Marek Olszewski

This is one example of one of the things that came out of that way of working.

We wanted it to just be really easy for normies to be able to transact right from the get-go.

Assume that someone sends them a stablecoin, they don't have to go and buy something else to be able to continue transacting.

And then we also realized that address-based identifiers are just too complicated for most normies.

And so that took us down the path of developing a protocol that allowed you to use phone numbers as your identifier.

And that's something that now is widely adopted throughout the seller ecosystem.

And it just makes it just so much easier for people, for normies, you know, they can effectively bootstrap what I like to call is the biggest social network in the world, which is the amalgamation of everyone's contact lists on their phones in their pocket, bigger even than Facebook social graph.

And so features like this ultimately made Celo or make it, you know, to this day, you know, almost this kind of consumer friendly part of Ethereum, right?

So I think a lot of people talk about how a lot of people are building consumer apps in Solana because if it's kind of low cost and kind of, you know, maybe even mobile focus, you can think of Celo now as really kind of becoming the Ethereum kind of alternative to that.

And we're actually cheaper even than Solana when it comes to the transaction fees.

And so that's one example of how we can compete there.

But the other way that we've been able to compete is primarily...

by the realization of that P2P payments focus through this partnership of Opera that's come about in the last few years.

Opera, the company that you may be familiar with, primarily known for browsers, they launched Minipay, which is this just amazing, super easy to use P2P payments wallet now on Celo, which leverages all of those features that I just talked about.

And it just makes it super easy for anyone to effectively have a Venmo-like experience, regardless of where they live.

They don't have to be in the U.S.

They can be anywhere in the world.

And so that's the kind of the journey along the way we transitioned to become an L2.

And I'm happy to chat more about that as well.

But, you know, I think the biggest TLDR is that we've just been grinding on this use case for eight years now.