How Celo is Bringing Real-World Web3 Adoption to the Philippines

Recently, locally-licensed crypto exchange PDAX and GCrypto, the spot crypto trading feature of local fintech app giant GCash, listed $CELO, the native token of the Celo blockchain. 

• Worth Reading: Crypto Exchanges PDAX, GCrypto List $CELO

With this, the BitPinas Webcast has invited Rene Reinsberg, the president of Celo Foundation and the co-founder of Celo Blockchain:

• Together with GCrypto Head Luis Buenaventura and PDAX Head of Platform Solutions Vincent Tio, the webcast explored how Celo has grown over the years, its key achievements, and how it is helping to bring financial services to everyone, especially in the Philippines. 

Key details: 

• Date: The interview was conducted on August 29, 2024, at 10:00 p.m.
• Link: You can watch the replay here: 

About the Guest

• Education Background: Rene Reinsberg is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and became an intern at McKinsey & Company. 
• Experiences: 
  • Research and teaching assistant at MIT.
  • Had a previous role at Morgan Stanley.
  • Was a consultant at The World Bank.
• Building Experience:
  • Co-founded and became the CEO of Locu, which was acquired by GoDaddy.
  • Served as the Vice President of Emerging Products at GoDaddy.
  • Started building Celo in 2017.

“My co-founders and I, we’ve been working together for over a decade at this point. In our previous company, we were helping small businesses better compete with the big, you know, Amazons of the world, by helping them use machine learning to manage the information online. That same spirit we wanted to bring to other areas. And when we discovered Ethereum and web3, we realized, ‘Oh, wait a second, this technology can level the playing field as it comes to financial services.’”

Rene Reinsberg, Co-Founder, Celo Blockchain

How Did They Come Up with Celo?

• According to Reinsberg, they first learned about the Ethereum Blockchain in 2017. 
• However, at that time, the network was using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, so Ethereum was slow and charged expensive fees. 
• This is where Reinsberg and his team thought of creating something that works well on mobile and gives people access to what they believed would become the next infrastructure for all financial services.

“Then maybe we have a chance to correct some of the mistakes of the traditional financial system—and that was the starting point. The first thing we did was build a wallet on the Ethereum mainnet, and from there, we worked our way backward and took an approach of saying, ‘Okay, what are the features that you need to actually enable? Just a really snappy, good experience even on a very basic Android phone with limited bandwidth.’”

Rene Reinsberg, Co-Founder, Celo Blockchain

Celo in the Philippines

• The co-founder also recalled their partnership with Filipino web3 enthusiasts to help the country during the COVID-19 Pandemic:

“I remember vividly the work we’ve done as a community in the Philippines. This was at the beginning of COVID when we distributed micropayments to entrepreneurs so they could order food and medicine online and get it delivered to their doorstep—all happening really fast and much cheaper than traditional ways. That was still one of my favorite use cases, showing the power of this technology in bringing money from any corner of the world right into a local market, directly to one’s phone.”

Rene Reinsberg, Co-Founder, Celo Blockchain

• Reinsberg also expressed his excitement about partnering with PDAX and GCrypto, while hinting at a Philippine peso-based stablecoin that will be called $PUSO:

“I’m excited to see that over the years, we’ve put points on the board as a community to say, ‘Hey, this technology can be used in all these different ways.’ And now, in 2024, it’s really time to scale up—no longer limiting these solutions to just a few thousand people. This is the moment now, and we’re obviously super excited to partner with PDAX and organizations like GCash. It’s a super exciting initiative, with a lot of components in place. I could imagine something happening in the Philippines similar to what’s happening across various African markets right now.”

What’s Behind The Celo Tagline “Prosperity for All”

“This has been our guiding principle. I think this is the reason a lot of early contributors joined the project and started building even before we were fully established. It’s also been the glue that has held us together during hard times like the bear cycles that you eventually have in this space, given how early the technology is. So to me, ‘prosperity for all’ ties back to the core design principles, really building for mobile and not just focusing on technical features.”

• Reinsberg emphasized that Celo’s tagline, “Prosperity for all,” has been embedded in the builders and dApp developers within the Celo ecosystem to create not just a profitable project but a platform that will make users’ lives easier. He also called on developers from other networks to keep this in mind:

“I wish everyone in web3 would bring that mindset. If we make it accessible to everyone with just a mobile phone, we can deliver on the industry’s original mission. As a standalone layer 1, we pioneered a lot of features. My hope personally is that we can bring this energy around mobile into the entire Ethereum ecosystem and get a lot more people and projects, even on other chains, to think about this mindset first.”

• The Celo Foundation President also emphasized the importance of public access to funds and web3-based applications via mobile phones only. 
• dApp developers should focus on financial inclusion to achieve this goal, such as offering more financial opportunities like savings, loans, and other basic financial services.

Main Challenges to Achieve This Goal

• According to the co-founder, while he is not against monitoring $CELO’s fiat value, the public is too “token-centric,” closely watching the token’s price rather than the use cases and infrastructures built around Celo. 
• Sharing his personal background working in various financial institutions that are now adopting blockchain technology, he stressed that through Celo, many traditional entities are slowly integrating the technology:

“That’s something I think we haven’t talked much about as an industry, but I think it could be one of the big use cases, and it’s happening on Celo, which I’m pretty excited about, given my background. This is where the new Filipino peso stablecoin, $PUSO, comes into play because you can imagine people going seamlessly between the riyal, the dollar, the euro, and these markets are developing, providing tons of utility for not just end-users but businesses.”

Why is Celo Transitioning From Being a L1 Major Blockchain to an Ethereum L2 Platform? 

“This is absolutely the right move for Celo, and I think it’s actually the right move for most L1s right now. Ethereum, given the last few years of technical development and the community forces, is really becoming the settlement layer.”

Rene Reinsberg, Co-Founder, Celo Blockchain

• Reinsberg expanded that moving to the Ethereum ecosystem is the best way to maintain Celo’s features and advantages in the long term, given that Ethereum is known for being an inexpensive chain with “super low fees.” 
• They plan to use Ethereum’s advantages to provide more mobile-based crypto use cases. 
• Additionally, integrating with Ethereum offers more benefits like interoperability with the network and its L2 chains, and connecting to other communities.

“Actually, the Ethereum community has been quite excited. We’ve always felt super aligned with Ethereum. For us, Ethereum was the obvious choice.”

• Meanwhile, addressing concerns that Celo’s fees might rise because Ethereum is a costly chain, Reinsberg assured that Celo will use Ethereum’s security features without affecting scalability:

“Celo can be Celo the way it is today but will leverage economic security. There are a few, without going into too many technical details, components in the way you can architect the L2 that help you achieve very low fees and even fast finality. In the case of Celo, it’s always going to be a bit special because we’re not going to change anything about our approach, focus, or what’s important to our community. So in many ways, it’s about scaling what Celo is today by leveraging the advantages Ethereum brings. We don’t want higher costs, slower transactions, or anything that sets us back. Quite the opposite, we want to accelerate this journey.”

Celo’s Plans in Mass User Adoption in PH

“The Philippines has been a really important market for us. Now that the technical components are in place, we’re ready to drive much bigger adoption. I love hearing about the remittance use case. It’s something we often work on—lowering costs and making assets more available. This is amazing, and I’m excited that we now have the new Philippine DAO.”

• Worth Reading: The Celo Philippines DAO has been officially launched, revealing its future plans. Celo Philippines DAO Established, Unveils Future Plans

“Now, to answer the question about partnering with institutions like us, we want the best possible price for our customers. This is a work in progress and, to use Rene’s word, an iterative process for us. The biggest challenge is always volume. We need to hit certain numbers—transactions, users, or whatever—to get better pricing. That’s business. Our biggest priority is to keep improving this. But part of the reason we’re on this live stream with the Celo Foundation is that we want to support what they’re doing and make this as accessible as possible to Pinoys at good prices. That’s the main mission for us.”

Luis Buenaventura, Head of GCrypto, GCash

“Just the fact that it’s crypto, a digital asset, and readily available is important. It’s available on the PDAX app. To have virtual assets accessible to as many people as possible, our priority is partnering with financial institutions and helping them enable this with our technology and services. This is why we have this partnership with GCash. We are trying to make it as easy as possible with these collaborations. We collaborate with regulators, but we also collaborate with peers in the industry to grow this market as large as possible in the country.”

Vincent Tio, Head of Platform Solutions, PDAX

This article is published on BitPinas: How Celo is Bringing Real-World Web3 Adoption to the Philippines

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