Celo Gather Africa - Real-World Utility and Driving Mass Adoption in Africa
September 30 2024
by Markus Franke
Thank you to Celo Africa DAO for doing such amazing work on the ground, and thanks to the Kenyan and African community for building such cool products on Celo and Mento.
I want to share with you a few things about the Mento Platform, cKES, and the decentralized local currency stablecoins we're building together with you.
cKES is the decentralized Kenya Shilling stablecoin on Mento. You can access it for example, via our partner Fonbnk. There's currently a cKES campaign going on.
Why a Kenya Shilling stablecoin? One of the cool things about a local currency stablecoin, is that you can save in a global currency like cUSD but you can also borrow in a local currency with the Kenya Shilling stablecoin. Therefore, as a user or a business or an entrepreneur, you are not exposed to FX risk by taking a loan in local currency stablecoins.
As a builder, you can actually build on top of the existing stablecoins on Mento. You can build FX platforms, FX options, currency forwards, futures, hedging solutions, lending solutions, and make credit accessible to your users.
We recently had the amazing opportunity to learn about chamas here in Kenya. It was really cool to be in the field and learn from users together with the teams from Haraka, Clixpesa, and Celo Europe DAO. Chamas are community-driven lending circles. We visited local communities and learned how people in chamas actually get loans and access to credit within their communities. We also learned how local currency stablecoins on-chain can make this process cheaper, easier and more accessible.
For me, this is an amazing opportunity. We now have the Kenya Shilling (cKES) live, and as of today, we also have the Philippine Peso live, which is called PUSO, meaning “heart” in Filipino. We have the West African Franc (eXOF) live, the cUSD live, the cREAL live, and the cEUR live. So builders can build lending solutions, on-chain FX solutions, and much more.
With Mento, users can easily swap from one currency to another. In the MiniPay dollar stablecoin wallet from Opera, you can use cUSD as well as other stablecoins like USDT and USDC. The Mento Asset Exchange powers the swap feature in the MiniPay wallet, allowing users to seamlessly switch between currencies within MiniPay’s “Pockets” feature.
Additionally, in MiniPay, there's currently a Mento dApp that allows users to earn cUSD and MENTO tokens. The dApp will be demoed at ETHSafari. We will have a booth there with teams from Celo, MiniPay, Fonbnk, and others.
There are so many projects here in Kenya that I want to call out, and we hope to partner with many more of you. We’ve worked with Fonbnk, Clixpesa, Pretium, Valora, MiniPay, Kotani Pay, Swypt, Payd and many others. Building local currency stablecoins wouldn’t be possible without these local partners on the ground. That’s the most important part of local currency stablecoins—you need local partners and builders. So, we want to partner with all of you, as you know best what’s important for your communities and users. We want to provide support with infrastructure for stablecoins, but in the end, the real difference is made possible by you - the builders and your projects.
To support this, we also have the Innovate Hackathon going on until the 24th of September. Builders can earn up to 1,000 cUSD for building and innovating, including creating global payment solutions, DEXs, cross-border solutions, TradFi or DeFi solutions, and more—all on top of Mento. If you have some great ideas for new use cases for cKES, check out this hackathon! You can talk to the Mento Labs team here or catch us at the ETHSafari event in Kilifi—I’m really looking forward to that.
There is also the Fonbnk campaign currently going on. You can earn up to $50,000 in cKES Kenya Shilling stablecoins through this campaign by on-ramping into Kenya Shillings and earning bonuses within Fonbnk. That’s really exciting!
At ETHSafari, there’s a really important birthday coming up—it’s the first birthday of MiniPay. We’ll be celebrating it at the booth, and there are more campaigns ongoing during ETHSafari. Attendees can purchase Kenyan coffee from Project Mocha using cKES on the ground, and if the DJs play some tunes you like, attendees will be able to tip the DJs in cKES as well.
And the community is working on the MENTO governance token. Currently, the Mento stablecoin platform on Celo is governed by CELO, which is an L1 soon-to-be L2 governance token. In the future, the CELO token will be used to govern all L2 decisions. However, Mento will have its own governance. There was already an airdrop to CELO token holders, known as “Episode One,” and “Episode Two” is coming soon. To participate, follow Mento Labs on Twitter, join our Discord and complete various quests to earn eligibility and status.
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