Marek Olszewski & Rene Reinsberg: Celo – Towards Prosperity for Everyone

Celo has a clear mission - to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity, for everyone. The Celo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open-source, decentralized Celo Platform. Its aim is to build a flexible network of applications built on a blockchain to facilitate payments and remittances to people’s phone numbers. Guided by the Celo community tenets, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach. These activities support and encourage an inclusive financial system that solves real-world problems such as lack of access to sound currency, or friction for cash-transfer programs aimed to alleviate poverty.

They are aiming to create a new platform to connect people globally and bring financial stability to those who need it most. Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, founders of Celo, talk about how they are using blockchain technology to achieve this.

Topics covered in this episode:

- Rene and Marek’s backgrounds and how they got into blockchain
- The history of Celo and its mission
- Some of the friction points with the project and how they have overcome them
- What Celo are doing differently than other networks
- How Celo are dealing with privacy issues
- Why they chose to build on the EVM
- The go-to-market strategy that Celo has chosen
- How cUSD works and how they deal with the scalability issue on the system
- As the reserve holds Bitcoin, how does the transfer of cUSD work?
- cUSD vs Maker
- The issuance protocol for transferring assets
- Host debrief

Episode links: 

- [Celo website](https://celo.org/)
- [The Celo blog](https://medium.com/celoorg)
- [cLabs announces acquisition of Summa](https://medium.com/celoorg/clabs-announces-acquisition-of-leading-cross-chain-architecture-firm-summa-strengthening-the-celo-f79045aa5ba0
)
- [Rethinking Remittances with Blockchain Technology and Celo](https://medium.com/celoorg/rethinking-remittances-with-blockchain-technology-720c978084d4)
- [Celo Dollars](https://medium.com/celoorg/celo-dollars-powerful-new-digital-money-in-circulation-b4147eda2d10)
- [Plumo Channel on Discord](chat.celo.org)
- [Valora](Valoravaloraapp.com)
- [Celo on Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeloOrg)
- [Rene on Twitter](https://twitter.com/followrene)
- [Marek on Twitter](https://twitter.com/marekolszewski)

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/355](https://epicenter.tv/355)