Celo Blockchain Basics and Yield Farming

6 min readDec 7, 2021

What is Celo?

Celo’s main unique selling point lies in making financial tools and global digital payments accessible to all using crypto. It focuses on making crypto mobile and usable taking a user-centric approach to platform design and innovation.

How is Celo different?

Mobile-first

Celo maps phone numbers to wallet addresses using a novel decentralized address-based identity layer. Mobile participants can earn rewards for securing and maintaining the system.

EVM-Compatible

From April 2020, the network is EVM-compatible and allows the creation of smart contracts and decentralized apps (DApps) as a part of DeFi.

“Celo’s technology supports 1000+ projects from builders, developers, and even artists who everyday launch new applications and issue digital currencies from everywhere in the world usable by anyone in the world with a desktop computer or mobile phone.” — from Celo Quick Guide

Mento function

It is a stability mechanism that ensures the healthy velocity of stablecoins that transact on Celo: cUSD and cEUR.

Both stable coins are backed by Celo reserve celoreserve.org composed of BTC, ETH, CELO, and DAI.

Low fee

The Celo allows conveniently share assets directly on mobile phones for as little as $0.01 with almost anyone worldwide.

How does CELO work?

It replaces Ethereum’s use of Proof of Work for securely adding transactions to the ledger with a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm. And it creates a new permissionless on-ramp by creating incentives for full nodes to serve mobile devices.

There are two types of nodes on the Celo network: Validator Nodes and Full Nodes.

Validator Nodes maintain consensus with the help of voting by the Full nodes. Users interact with light clients which in turn interact with Full nodes, which in turn interact with Validator nodes.

The open source Celo app embeds a “light client” that connects to the network and is optimized for low-power devices and low-bandwidth connections. These light clients need nodes that will answer their requests for account and transaction data and forward new transactions on their behalf.

In Ethereum right now, there are few incentives to run a full node that is not mining. Few nodes serve light clients, and this results in a poor experience for mobile wallets.

So Celo designed a protocol to incentivize users to operate regular nodes. With Celo, light clients pay a per-transaction fee to full nodes. Clients include in every transaction the address of a node which, when the transaction is processed, receives this fee. Full nodes advertise a minimum fee, and may choose to refuse to process transactions for which it will not receive the fee or it deems the fee insufficient.

Celo assets

CELO

Celo’s native asset is the core utility, reserve, staking, and governance asset.
CELO has a fixed supply and variable value, related to the use of the platform, governance and the amount of stablecoins in use.

Stables

Celo Dollars (cUSD).
Celo Euros (cEUR).
Can be used to pay gas fees.
Celo’s groundbreaking stability mechanism (Mento), CELO allows platform-native stablecoins like Celo Dollars (cUSD) and Celo Euros (cEUR) to algorithmically follow the value of their namesake currencies.

Other top 3 tokens

UBE

Project: https://ubeswap.org/
Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ubeswap/
CoinGeko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ubeswap

MOBI

Project: https://www.mobius.money/#/swap
Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/mobius-money/
CoinGeko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/mobius-money

MOOLA

Project: https://www.moola.market/
Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/moola-market/
CoinGeko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/moola-market

See more Celo tokens:
https://defillama.com/chain/Celo
https://explorer.celo.org/tokens
https://www.coingecko.com/en?asset_platform_id=celo

Celo ecosystem

What CEXes support CELO?

Celo Wallets

You can operate with native Celo wallets or use Celo-compatible wallets.

Native wallets

📲 Valora

The app works on iOS and Android. Valora can be used to send money to virtually any mobile phone number in the world and works with any smartphone, even with low internet connectivity.

More details: https://valoraapp.com/

🖥 Celo wallet

It’s a desktop wallet, which supports Web, macOS, Linux, Windows. The wallet works with the ledger and supports core Celo functionality like payments, exchanges, staking, and governance. More detail: https://celowallet.app/

🖥 Celo Terminal

Desktop wallet and DApp platform. Support macOS, Linux, Windows and works with ledger. More details: celoterminal.com

🖥 Celo Extension Wallet

It’s a fork of Metamask for the Celo Network. Support Chrome Browser. and works with ledger. More details: chrome.google.com/webstore

📲 Steak wallet

Non-custodial, multi-chain staking wallet. The app works on iOS and Android. More details: https://steakwallet.fi/

Celo compatible wallets

You can connect the MetaMask wallet to the Celo network. Step-by-step guide you’ll find here:

https://docs.celo.org/getting-started/wallets/using-metamask-with-celo

About other compatible wallets, you can read here: https://docs.celo.org/getting-started/wallets

💡 A little tip! If you open Allbridge.io and choose the CELO network, you can automatically add the Celo network to your Metamask wallet. Just follow our guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jbee0_HmAU

Celo Bridges

You can bridge tokens to Celo.

To do this, you can use the following bridges:

In addition, Celo has recently launched a $10M bridging incentivization, welcoming more users to join their ecosystem. More on that: https://twitter.com/CeloOrg/status/1466899503492079620

Celo DEXes

Celo Yield Farming

UbeSwap

DEX
https://app.ubeswap.org/#/farm
https://docs.ubeswap.org/

Ubeswap is a decentralized exchange, meaning that you can directly interact with the exchange using a wallet whose private keys you control. Ubeswap is a mobile compatible fork of Uniswap running on the Celo blockchain.

Sushi Swap

DEX
https://app.sushi.com/farm
https://docs.sushi.com/products/amm-exchange

SushiSwap allows users to trade trustlessly, peer-to-peer, with liquidity that is supplied by other users. You can farm CELO/WETH.

Moola

Money Market Protocol
https://app.moola.market/#/
https://docs.moola.market/

Moola is a non-custodial liquidity protocol built on the Celo blockchain that is democratizing access to yield and credit. Depositors earn yield which is paid for by borrowers who are able to take over-collateralized loans in perpetuity or under-collateralized flash loans.

Earn CELO, cUSD, and cEUR yield from deposits on Moola market.

Mobius

Stableswap DEX
https://www.mobius.money/#/pool
https://medium.com/@mobiusmoney/introducing-mobius-celos-first-cross-chain-stableswap-exchange-54ef17c23eca

Mobius is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) based on the StableSwap and CurveCrypto invariant that specializes in low-slippage swaps between price-stable and interest-bearing pairs, such as liquid staking tokens.

Beefy Finance

Yield Optimizer platform
https://app.beefy.finance/#/celo
https://docs.beefy.finance/moo/

It is a Decentralized, Multi-Chain Yield Optimizer platform that allows its users to earn compound interest on their crypto holdings. Through a set of investment strategies secured and enforced by smart contracts, Beefy Finance automatically maximizes the user rewards from various liquidity pools (LPs),‌ ‌automated market making (AMM) projects,‌ ‌and‌ ‌other yield‌ farming ‌opportunities in the DeFi ecosystem.

Autofarm

Yield farming aggregator
https://autofarm.network/celo/
https://autofarm-network.medium.com/autofarm-integrates-with-celo-666040c8afc7

AutoFarm is a yield farming aggregator running on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon Chain (MATIC), Huobi ECO chain (HECO), Avalanche (AVAX), Fantom (FTM) & Moonriver (MOVR). The DApp (Decentralised Application) was designed with the purpose of optimising DeFi (Decentralised Finance) users yields as they interact with the other DApps in the DeFi space.