Markus Franke discusses Celo's mobile payment network and stablecoins

0:02i'm ashton addison from block quest capital for investment pitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with marcus frank partner at sea labs working on cello marcus welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to be here today thank you ashton exciting to be here yeah exciting times right now cello's working on some interesting initiatives

0:23that i think are really going to increase interaction into the cryptocurrency space through mobile which is really needed and so many people are you know primarily using mobile only right now i would love for you to kick it off for us with a high level overview of cello and then we can dive into the details exactly yeah happy to talk about that and you already said it a lot of

0:46people in the world have access to a mobile phone currently 8 billion mobile phones are out there and the mobile or the ericsson mobility report estimates that there will be close to nine billion smartphones out there soon zelo's mission is to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity for everyone and when we talk about cello we

1:14typically say that cello is mobile open and real mobile in a way that cello is built mobile first so that you can easily access it from every mobile phone open means it's open source it's based on proof of stake and it's permissionless and real means it is it supports real use cases

1:42peer-to-peer transactions around the world decentralized finance for people to use it easily on their mobile phone so real use cases on your mobile phone great thanks for the overview marcus and it seems like there's a lot of different mobile wallets that have been popping up and they're all sort of working on different things

2:09when your team came and started cello what were some of the problems that you pinpointed in the industry that really needed to be solved and driving those mobile solutions great question and in general there are as i said eight billion smartphone subscribers in the world but not a lot of cryptocurrency users currently and most cryptocurrency users are

2:33active in the crypto ecosystem as developers as traders as other projects but less people are actually using cryptocurrencies for reuse cases for end-to-end or peer-to-peer transactions for payments for remittances for saving for lending and one of these problems that there's basically

3:00not many people who use this technology for example for day-to-day transactions also many people don't have access to traditional banking system that was why we chose from the start to build for mobile or to build mobile first because as i said so many people have a smartphone so to make this technology actually inclusive we wanted to enable it on

3:28smartphones therefore cello now is as i said mobile first an open source blockchain that makes for example remittances very easy to send at a small fraction of current cost today i can send a sello dollar or a seller euro to any phone number around the world and it arrives in five seconds because the block time is five seconds and the transaction fees are

3:56very very low and i just need to know the phone number and it's actually very hard to build for mobile not only from a from the blockchain perspective to enable ultralight clients to sync with the network it's also hard for example the designers to build a mobile first wallet because you have to focus on the most important things and you want to build it in a way that

4:24people everywhere can can interact with it can use it can understand it and therefore open source is the way to go and building for mobile therefore for us made a lot of sense to give more people access to crypto a second reason why people didn't use cryptocurrencies for day-to-day transactions was

4:51that cryptocurrencies typically are very volatile so cello also has embedded stable coins on the blockchain as i said cello dollar and cellular euro are the first two stable coins that live on cello and in future we hopefully see many more currencies like a selloreal or cellopiso and many more and these stablecoins enable people to make

5:19all these transactions saving lending purchases remittances and embedded stable coins actually means these stable coins or the smart contracts that govern these maple stable coins allow you to pay for gas fees in the same currency as you do the transaction so if i send you sell a dollar today and i send you a dollar

5:45i only need to know your phone number it arrives in five seconds and i can pay for gas in seller dollar as well and it's less than a fraction of a cent for this transaction wow that's incredible and that's huge barriers to entry have been broken with that first of all just having your phone number only you don't really need to have you know understanding

6:10cryptography and cryptocurrency wallets and ethereum addresses and then being able to pay the fee in the same currency that you're sending it in is also a huge advantage i know a lot of people that got a erc20 token and then they realized that they needed ether in their in their wallet as well to actually be able to withdraw that token and send it and

6:31a lot of people get confused about that and i think that's a major barrier that is prohibiting this mobile access to be sending remittances around the world really easily so that's really great to hear that your team has the stablecoin you're already working on more coins very interesting that you mentioned the five second block time as well

6:51So within five seconds you know you don't have to be sitting there if you're buying a coffee waiting for the transaction to confirm holding up the line and i'm guessing that's all to do with the cello proof of stake and the blockchain as well maybe you can talk more about the technology how did you get it to become so fast and those advantages

7:14with it being proof of stake on the network yes great questions happy to talk about that so what you mentioned are a few of the nice platform features of the cello blockchain in general the cello blockchain is a layer one blockchain that is proof of stake it has on chain or supports on chain governance so

7:40the community can actually vote on validators of the blockchain but also vote on future governance decisions by holding the cello native asset which is the utility and governance asset then there's this support for ultralight clients so even very simple smartphones can interact with the

8:09cello blockchain and this is 700 000 times faster than other chains but cello is also a fork of ethereum gas so it is evm compatible with optics we'll soon now launching also bridges to all other evm compatible chains and cello also supports smart contracts so if you're a ethereum developer you could either use bridges between the

8:38ethereum blockchain and the seller blockchain so that you can like have your applications on top of ethereum talk to also cellular blockchain but you could also port over your applications and also cello as a fork of ethereum smart contracts are written in solidity i mentioned the gas feature which is important i think for transactions

9:04and this feature is implemented for the first two stable coins that currently live on sellers so for sello della transactions you can pay and sell a dollar for seller euro transactions you can pay in seller euro and then one other nice technical feature is this public key interface the phone number so basically it allows people to send seller dollars by simply

9:32clicking on a contact in your mobile phone and sending and therefore basically a hash of the phone number is linked to a public key so your phone number stays private but as a user i just only need to know your phone number and if you already have a seller wallet then the transaction arrives within five seconds if you don't have a wallet then you get a text message saying that

10:00somebody sent you a sell or stablecoin and that this stablecoin is held in a escrow smart contract and that you can unlock with getting a wallet on cello great thanks marcus and you mentioned there about developing in adapts on the for an environment and having it evm compatible which i think is a huge advantage for

10:27the bulk of blockchain developers that are already coding on ethereum i'd love to know more about the environment for creating dapps on cello and how you're going to incentivize developers to continue to create gaps on the environment yes so if you're a developer and you're considering building your dap on cello there's cello.org slash developers

10:50there's tons of documentation there to learn about the sdk and how it works also how about how the code works there's also a link to the github repo and a link to the sdk code base there are also several tutorials so that it makes it very easy to build your applications on top of zello but there's also a link to

11:18the code base of the core contracts of the blockchain so that you can find out about cello and how it works there is a cello foundation and cello foundation gives grants for developers especially if you're a developer catering a certain market then you should look up also on cello.org the grand kit

11:45that basically has all the information you need to how to get a grant and actually today or yesterday also cello camp is starting again taking in applications cello camp is a boot camp slash incubator with really great mentors great prices so you can look up cello camp and also yeah go through a boot camp type of

12:14experience to learn how to develop on top of cello there are also ecosystem funds that invest in projects that want to build on top of cello so yeah also tons of incentives to build your business or your application on top of setup definitely that sounds great grants incentives foundation evm compatible nice work on you know laying out a lot of different incentives

12:42for developers now we don't have a lot of time left but i want to hear about your team and some of the things that may be coming out from now until you know the next few months and the end of 2021 that cello is working on primarily so the sealabs team is currently focusing a lot on interoperability working on this optics we had a lot of interaction with the

13:10also the ethereum community last week in paris at the ethereum paris conference where we introduced optics in a event series that was called league of bridges and where we described the bridges to all these other evm compatible chains and i think this interoperability is super important because now you have cello as a

13:38blockchain that enables all these mobile first transactions and purchased to all these other great chains out there that have yeah their their assets on top and other other use cases so interoperability will be on top of the list another thing that is on top of the list i all already also mentioned this to issue more and different currencies on top of

14:05cello cello dollar and cello euro are the first two and we hopefully see a lot of adoption for these but we also have active communities for example in brazil that would like to see a cello real that is following or tracking the value of the brazilian real that is another focus and then there's also a focus on the alliance for prosperity the alliance for prosperity

14:33is a set of mission aligned organizations around the world that would like to enable their users and their clients or their their partners sellout technology and we won't like to expand this alliance focused parity there are great organizations mobile carriers charity organizations there are also builders of all sorts and

15:03creating a vibrant ecosystem where people have enough on and off ramps where people have enough merchants as well that allow for payments in cello currencies i think that makes this blockchain then very strong definitely i think the on and off ramps will be of much importance so people can buy things locally and that expansion of

15:31currencies also sounds very important so i'll be watching as your team continues to develop and release those updates throughout the rest of 2021 you mention a lot of sources for developers to get involved with cello i'm curious for the viewers and people that are actually looking to utilize these payment networks for them to get involved and for fans of the community that just

15:54want to learn more and get involved in the community what's the best way for them to learn more there are so many ways and actually i would like to add one more thing about what is on the roadmap cello is carbon negative which is really cool it is already more efficient in terms of emissions than for example proof of work blockchains because it is proof of stake

16:16but there is also a offset of carbon emissions on the protocol level to keep it currently carbon negative and maybe to have it carbon neutral in the long run and we are also looking to add nature-backed assets to the cello ecosystem so we would really like to see something like tokenized forest on cello in future or we already have a token that is tokenizing carbon

16:46credit so i think also here this technology can make a big difference and if people would like to check it out how to build on top of cello or what cello is in general first starting point would be the webpage sello.org there's a chat on discord if you would like to ask your technical questions you can find that under chat.zello.org there's a cello telegram channel

17:15that is more and more active there's a lot of documentation on docs.zelo.org there's also a nice medium block which showcases those new developments from from cello and as i said you can also check out fellow camp this boot camp that is starting now and see if you would like to apply there great marcus thank you for that tons of resources i will leave those all in the

17:42description box below all the best with everyone at sea labs and cello moving forward and let's follow up in the near future yes that would be great thanks a lot ashton this was fun you