Marek Olszewski

We need scalability.

We need ease of use.

We need stable coins, obviously stable coins.

You can't transact with a volatile asset, especially not a store of value.

Like you want to borrow against a store of value and transact with that.

You don't want to spend your, you know, your precious ETH or Bitcoin.

And so we built Celo with all of these things in mind.

We made it probably the first EVM proof-of-stake network with really high scalability from day one.

We even built our own stablecoin protocol into the platform.

which we have now since spun out through a pretty cool DAO spin out, which I don't know if it's the first of its kind, but certainly we were pretty stoked to kind of pull that off.

And I think actually that stablecoin, doing it ourselves in hindsight was maybe a mistake because we weren't credibly neutral and it took longer.

We weren't credibly neutral on the stablecoin front and it took longer for folks like USDC and USDT to come to sell out.

Since that's been out, USCC and USCT have come to Celo.

We've become fully credibly neutral when it comes to stablecoins.

There's now tons of people deploying stablecoins on Celo.

And I think that probably, you know, in hindsight, maybe slowed us down a little bit.

But the thing that ultimately I think is needed beyond those things is bootstrapping network effects.

It's very difficult to get everyone in the world to agree on what they want to use to transact.

You need to start in smaller markets, grow those, get really dense network effects, and then use those to pull more and more people in.

And this is what certainly Venmo did with kind of this focus on college markets that they started with.