Odaily Frontline | Decentralized payment protocol Celo received 20 million US dollars in financing, a16z and others participated in the investment
This article comes fromThe Block, original author: Ryan Weeks
Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang
This article comes from
, original author: Ryan Weeks
Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang
The decentralized payment protocol Celo has completed $20 million in financing, with investors including Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), Greenfield One and Electric Capital.
This latest investment brings Celo’s total funding to $65 million, and previous investors include Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) and Coinbase Ventures.
On February 10, Valora, the first peer-to-peer payment and mobile remittance application based on the Celo platform, was officially launched.
Valora launched in beta in September 2020 and has since attracted tens of thousands of users from more than 100 countries, according to a press release from Celo. The tool can be used to send and receive funds worldwide with transaction times of just seconds and claims to pay as little as $0.01 per payment.
“That’s why we got interested in this space in the first place — wanting to see cryptocurrencies brought to life and used like any other currency,” said Greenfield One, managing partner of Greenfield One.
To use Valora, users top up the app with Celo Dollars, a stablecoin launched last summer, and can send those funds to users on their contact lists.Celo Dollar (cUSD) is backed by a basket of crypto assets that are algorithmically adjusted to bring prices as close as possible to their pegged currency.On June 29, 2020, Celo announced the official launch of the stablecoin Celo Dollar, which is now in circulation. This milestone will bring stable assets to the Celo ecosystem, a new financial system that anyone with a mobile phone can access . The article pointed out that the application scenarios of cUSD include the digital remittance market, gig economy and peer-to-peer lending market, etc. The team believes that with this payment solution built on the Celo platform, retailers can accept cUSD digitally online or in person, while avoiding high credit card processing fees. MugglePay is one of the original solutions enabling over 2,400 small businesses and online merchants to upgrade their payment systems to easily accept crypto assets including cUSD.
The Block also recently revealed that Celo
is preparing to launch a stablecoin pegged to the euro
, with an initial launch date of March.
