The Most Underrated Chain: Celo’s Surprising Traction Around the World | Marek Olszewski

What It Covers

Marek Olszewski explains how Celo has become the leading Ethereum Layer 2 for peer-to-peer payments in emerging markets, achieving 700,000 daily active users through its partnership with Opera's MiniPay wallet. The chain focuses on stablecoin payments, on-chain foreign exchange, and decentralized identity using phone numbers and biometric passports.

Key Questions Answered

• •Emerging Market Payment Adoption: Celo processes payments for users across Africa, Latin America, and Asia through Opera's MiniPay, which has 500 million monthly active users across Opera products. The platform enables a yoga instructor in Malawi to receive payments from Norwegian clients 40% cheaper than MoneyGram, even including on-ramp and off-ramp fees, while allowing recipients to hold dollars and hedge against local currency inflation without additional effort.
• •Active User Metrics Leadership: Celo leads all Ethereum Layer 2s with 700,000 daily active addresses and 3.3 million weekly active USDT users, surpassing Base, Polygon, and often Ethereum mainnet according to Grow the Pie data. The majority are MiniPay users verified through phone numbers and Google accounts, making them significantly harder to Sybil compared to address-based metrics on other chains.
• •Virtual Bank Account Innovation: MiniPay creates US dollar or European bank accounts tied to self-custodial wallets, enabling anyone globally to receive traditional bank transfers that automatically convert to stablecoins. This eliminates the need for employers or clients to understand crypto while allowing freelancers and remote workers in emerging markets to access global payment rails without explaining blockchain technology to payers.
• •On-Chain Foreign Exchange Market: The global FX market processes 9 trillion dollars daily, totaling 3.2 quadrillion dollars annually, making it the largest financial market. Celo hosts 15 Mento Protocol stablecoins plus additional local currency stablecoins, enabling 24/7 on-chain currency swaps on Uniswap and Velodrome with better efficiency for exotic pairs like Nigerian naira to Brazilian real compared to correspondent banking systems.
• •ZK Passport Protocol for Sybil Resistance: Self protocol uses NFC-enabled biometric passports and national IDs to verify humanity on-chain through zero-knowledge proofs, eliminating third-party KYC providers. Users prove statements like age over 18 or absence from OFAC lists without revealing personal data. Google Cloud adopts this system for their faucet, enabling mainnet token distribution with built-in compliance and civil resistance.
• •Design Choices for Consumer Adoption: Celo enables native gas payment with stablecoins without account abstraction, uses phone numbers as identifiers instead of addresses, and maintains one-second block times with sub-two-second finality through Espresso integration. These features emerged from building the flagship wallet application simultaneously with the blockchain platform, creating consumer-friendly infrastructure that competes with Solana while offering cheaper transactions.