Celo is quietly powering real-world payments at global scale. In this episode, David and Ryan sit down with Marek Olszewski, CEO of cLabs, to unpack how Celo became a fast, low-cost payments layer used for remittances, savings, onchain FX, and identity across emerging markets.
They explore why Celo stayed focused on peer-to-peer payments while others chased trends, how Opera’s MiniPay onboarded hundreds of thousands of daily users, and why stablecoins are reshaping global finance from the ground up. The conversation spans onchain FX, proof of personhood with Self.xyz, Ethereum’s L2 future, and why fast, cheap payments, not hype, may be crypto’s real unlock.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Celo’s Origin Story and Design Philosophy
5:18 The Long Bet on P2P Payments
17:19 700,000 Daily Users: The Data Behind the Narrative
22:11 MiniPay: Global Venmo Built on Celo
30:28 Solving the Last-Mile Banking Problem
37:36 Celo x Opera partnership
40:37 Stablecoins, FX, and the Rise of Onchain Forex
46:53 Perpetuals for FX: UpDown.xyz
49:37 Open Finance vs. Governments and the Battle for the Payments Stack
59:13 Why Celo Chose Ethereum L2 Over an L1 Path
1:06:02 Self.xyz and Proof of Personhood
1:14:06 Putting It All Together: Celo’s Endgame
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RESOURCES
Marek Olszewski
https://x.com/marek_
Celo
https://celo.org/
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