Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Applauds Celo’s Growth, Surpassing Tron in Stablecoin Adoption

• Celo has outpaced Tron in daily active addresses for stablecoin usage after its key applications recently announced a groundbreaking expansion across Africa.

• In July, Celo’s daily transactions surpassed one million for the first time in 2024, and its number of active users reached an all-time high.

Artemis recently disclosed that the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol Celo (CELO) has marginally outpaced Tron DAO in the area of daily active addresses for stablecoin usage. Artemis highlighted that Celo’s stablecoin transaction volume is “purely organic,” and the transfer sizes across all “buckets” are growing. This implies that the growth has nothing to do with “address spamming.” 

@Celo recently passed @trondao in daily active addresses for stablecoin usage.
-What’s behind this meteoric rise?
-Is Africa undergoing a stablecoin breakout?
A pic.twitter.com/6Xn8CF6DfO— Artemis (@artemis__xyz) September 16, 2024

Similar to the daily active addresses, Celo has recorded an impressive surge in Stablecoin supply on its network over the year, from less than 50 million in February to almost 350 million presently. 

MiniPay and Valora’s Influence

According to Artemis, this surge in activity can largely be linked to the significant increase in popularity of major applications like MiniPay and Valora across Africa. For context, MiniPay and Valora recently expanded to three additional African countries (Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa) after its earlier launch in Nigeria. MiniPay exists as a stablecoin wallet integrated into the Opera Mini browser. This ensures that users access financial services with low data usage. Valora is also a mobile wallet designed to simplify peer-to-peer payments and be accessible to everyone. It also supports the Celo identity protocol, making it easier for users to verify their phone numbers and send them to their contacts. 

Following these efforts to promote stablecoin usage across Africa, Celo’s daily transactions exceeded one million in July. Within the same period, the number of active users also reached a new high of 716,000. According to market experts, Celo’s stablecoin usage growth is expected to continue as Tether is reported to have a pre-minted additional $200M in USDT on the Celo blockchain. 

Vitalik Buterin Praises Celo

Lauding Celo’s incredible numbers, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out the contribution of Ethereum and highlighted the protocol’s planned transition from Ethеrеum Virtuаl Mаchinе (EVM)-compаtiblе lаyеr 1 (L1) blockchаin to аn Ethеrеum lаyеr 2 (L2) solution. This move is expected to position the network in a better avenue to improve its scalability and interoperability to compete with the likes of Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum.

This is amazing to see. Improving worldwide access to basic payments/finance has always been a key way that ethereum can be good for the world, and it’s great to see @Celo getting traction. See also their recent posts:
* @Celo becoming an Ethereum L2: https://t.co/08U7G7q69s
*… https://t.co/Qq7vcmZ6e3— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 25, 2024

In 2023, Celo’s core developer, cLаbs, proposed this Layer 2 transition to unlock the maximum potential of the platform. Currently, Celo uses Dаngo (launched in July 2024) and Alfаjorеs. According to reports, the latter would execute an L2 upgrаdе today, September 26, to enable a smooth bridge between Celo and Ethereum. 

Following this update, Celo has made a strong move up the price curve with a 7% surge in the last 24 hours and a 39% surge in the last seven days. At press time, the asset was trading at $0.65 and had a trading volume of $224 million. On top of that, its fully diluted market cap was around $653 million with its market dominance currently around 0.02%.