Celo was a page2 dweller for quite some time since starting with zero market cap back in the heady days of February 2021. As usual, as I am researching Celo, it CRACKS into the 60s with a market cap spiking by a billion dollars in a blink.
I was muddling through their philosophy and purpose, ignoring their tech for a moment. They have baked philanthropy into their business plan and I was mesmerized. I was hung up on Anastasis Karampetsos’ profile in the About page- says he’s “a Teal missionary.” I spent too much time on search engines trying to find out what that means. I still don't. I also like their Sacred Economics, a needed philosophical diversion into industrial ecology and radical ecopsychology. I've hold an advanced degree in these subjects. During my idle wonder, Celo CRACKED. Here I am writing about the aftereffects like a common piker. Don't get distracted by shiny baubles, folks!
I'm a philosopher first and a journalist second. I also have an allergy to nonsense and pandering.
Their stated mission of bringing DeFi to all smartphone users became legit last month when they announced their partnership with the leading DeFiers with the DeFi for the People Collaboration. Another 6 billion DeFi customers is an amiable aspiration for a business!
Perhaps is was the news that cLabs picked up employees from Google and A16zt.
They introduced a new interoperability protocol called OPTICS.
It might also be the liquidity mining announcement. And who doesn't like liquidity mining?!? Me.
What really bothers me is this pesky black swan that keeps bugging me for corn: it’s on the short list for CBDCs. Their market cap spiked when this was announced.
There might be a bit of hype buying and not much news selling at the moment, so let’s forget about market cap or that the price has meh’d in the last few hours. What about the tech?
It’s Proof of Stake, smart contract-y and an ERC20, but does not use the ETH network. But, it does use Byzantine Fault Tolerance. That sounds like more of a pain in the ass than ETH with less of the network effects.
They have a bunch of dApps and with a multitude of mobile wallets. These trustless mobile wallets work as light clients, which communicate with full nodes. The chain is stored on the full nodes and mined by the validators, which makes a pretty flexible topology. The light clients on smart phones don’t do any work but bring in the transactions. Cool feature! The full nodes store the chain and earn a fee and the validators mine. The mining is done by Proof of Stake and Consensus.
This reminds me that I had an uncle who got a consensus of miners to unionize, do less work and demand more money. He was killed in a riot. All I’m saying is that mining is a dangerous business.
Their token ecosystem includes USD and Euro pegged stable coins. Would you like to vote on Celo governance issues? No, I’d rather headbutt a cactus. If you are weird and like voting, you have some command line work to do.
It’s that easy!
/sarc
This is the democratic solution to a problem we fixed long ago with the Lighting Network, coupled with a devil’s bargain with the central banks. This is what happens when well-meaning cypherpunks drink the Flavor Ade and mimic the worst aspects of central banks. Central banks are not your friend, and if you know anything about game theory, hard economics, the Cantillon Effect and human nature, you understand my utter revulsion towards this project.
Celo hits all the woke talking points, promises to bank the unbanked (AKA enslaving them), then vies to be the engine of the very system that has perpetuated global poverty since the Bretton Woods agreement.
