By
Godfrey Benjamin
March 11th, 2024
The new Celo Connect campaign seeks to offer the development of high-quality Celo on- and off-ramps globally.
CELO, the native token of Layer-1 blockchain Celo jumped a staggering 23% on Monday, April 4, with its price moving close to $5.0. This happened as the Celo blockchain announced a $20 million incentive campaign during the commencement of the Celo Connect conference earlier this week in Barcelona, Spain.
Over the last month, the CELO price has surged by a staggering 50%. During the Monday event in Barcelona, the Celo Foundation announced a $20 million ‘Connect the World’ campaign. This was to incentivize the development of high-quality Celo on- and off-ramps globally.
Furthermore, the foundation announced an open-source application programming interface (API) “Fiat Connect” for payment providers to make integrations more scalable. As part of the campaign, Celo will offer $50K to the first payment provider in each country to integrate FiatConnect. Besides, the Foundation will also subsidize on-ramp fees of up to $100K for all providers. This will make it more affordable for users to access Celo assets. The official blog post notes:
“The Celo Foundation and the broader Celo community believe in a future where anyone, anywhere in the world, can access digital assets and prosper through financial inclusion. Considerable progress has been made toward this vision”.
Celo’s Growth in DeFi
As per data by DeFiLlama, Celo is currently the 19th ranked decentralized finance (DeFi) platform in terms of total value locked (TVL). The coin currently has a market cap of $2.1 billion.
The Celo blockchain protocol serves as a global payments infrastructure for crypto assets that uses phone numbers as public keys while issuing a native stablecoin token. It will allow native and non-native crypto assets to circulate freely across devices, carriers, and countries. Edward Moya, senior analyst at Oanda, said that Celo has been steadily attracting interest as many investors are drawn to the potential of its smartphone technology.
This technology could play a key role in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Moya added:
“What also helps Celo is that it works using proof-of-stake and is offsetting carbon, which makes it appealing to many climate-focused investors.”
Lennard Neo, head of research at Stack Funds, said that the recent price action of CELO is the outcome of the Celo Connect event.
“We reckon it is probably an event-related price rise as traders speculate on positive surprises during the conference,” added he.