The Most Underrated Chain: Celo’s Surprising Traction Around the World | Marek Olszewski

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Tech News, Technology, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast ⚡ EUPHORIA | REAL-TIME ONE-TAP TRADING https://bankless.cc/euphoria 🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://bankless.cc/TDR-pro 💰ICO WATCH | UPCOMING PUBLIC TOKEN SALES https://bankless.cc/ico-watch --- 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 --- RESOURCES Marek Olszewski https://x.com/marek_ Celo https://celo.org/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bankless Nation, we are here with Merrick Olshefs, the CEO of C-Labs.
0:06.1	That's the organization behind SELO.
0:08.5	Merrick, welcome to the show.
0:09.6	Hello, thanks for having me.
0:11.0	Merrick, I think there's just a lack of education about SELO in the ecosystem,
0:16.7	about what SELO is, how it's positioned.
0:19.4	I think people probably know it as that chain that transitioned into Ethereum layer two,
0:24.0	not terribly long ago, always been kind of proximate to the Ethereum ecosystem,
0:28.3	at least in spirit, now formerly part of the Ethereum superstructure.
0:32.5	So welcome.
0:33.4	That's not really the subject that I want to kind of cover on today's show.
0:36.4	I kind of wanted to cover like how actually Selo is being adopted and used, because I think it's a little bit of an
0:43.5	under told story. Before we get into that, maybe you can kind of just educate us on Sello's origins
0:48.5	and some of the thoughts behind it. It's been around for a long time. Get us up to speed with
0:53.7	where Selo came from
0:55.1	and what it is today. Yeah, absolutely. So Sello's been around for eight years. We've been working
1:00.6	on it, I guess, for eight years now. We launched six years ago now. And we are very laser-focused
1:08.6	on the PDP payments use case.
1:11.9	That was really the origin story.
1:13.5	We started by looking to build a mobile wallet on top of Ethereum.
1:17.5	That was back in the days of CryptoKitties, if you remember.
1:21.0	And it was very obvious back then that we couldn't build something that was normie friendly
	...

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