Celo: A New Hope for Stablecoins on Ethereum

Thank you. It's good to be here. Yeah. Uh it's fun to be out of an elevator. I was just stuck in an elevator for half an hour, so I'm glad I made it.

Um anyway, um I'm How many Argentinians are here in the audience? Just out of curiosity. Woohoo. A bunch. Uh well, it's good to be here.

I'm from Poland. I'm uh I'm very jealous of your of your football team. Uh, and it's really wonderful to be, you know, back in Argentina. Uh, fun fact, I actually proposed to my now wife in Patagonia. And so it's, uh, really special to be to be back here.

Uh, and a lot of the team at Cello actually in the in the ecosystem, uh, is actually from Argentina. And so it's really nice to be here. But today we're going to be talking about a new hope. Um and you know the talk starts uh on a planet that definitely isn't Nibou uh for copyright reasons. Um but you know has two moons uh has an infinite garden of stable coin activity uh happening.

Um this of course is Ethereum. You know there's just uh so much amazing uh stable connectivity happening in on Ethereum especially on mainet. Uh, and whenever you have that, uh, you know, the competition, uh, shows up. Um, and, uh, this might be a good place for me to apologize to the Sable Coin Summit organizers. I don't think you're going to be able to monetize, uh, the video for this talk.

I'm really, really sorry. Uh, uh, but hopefully for your viewing uh, pleasure, you guys will enjoy uh, the story that I have outlined here. Um and so you know if you if you I think Ethereum mainet has been doing really really well uh with stable connectivity uh but if you look at Ethereum as a whole if you look at L2s um you know they're getting a lot of heat from a lot of competition uh that has shown up um you know I've been here now for just two days and the number of times I've heard people talk about USDT on Tron uh is you know a little a little sad for you This being an Ethereum uh developer conference, uh it really does seem like um Tron has gotten a lot of traction for stable coin payments. Uh and in contrast, if you look at a lot of the Ethereum L2s, uh it does look like um you know, we're we're starting to struggle a little bit to compete against some of these other other L1s. Dare I say, you know, we might be at a point where we're about to lose our hand, so to speak, if if you know the story that I'm alluding to.

Um, and um, you know, if you look at the numbers, this really is showing up in in a lot of different ways. And one way that it's showing up is in daily active users. If you look at daily active users across uh, you know, the majority of L2s today in Ethereum, um, it's actually a little bit of a a sad story. uh over the last three to six months there's been a pretty big uh drop in in daily active usage. Um and and that's that's a real shame.

Um and you know this is on top of um a lot of new competition coming in and um being hot on our heels at Ethereum. Um, you know, we have uh many new uh alt L1s especially that that are popping up that are claiming that they're really focused on stable coins uh and they're going to be nipping nipping at Ethereum heels uh very soon, no doubt. And so if you know how this story goes, you probably remember you know this montage um which you know in our metaphor here is um you know starts with Cello. So Cello, for those of you who've been following us, you guys are probably familiar. We transitioned from an L1, from the dark side, so to speak, uh to the light side.

Uh and you know, we've been very fortunate to be taking under the wing of this really amazing mentor, uh that has, you know, incredible economic security, incredible decentralization, incredible stable coin activity. [snorts] uh and we've been learning the ways, you know, learning how to inherit the economic security of Ethereum. Uh learning how to plug into this amazing ecosystem and becoming interoperable with this whole ecosystem and learning to be in [clears throat] a position where we ourselves can contribute value back to Ethereum. Uh and so through all of that, you know, Cell has gotten stronger, uh dare I say strong enough to to lift this fighter out of the swamp. Um, and that's really exciting because now we're at a point where this is also showing up in our actual numbers.

Um, but before we get to the numbers, um, I just wanted to add, you know, it's not just us, it's not just Ethereum, but it's actually been, you know, a real team effort along the way. We got a lot of support, uh, from, uh, some pretty incredible additional uh, folks in the ecosystem. Uh most um importantly to start um you know we've partnered with OP uh Cello is an OP stackbased L2 um and we worked really really hard to effectively rewrite the whole entire codebase uh to be an OP stackbased client while porting all of what makes CO uh just a really incredible platform for stable coin payments like the ability to pay for gas with tokens and like the ability to send value to phone numbers. Additionally, we've worked with IGEN layer to to leverage IGENDA with Cello uh so that our transaction fees continue to remain really cheap. Uh so IDA has you know by far um I would say the best um data availability outside of Ethereum um and it's extremely cheap, extremely fast.

uh and we've been working with them both on version one and now we moved over to version two of INDA uh which which has some really nice properties as well. [snorts] Uh we're also just a few weeks away from upgrading Cello to use uh opsync light. We're going to be the first chain to deploy opsync light into production. And so we're going to have uh ZK fault proofs um further improving seller security uh and also lowering the um withdrawal window um that we currently have when sending assets back to Ethereum on the native bridge. Uh and so we're really excited about taking our first step towards um you know becoming a full-fledged fully interoperable uh ZKL2.

And then finally, you know, since this is a stable coin conference and we're talking about payments, uh finality is really really important when it comes to payments. And so we're actively working with the Espresso team uh to bring uh 1 second finality uh to to the chain. Um and it's a little ironic because Cello as an L1 used to have 5-second finality. Uh and now as we transition to an L2, we have 10 minute finality. Right?

That's roughly how long it takes um for for um our blocks to be to be written to Ethereum. And then of [snorts] course we have to wait for Ethereum finality. Um and and so it's it's a bit of a shame, right? When when making this transition, we uh we actually took a step back on finality. And so now we've been working with the great people at Espresso uh to bring that back to to on the order of one to two seconds.

So, that's going to be really amazing. And we're also um you know, maybe not weeks, but probably um a month or or two away from having that in production as well. And then we've also have some amazing partners on the stablecoin front. So, Cello has native USDT. I I believe we're the only L2 with native USDT on Cello.

So, this is not USDT0, but actual natively deployed USDT. Um we also have native USDC. um and Mento, uh which is a native protocol to Cello that has around 15 different stable coins pegged to various local currencies around the world. Uh and so there's just a lot of really good options for for stable coin adoption and stable coin use on Cello thanks to these three amazing projects. And I should add that each of these can be used to pay for transaction fees on Cello, which is really nice.

Who here has sent a stable coin to an address that then suddenly you couldn't forward to another address because you didn't have any ETH in it? Anybody? Okay. A bunch of people raising their hands. That is super frustrating.

Account abstraction supposed to help with this. Uh but it's rollout has been a little slow on Cello. You don't actually have to do use account abstraction because natively we support paying for gas with tokens. And then finally um self uh launched recently on Cello which is a really cool ZK identity protocol that lets you prove anonymously uh and without a counterparty that you are a unique individual uh as well as other statements derived from your ID information. This is really cool.

Uh, and I think in the context of stablecoin adoption, I think is a really great way of incentivizing new users to come uh on chain uh without um you know risk of being civil attacked. Um and so all of these um folks uh have been helping um you know uh uh Cello with kind of becoming just this amazing stablecoin platform. Uh but I would be remiss if I didn't mention one more amazing partner which of course is the Millennium Falcon of the Stella ecosystem and that is of course Opera Mini Pay. Uh Minipay is this incredible wallet um that's you know targeting normies uh by you know this amazing uh you know big public company Opera that you may have heard of. Um and if you're new to Minipe you might be excited to hear that they have now 10 million users.

It's pretty exciting. Uh they also recently launched virtual accounts. So now anyone in the world can open a US dollar or EU bank account. Uh which is pretty cool. Um and then finally uh even though it's um focused primarily on stable coins uh they've been kind of embracing slow DeFi and slowly uh making it easier for normies to to do more with the wallet.

And as of recently, you can now also buy uh tokenized gold um in the wallet. Uh you can't buy ETH or Bitcoin or or Cello um but uh you can buy tokenized gold and it's it's a it's a nice step towards um opening up new asset classes for you know these normal users uh for whom you know they've been really selective about what they put in front of. Now, all of this together has maybe not given Cell the highest TVL uh or maybe the highest stable coin volumes. Uh but it has done one thing which is pretty cool. It's given us um the uh highest amount of daily active usage of any L2 out there.

And so if you add CO back to that graph that I showed earlier, suddenly the L2 landscape doesn't look as depressing anymore. uh because if you look like Cello actually is growing in usage uh in fact we're I think one of the only major L2s that over the last 6 months has grown uh and as of recently we have actually overtaken base uh and so we are now the number one yeah thank you uh used chain by daily active usage uh in the Ethereum ecosystem so number one L2 um so that's pretty cool Um, another really cool thing is that our all-time highs, uh, sorry, that we have a new alltime, we reached a new all-time high for stable coin volume, uh, which is pretty cool. So, last month in October, uh, we surpassed that previous peak uh, reaching just shy of $3 billion of adjusted uh, stable coin transaction volume. Um, this is using Artemis' adjusted uh methodology where they exclude transfers of stable coins between uh centralized exchanges. Uh, and if you look at November, uh, we are actually we're about halfway into the month and we're already over halfway of that all-time high from last month.

So, I think we're on track to have another all-time high this month, which is pretty exciting. Uh, and so the stats are just uh, doing really, really well. Now, [clears throat] one criticism that we get frequently, uh, I'm not going to lie. You know, when we're on crypto Twitter, we we get excited about these numbers. We share them.

Uh, but people go, "Uh, [clears throat] but what is it actually used for?" You know, I'm trying to think about the last time that I did a transaction involving Cello. And it's true. If you're a hardcore DGEN, you know, maybe u, you know, stable coin transfer is isn't something that you're uh using on a day-to-day basis. Um, and so what I wanted to do for the rest of this talk is just show you some of the users of the Cello ecosystem.

Uh, so that when you um when you see our stats, you know, you can put either a face or a persona to some of these numbers. And so for the first persona, uh, I want to start with a remittance sender. Uh and this is a um message that um the Mini Pay team received from a Mini Pay user. It's really quite touching. Uh it says, "I just wanted to give a personal thank you to the whole team because because of Minipe, my mom was able to pay a doctor in Congo instantly this morning from Germany to give my uncle medical treatment also this morning."

And that's pretty incredible, right? to be able to send a payment in real time uh over such a great distance effectively almost for free and to have it have such a a life-changing impact on a family member. You know, it's really one of the best testimonials. The next persona is uh Richie, who's a freelancer. Uh Richie gets paid on Minipay for writing.

Uh he lives in Kenya. Uh, and he's really stoked about getting paid with Mini Pay because he gets paid in a US dollar stable coin, which he then uses to save and to fight against inflation. But even better, he can then use that stable coin to pay for groceries and pretty much anything that he needs uh at any terminal uh because Minipe has a a nice way to um pay through PTM uh any Empessa terminal in the country. And so if you know Kenya, you know that Empessa is everywhere. And so basically you can use mini pay everywhere and Richie really likes that.

And then finally the last persona uh which is uh Nico uh Nico is the traveler uh who had suffered a very unfortunate accident uh while he was in Kenya. Uh his tuk tuk that he was in rolled over uh and all of his belongings went flying in every direction. Uh and as a result he actually lost his wallet. Um, and so he was stranded in a country that he didn't live in without a wallet. Luckily, he had his phone and he had mini and a few people were able to to send him some money on Miniipe and he was [snorts] actually able not only to uh to survive in Kenya, but he flew later to Nigeria and was able to pay for everything uh [snorts] in Nigeria.

And this last point is that Nico is actually in the web 3 ecosystem. So, he's one of you. [clears throat] And so this last persona uh can actually be you. Uh I know uh Opera is working on adding support for Pix and Marcata Pago. And so it won't be long before you guys will be able to travel anywhere in the world and be able to use Minipay to pay for local rails with local rails as well.

[snorts] And so I think that's all the time that I have. Just wanted to say thank you. And if you're interested in trying out Mini Pay, uh here's a cash link for 10,000 uh pesos. First person to claim it uh will get it in their wallet. So act quick.

And if you have Mini Pay already, then I would ask you not to claim it so you can give the other people a chance. Anyway, thank you so much.