By Evan Fenster, Celo Foundation Atlas Cafe coffeehouse in San Francisco’s Mission district has been a mainstay in the neighborhood since 1996, providing a comfortable place for the local community to eat, drink, socialize, and work. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit Atlas Cafe hard — its ‘regulars’ came a lot less often, as stay-at-home orders disrupted typical routines. This scenario occurred all across the country and around the world. While most businesses have reopened, some have struggled to rebuild their regular clientele. Atlas Cafe was no exception. As an Atlas customer over the summer ..read more

EthicHub, a protocol helping unbanked farmers access capital at low interest rates, has joined the DeFi for the People (DFTP) initiative. EthicHub connects lenders to small unbanked farmers. It also supports the growth of DFTP partners Ubeswap, a mobile-first DeFi exchange, and Symmetric, an automated market maker and a decentralized exchange (DEX). EthicHub users can swap and deposit assets into both Ubeswap and Symmetric. DeFi for the People helps to encourage regenerative finance (ReFi) projects. EthicHub’s focus on enabling unbanked farmers to access capital is an example of DeFi protocol ..read more

The DeFi for the People (DFTP) initiative is excited to welcome ImmortalDAO Finance, the first decentralized reserve currency protocol built on Celo. ImmortalDAO, a DeFi 2.0 protocol that helps users generate passive income through staking, seeks to build a policy-controlled currency system in which the behavior of its IMMO token is influenced at a high level by the DAO. Holders of IMMO will be able vote on proposals submitted by ImmortalDAO community members. Each IMMO token is backed by a basket of assets that includes mcUSD, mcEUR, and CELO. This means that the price of IMMO will floa ..read more

UPDATE 2/23/2022: Mila Kunis has canceled. For an updated list of conference speakers and more, go to Celo Connect. Things are heating up as we count down to our first Celo Connect global conference at the historic La Llotja de Mar in Barcelona, Spain, April 4–5, 2022. Programming is underway — with more details to come — but today, we are excited to announce the first group of headline speakers: Morgan Beller of NFX, Fabrice Dautriat of Ledger, and Blackrock’s Henock Teklu, Morgan Beller is a General Partner at NFX, investing in networks and marketplaces across a broad spectrum of ..read more

Since its launch, the Celo Platform has relied on consensus mechanisms in the blockchain space. It is a proof-of-stake mechanism that relies on community members to vote for responsible validator groups, actively engaging in the governance process and with applications and projects in the Celo ecosystem by staking CELO tokens. Until now, staked CELO tokens could only be used for those purposes. With input from the Celo community, cLabs developed StakedCelo,* an open source liquid staking protocol, to encourage stakers of CELO to participate further in the Celo community by engaging across oth ..read more

After several months of hard work from the teams at cLabs, Abacus, Curve Labs, Bld.Ai, and the Climate Collective, the Toucan Protocol is live on Celo! This deployment means users have the ability to access high-quality, nature-based carbon offsets to hold, use across Web3, or “retire” to claim the underlying carbon credit towards their GHG reduction goals. Image courtesy of Toucan. The Toucan Ecosystem Toucan fosters an ecosystem of projects that incorporate tokenized carbon to unlock a range of use cases around climate action, including increasing utility for carbon, scaling climate mi ..read more

#CeloVie! — A Recap of the Celo Connect Salon In Paris Highlights: Stani Kulechov, Julien Bouteloup, Pablo Veyrat, and Celo co-founder Marek Olszewski explored how ReFi has evolved over the past year. Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, sat down with the Celo Foundation’s Xochitl Cazador for a conversation titled Hyperstructures, Public Goods and ReFi, Oh My! #ReFi trended on Twitter! Last week, during EthCC-5 in Paris, France, Celo held its second Celo Connect Salon. The Salon venue, which was a short walk from the main event, provided two floors of intimate and large ..read more

EthicHub, a protocol helping unbanked farmers access capital at low interest rates, has joined the DeFi for the People (DFTP) initiative. EthicHub connects lenders to small unbanked farmers. It also supports the growth of DFTP partners Ubeswap, a mobile-first DeFi exchange, and Symmetric, an automated market maker and a decentralized exchange (DEX). EthicHub users can swap and deposit assets into both Ubeswap and Symmetric. DeFi for the People helps to encourage regenerative finance (ReFi) projects. EthicHub’s focus on enabling unbanked farmers to access capital is an example of DeFi protocol ..read more

Recapping Celo Connect — A Celebration of the Ingenuity, Strength, and Growth of the Celo Community Last week, the Celo community gathered in Barcelona, Spain, at the historic La Llotja de Mar for our first Celo Connect global conference. This event was over two years in the making, and the incredible turnout is a testament to the shared belief in the power of Web3 technology to transform financial services, communities, and the planet. Over 800 community members attended from Europe, Africa, Asia, the United States, and Latin America to celebrate Celo and meet and mingle with one anothe ..read more

The Celo Foundation, Climate Collective, and Toucan Collaboration Deepens to Bring ReFi to the Masses The Celo Foundation is committed to scaling the Celo community’s efforts to reverse climate change through Web3 technology. To continue to coordinate an efficient, effective climate response and make the Celo blockchain the home of regenerative finance (ReFi), founders and developers turn to fight climate change, the Foundation is strengthening its partnership with the Climate Collective and long-time Collective partner Toucan Protocol. Toucan, an infrastructure provider planning to depl ..read more