• Celo is an open platform that supports a variety of distributed applications, smart contract development and payments using e-mail addresses and phone numbers as public keys.

  • Celo proposes address-based encryption, a variant on identity-based encryption, directly using an e-mail address or phone number as a public key.

  • CELO is the native token of Celo and has the following use cases:

    • Governance: vote on network governance decisions via staking.

    • Network Security: stake CELO tokens to secure the network, participate in consensus and earn rewards.

    • Transaction Fees: pay for on-chain transactions.

  • The Celo ecosystem contains the following key components:

    • Celo Protocol: proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that uses phone numbers and e-mail addresses as public keys.

    • cUSD (Celo Dollar): stablecoin pegged to the US dollar backed by a reserve of crypto assets.

    • Celo Developer Wallet: send, receive and swap cUSD and CELO test tokens using decentralized phone number verification.

  • Details of the CELO token distribution can be found here.