want to save in American dollars , but they also want to borrow in local currencies, or at least in stablecoins that are linked to local currencies . And the reason for that, you know, is obvious in retrospect, right? You should not borrow against property that is increasing in value relative to your income.
You should take a loan against the same asset in which you receive income. And for this reason , we think it's important to have stablecoins for every currency in the world think it's important to have stablecoins for every currency in the world . So we're really excited about what Mentor will be up to again in our ecosystem . They now have six assets , including the American dollar and the euro . Also included are the Brazilian real, Kenyan shilling, West African franc, and the Philippine peso, which launched last week .
And we really look forward to a future where there is a stablecoin for every currency in the world . We think this will make it easier for companies like Haraka to expand their services to every market in the world where lending circles are attractive . The good thing about this is that , from Haraka's perspective, they can do this without having to rebuild their software, which they would have had to do if they used separate economies for each country . Okay, so these are some truly amazing uses for the Celo, but in light of the cello moving from L1 to L2 , I felt it would be a shame if I didn't come here and at least briefly mention it . Some of you may have heard that Celo is transitioning from an EVM- friendly L1 to an EVM-friendly L2 .
So I want to take just a few minutes to talk about this . The way to think about this is that we are taking the best of the cello . The names and points for all these emojis are available for you . That means the ability to pay gas fees with tokens. This ultra green thing is a mobile thing that sends money not just to wallet addresses but to phone numbers and a portion of each transaction fee is used to buy carbon credits and offset them.
We have effectively captured all of that and packaged it into an OP stack on top of Ethereum and an EigenDA-based L2. We recently reached a major milestone , launching Dango, its testnet version on top of Holesky . This is really very exciting exciting . We started this in ECC . However, converting or starting an L1 to an L2 is a bit of a difficult task.
We prefer to think of this as just a hard fork. This is the best emoji I've found for anything tough. Stone is the correct answer. Good idea. This is difficult.
That's the duality there. Why is this difficult? We prefer to think of this as just a hard fork . At a certain block height the current client stops generating blocks and starts generating new client blocks . So, it's like a traditional hard fork, but we want to consider it a 'hard' hard fork .
Two stones in the fork. The reason this is so difficult is because the users we spoke to rely on cello to travel in the real world travel in the real world . We're acting like we're changing engines while the plane is in the air , right? This is a very difficult task. We want to be very thoughtful about this .
That's why, our roadmap includes a lot of upgrades and testing. We upgraded the Alpha Horizon network via a fork to introduce Dango. In a few weeks, we will be upgrading the Alpha Horizon network for those who participate in ETHGlobal events , those who received our bounties in hackathons , they will definitely remember this. That's the main developer testnet. We'll be upgrading it at the end of September , so you'll be able to build on the Celo L2 network in time for DevCon .
Next we will upgrade to Klava and expect mainnet by the end of the year . This is a very exciting thing for us, for sure. Since we are OP stock friendly, we will connect with it wherever it is difficult . That's it, you see. Oh, you know , I want to end with this .
The reason we are doing all this is because we have a strong belief and enthusiasm that Ethereum will become the settlement layer for Web 3 . If you follow Justin Drake, you've probably heard him talk about this. That, you know, scaling Ethereum to thousands or more chains is a big goal right now. We strongly believe in this vision and hope to set an example for others by moving from Layer One to Layer Two . That's all, I just want to say that I'm eagerly awaiting for you all to finally experience Cell 2 .
That's the closest reference I've found to Dango from a movie . Guess what movie it is. Anyone? Spirited away, correct. Very good.
Cool. Okay, thank you very much. That's all from my side . It was a very happy experience.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.
