Celo in 2025: Scaling the Home of Stablecoins for Real-World Adoption by Rene Reinsberg

all right all right how's it going the fact that you guys are not at a brewery right now or a bar means really love stable coins right okay let's do this um do I like bend down here to push next slide or do we have a clicker I can also dance but oh up there let's see okay that that works you know okay cool yeah excellent okay for those of you who haven't seen this massive Banner outside uh cell is a layer one right now it's becoming a layer two very soon next month excited for that um and it was initially built for mobile first use cases right because a lot of more people have phones in their pocket than access to a desktop computer and that has led to just uh a lot of payments use cases happening on cello uh little bit of data um monthly stable coin volume around 3.5 billion up 5,000% or so year-over-year and that keeps growing and what's really is that there's uh over 600,000 daily active users engaging with stable coins uh and that's really a very powerful number uh especially for the broader industry and a testament and we know for a lot of these folks there are not Bots but they're humans I'll get to that a little later little give you guys a little sneak preview on something um and that's really for us a strong sign that Yes stable coins are being used in the real world uh by real people uh you've probably also met Michael or seen his presentation earlier today from Stabila Foundation um who's been doing a lot to accelerate use cases for foreign exchange uh onchain foreign exchange um and that's really taking uh or seeing a lot of grow on C was uh cell being the chain with the most stable coins across different currencies right so not just dollars but really a rich uh family of local currencies that are um you know benchmarked or kind of uh tracking the the currencies of different countries such as you know Kenyon chilling or uh yeah Brazilian real there's some kenyons in the house I love it uh all right so not only uh you know folks in our community have taken note but vitalic uh you know saw it too and tweeted about it last uh last fall and a lot of this growth has actually happened through this wallet that opera launched uh about a year ago and that's been on a quick rise across uh initially Africa but now really expanding globally and operas you may know is a browser company and so they built this wallet into their browser that already has over 100 million active users and so a lot of people suddenly had access even on lowend Android devices to a non-custodial dollar wallet if you want uh that could actually be used in the real world um and we we felt this firstand a bunch of our team went to e Safari last year and you know instead of having to go through the process at the airport to buy like you know the local Sim sign up for impesa to actually do anything like you know buy buy bottle of water they could just use mini pay and pay at any store locally and of course um you know kind of send uh money to the new Kenyon friends uh and what's cool about this wallet is it's not just a payments wallet like a kind of a venmo but it actually has a rich App Store and so these mini apps have started to emerge and and many of them have seen like tremendous you know adoption and kind of unheard for sort of typical webst stre applications where you know even just as an example this is the most recent launch uh mini app called learn and earn uh within sort of two weeks in under two weeks uh a campaign uh you know in USD rewards onboard at over 150,000 people learning about uh usdt and and getting rewarded for that uh so anyone here building applications and wants to put them in front of like a massive audience and actually get used by real people definitely check out check out mini pay um we've been thinking a lot about how to make these onchain FX markets grow and more efficient and you know as maybe those of you from traditional Finance know the dollar euro Market is the most liquid Market in the world right and so it's going to take a long time for onchain to get to those levels uh but even if you go to some of the more sort of obscure kind of you know longtail currency markets and you're looking for liquidity in for example that Kenyon Shilling to the Brazilian rail you notice it's actually not that liquid um and I think there's a big potential here for for onchain markets to actually surpass the efficiency of current markets and not just that but you know they're open 247 they're accessible not just by big institutions but by you know even a small company or an individual right could imagine a small company doing some crossborder Commerce and wanting to hatch their exposure and and that's what we're really excited about and now was the rise of agents I think there's a possibility to help bootstrap liquidity in those markets and also have these agents you know absorb everything they're seeing you know out there on the web information about currencies and then um develop trading strategies against that and that's something we're working on as part of RSC xai initiative so um I have a little um surprise here uh which is something that we're announcing this week here in Denver and it actually came to us when we were talking to Opa last year they were really keen on um knowing better that the people that are using uh their products especially when it then kind of comes to engaging with some of these applications are real humans are unique humans and then of course with the rise of Agents right there's always this questions well you know is this traffic on your chain in your ecosystem you know how much of that is driven by Bots by agents or by real humans and so we're very excited to announce self protocol uh let me see if I can play this oh no okay uh never mind why did I do that uh let's go back perfect you've Al you can all check out the clip on Twitter um but you know let me let me quickly tell you about uh self and so uh for for most of you the passport that you um have back at your hotel in the safe is actually has a um biometric feature uh that can be through NFC scann with your phone and uh when you for example enter a country right it allows the country to verify that this is not like a fake passport it's actually a valid passport now what's really cool is there's zero knowledge uh technology that allows uh people to create proofs that yes they're holding this passport and you know then verify certain features or certain sort of information within their passport without ever having to share uh the whole passport or you know the passport data um and that's really great right because for those of you who've ever participated in uh an airdrop and had to go through kyc we all know it's uh you know happens very often that those things get hacked and then new information uh is out there and so this is a really new way of actually uh having a much more secure way for someone to prove that they're a unique human that they have that they have a passport um and allows you know not just for proving that you're human um on chain but all kinds of other real cool use cases leaving like things like age verification which is obviously also very useful outside web3 I know I only have uh very limited time here so I'll uh Zoom through this very quickly the app's going Live this week uh we have a booth at East Denver so if you're there uh later this week definitely come by uh get the demo um we also have uh a cool little thing we're doing where if it's your birthday and you can prove it uh you know in zero knowledge by scanning your passport with the app uh you get a little something um so yeah definitely check that out at e Denver um or hit me up afterwards uh for for additional uh context and yeah thank you very much for sticking around and enjoy the bar tonight cheers [Applause]