The Most Underrated Chain: Celo’s Surprising Traction Around the World | Marek Olszewski
January 29, 2026
AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Voices & The Context
- The Format: Podcast interview with hosts grilling a guest on blockchain origins, metrics, and real-world adoption.
- The Key Players:
- Guest: Merrick Alshewski, CEO of C Labs (builders of Celo), an Ethereum L2 focused on mobile-first P2P payments; interesting for his 8-year grind turning Celo into a top L2 by daily active users.
- Hosts: David (main interviewer) and mentions of Ryan; sharp crypto vets with banter on tech trees, pivots, and underrated chains.
- The Vibe: Educational yet hype-filled—excited optimism about "global Venmo" unlocking financial freedom in emerging markets.
🗝️ Key Themes & Topics
The episode dives into Celo's laser-focus on P2P payments, contrasting crypto Twitter's meme/DEX hype with real adoption in developing economies.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Merrick Alshewski**
- 2 (00:50) **Celo's Origins and Key Features**
- 3 (03:25) **P2P Payments Focus and Opera MiniPay Partnership**
- 4 (06:15) **Early Vision and Personal Crypto Origin Story**
- 5 (12:05) **Why Payments Are Booming Now**
- 6 (16:25) **Celo Usage Metrics**
- 7 (18:20) **Core Use Cases on Celo**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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_