News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Celo is a payments-focused Ethereum layer 2 built on the OP Stack, designed around mobile use and stablecoin settlement, on which transaction fees can be paid in dollar-denominated tokens rather than the native CELO asset, and which hosts Tether's USAT alongside USDT and USDC.
Celo began in 2018 as a mobile-first payments network developed by cLabs, with the Celo Foundation funding ecosystem work and governance, and ran as a standalone proof-of-stake layer 1 from its mainnet launch in April 2020. Its distinguishing design choices were the mapping of phone numbers to onchain accounts, later formalised as the SocialConnect protocol, and native stablecoins minted through the Mento protocol against a reserve of crypto assets: cUSD, cEUR and cREAL, since renamed USDm, EURm and BRLm under a Mento governance proposal. On 26 March 2025 the chain migrated to an Ethereum layer 2 built on Optimism's OP Stack, replacing its own consensus with a sequencer while validators moved to running community RPC nodes, with blocks produced at about one second. CELO remains the native and governance token, but the fee abstraction mechanism lets whitelisted ERC-20 tokens pay gas, including USDT and USDC. On 29 July 2026 Tether deployed USAT, its US dollar token issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, to Celo as its first network beyond Ethereum, with native minting and burning and gas payable in USAT.
Developments in which Celo is a named party, newest first.
cNGN, issued by WrappedCBDC under the Nigerian SEC's oversight, has gone live on Celo with an onchain foreign exchange pairing, giving the naira a regulated onchain form beside the dollar tokens that dominate local use.
The federally regulated dollar token Tether launched in January now mints and burns natively on the payments network, where it can also pay for gas.
cNGN, issued by WrappedCBDC Limited and described as Nigeria's first regulated naira stablecoin, went live on Celo on 6 August 2026, with Textile FX enabling onchain swapping. The announcement is Celo Core Co.'s own and presents it as opening the naira to onchain foreign exchange, payments and remittances. The Nigerian SEC is named as regulator.
Tether's USAT, the dollar token issued by Anchorage Digital Bank under the GENIUS Act regime, went live on Celo on 29 July 2026, its first network beyond Ethereum. The deployment mints and burns natively rather than bridging a representation, and Celo's fee abstraction mechanism lets USAT pay transaction fees, so a holder can transact without first acquiring the network's own asset. The announcement ran through Celo's channels; Tether's newsroom carried no release of its own.
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