Bankless
The Most Underrated Chain: Celo’s Surprising Traction Around the World | Marek Olszewski
29 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is Celo's origin story and design philosophy?
Bankless Nation, we are here with Marek Olszewski, the CEO of C-Labs. That's the organization behind Celo. Marek, welcome to the show.
Hello, thanks for having me.
Marek, I think there's just a lack of education about Celo in the ecosystem, about what Celo is, how it's positioned.
Chapter 2: Why did Celo focus on peer-to-peer payments?
I think people probably know it as... That chain that transitioned into Ethereum layer two not terribly long ago, always been kind of proximate to the Ethereum ecosystem, at least in spirit, now formally part of the Ethereum superstructure. So welcome. That's not really the subject that I want to kind of cover on today's show.
I kind of want to cover like how actually Celo is being adopted and used, because I think it's a little bit of an undertold story. Before we get into that, maybe you can kind of just educate us on Celo's origins and some of the thoughts behind it. It's been around for a long time. Get us up to speed with where Celo came from and what it is today.
Yeah, absolutely. So Celo's been around for eight years. We've been working on it, I guess, for eight years now. We launched six years ago now.
Chapter 3: What data supports Celo's 700,000 daily users?
And we are very laser focused on the P2P payment use case. That was really the origin story. We started by looking to build a mobile wallet on top of Ethereum. That was back in the days of CryptoKitties, if you remember. And, you know, it was very obvious back then that we couldn't build something that was normie-friendly online.
Chapter 4: How is MiniPay transforming global payments?
and could scale to billions of people on Ethereum back then. And so that's ultimately what took us down the path of building our own L1. But because we started in Ethereum, of course, we picked EVM and we focused heavily on making it as EVM compatible as possible, but with some bonus features to make it work better for that P2P use case. And so that's the origin story.
We started building it with the mobile wallet at the same time, almost taking an Apple-like approach. So Apple builds the software and hardware at the same time. So we built the kind of flagship application and the platform at the same time. And that made us build certain things that I think are different than other L1s and L2s.
Chapter 5: What challenges does Celo address in last-mile banking?
We definitely took different design choices. You can pay for gas with stablecoins on Celo natively without account abstraction. 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.
Chapter 6: How does the partnership with Opera enhance Celo's reach?
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?
Chapter 7: What role do stablecoins play in on-chain Forex?
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. And it's finally, finally kind of working. It's finally taking off. We're really just excited about it.
Yeah, I think like if you go into crypto Twitter and you kind of pay attention to the zeitgeist of the moment, it's like, you know, perp dexes, meme coin launch pads, all of this very exciting stuff that produce, you know, billion dollar size venture outcomes for like brief moments of time. And then the fad kind of goes away.
You know, and I'm never going to fault anyone, any founder for ever pivoting, trying to find product market fit. You know, like I think there's like a, I think crypto Twitter especially is very harsh to founders that pivot when pivoting is actually just a part of the regular startup experience.
something about Celo is that Celo seemed to like identify P2P, P2P payments, and kind of like also like developing economies and has stayed just locked in on that focus since the get-go.
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Chapter 8: How does Self.xyz contribute to proof of personhood?
And like, I think when I'm going to ask you, not right now, but I'm going to ask you in a second to like kind of share some usage metrics. And I think maybe people who are like kind of following the crypto Twitter zeitgeist, of what it means to be in crypto, Will might be surprised about what actually Celo is doing over in the world of P2P payments and developing economies.
But talk to me a little bit about the whole P2P strategy. You identified it early, locked in on it, and has been laser-focused on it ever since. Put me in your shoes, maybe all the way back in 2013 when Celo got started, or maybe that's... 2018, yeah. 2018, excuse me. Years ago. Okay, we're just off by five years. Put me in your shoes.
Pre-Ethereum.
Pre-EVM. So put me back into your shoes in like 2018 and what it's been like just to be laser focused on this part of the crypto economy.
Yeah. And you know what? Actually, you know, 2013 is an interesting year. It's the year that I sold my first startup. And literally a week later, I was at a music festival where I bumped into Brian Armstrong, who sent me... I knew there was something there.
I knew there was something in 2013.
It's a podcast instinct. David can feel it as a host. That's why he went to 2013. Amazing. Tell us the Brian Armstrong story. Wait, what music festival were you at? What kind of music does Brian like?
There's Outside Lands. It's kind of like the closest infrastructure that San Francisco has. Yeah. And yeah, we were both just invited by actually by SVB, the Cabana. And this was back when SVB, I guess, banked crypto exchanges super early on. And, yeah, he was very excited, obviously, about Coinbase and sent me some Bitcoin, which I've kept to this day.
And, you know, the experience was really lovely. And in a way, you can think of that as being actually inspiration for what we wanted to do, but we just wanted to do it in a trustless, decentralized way, right?
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