Is Celo (CELO) a good cryptocurrency?
Coinbase now supports the Celo (CELO or CGLD) cryptocurrency. Coinbase will now support and trade Celo under the CGLD ticker symbol.
Oddly, CoinMarketCap tracks Celo under the CELO ticker symbol. Coinbase treats Celo as an exploratory cryptocurrency. That means Coinbase is examining Celo as an asset. In particular, Coinbase has listed Celo for trading on Coinbase Pro.
Celo is the cryptocurrency platform built as an alternative to Facebook’s (FB) Libra cryptocurrency scheme. The Prosperity Alliance is building Celo as a platform that will make financial tools accessible to anybody who has a mobile phone.
Celo’s website describes Celo as a Mobile-First Blockchain Platform. Celo (CELO) or CLGD is a utility token for the Celo Platform. In addition, Celo planning a US dollar stablecoin they call the cUSD or Celo Dollar. The cUSD is a stablecoin they design for mobile phones.
What is Celo?
The Alliance for Prosperity is a group of nongovernment organizations and blockchain developers. The Alliance’s members include the World Food Program, OkCoin, Indacoin, Wyre, MoonPay, smeicolin, Laboratoria, BC4NB, Blockchain ex, CoinLogiq, cLabs, Keyko, Klaytn, Hashkey, Gitcoin, B12, blockforce, Bitwage, WeTrust, and Bitmania.
Celo has some powerful commercial backers including Coinbase, SVAngel, General Capitalist, Verisonone, Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey, Dragonfly Capital Partners, and Polychain Capital.
The goal of Celo is to build a new international financial system that will serve everybody, including the unbanked. The hope is to create mobile apps that will allow anybody anywhere to spend or transfer Celo through a mobile app.
They are building Celo as a non-Facebook (FB) alternative to the controversial Libra. Libra faces vehement opposition from many politicians, including members of the US Congress.
What Value does Celo (CELO) have?
CoinMarketCap gave Celo a Coin Price of $1.78, a Market Capitalization of $221.593 million, and a 24-Hour Market Volume of $2.682 million on 27 November 2020.
They based those numbers on Circulating Supply of 124.448 million CELO, a Total Supply of one billion CELO, a reported Circulating Supply of 184.448 million CELO, and a Maximum Supply of one billion CGLD.
In contrast, CoinBase gave Celo a Coin Price of $1.80, a Market Cap of $223.6 million, a 24-Hour Market Volume of $2.7 million and a Circulating Supply of 124.4 million CGLD.
The Problems with Celo
I don’t think Celo is a good cryptocurrency because it is not Ethereum compatible. Ethereum (ETH) is the most popular blockchain. In fact, Investopedia estimates there were over 200,000 Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC-20) tokens in 2019.
That means most cryptocurrencies are Ethereum based, and Celo is not compatible with them. Moreover, this means Celo will not work with most blockchain platforms. I have to wonder how Celo can achieve mass adoption without Ethereum.
I also note that Celo refuses to address the major roadblock to cryptocurrency adoption: the blockchain scalability problem. The problem is the slow speed of cryptocurrency, which makes it difficult to spend cryptocurrencies.
What’s Wrong with Celo?
I do not think Celo could make money or achieve mass adoption without a solution to the blockchain scalability problem. To solve the blockchain scalability problem. I think a cryptocurrency will have to process 3,000 transactions per second (TPS) or more.
Without that kind of speed, Celo cannot build a global platform. Notably, Visa (V) claims to process over 65,000 transactions per second.* However, I know of only cryptocurrency that claims to offer a speed of over 3,000 TPS: EOS (EOS). The EOS Network Monitor claims EOS has processed 3,996 TPS.
In conclusion, I advise speculators to avoid Celo (CELO) because it has no current value. Instead, all Celo (CGLD) offers is a vague business plan. Hence, you need to stay away from Celo until it demonstrates a working mobile app.
* https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf