CELO (GREEN) OPERA
"Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
The crypto project nobody talks about is the one actually working
A common refrain about the crypto space is that it is "technology in search of a problem." There is definitely some truth to this accusation: many of the projects with top-50 valuations in the space have barely any users. Looking at on-chain data for projects like Cardano, Hedera, and ZCash shows that, whatever you think of the tech, barely any actual two-legged human beings are using them.
Prior to 2025, this was at least somewhat understandable: in many cases, the things that chains most wanted to do were being actively impeded by regulators, ranging from excessively conservative but well-intentioned all the way to straight-up illegal.
Now, though? That is not the case. Has the crypto industry adjusted to this reality? Of course not. We continue to see the pattern of token launches backed primarily by hype and marketing budgets without any concept of product market fit, which then rapidly collapse into disarray.
We see memecoins, creator coins, and other tokens with no core economic rationale created purely for gambling (if we are being charitable) or straight-up scams (if not) being put front and center.
We also see the projects with the best adoption — those actually making strides in the real world — being systematically ignored by crypto-twitter and the hype merchant class, creating an ever-increasing divide between those garnering the attention and those doing the actual work.
Yet, if you are a blockchain optimist, there are some exceptionally positive signs as to the use of the technology to significantly improve the world. One example that nobody talks about? Celo.
What Is Celo?
No, we are not talking about the musical instrument, and no, that is not a typo. Celo is one of the blockchain projects from the post-ETH launch days of crypto, founded in 2017, that launched with some fanfare and a very liberal slant around carbon-neutrality, financial inclusion, and addressing the multi-day and sometimes double-digit percentage remittance fees hitting immigrants and their families in emerging markets.
This is not dissimilar to the rough goals of some other projects from that era — like Stellar (XLM) or Ripple (XRP) — and was an accurate representation of the somewhat utopian, idealistic, and overly simplistic idea that the blockchain rail itself alone could solve that problem.
Spoiler alert: it can't.
Celo had to learn this the hard way. Unlike many crypto projects, which, upon contact with reality and the fact that their underlying assumptions were wrong, double down aggressively on being wrong — Celo has done something remarkable. They adapted.
First, Celo is the first L1 to convert to an L2 on ETH, a conversion that happened in March of 2025. This meant that instead of being some sort of weird side project with knock-off DeFi products like Ubeswap (yes, that's a real thing), they are now part of the ETH ecosystem and benefit from that scale. It also made the unit economics of Celo very different: they no longer need their own validator architecture, but rather a sequencer to run the L2.
Second — and more importantly — they boldly did something that many in crypto stridently refuse to do: they helped create a product for users, in the way users want it, that is easy for users to use. And by users, I don't mean the low hundreds of degenerate gambler crypto natives all knifing each other in a zero-sum battle on-chain. I mean, actually, two-legged human beings out in the wild. Put differently: have you heard of MiniPay? You probably should have.
MiniPay
No, this is not how you buy a Mini. MiniPay is a mobile wallet in SE Asia and Africa, with 4.4 stars in the Google Play store — same as PayPal — and around 700,000 daily active users. That means there is a real chance that Celo is a top-5 crypto project in terms of actual stablecoin adoption and use, alongside Tron, Ethereum itself, and Polygon — and notably ahead of Base.
It makes sense to be skeptical about user counts in crypto, but to open an account with MiniPay, you need a verifiable SIM-based phone number. You also undergo KYC, complete with liveness check, when you on-ramp via fiat, which is how most users are onboarded rather than bridging from another chain. Another sign of two-legged humans.
That means Celo has over 400,000 people essentially using crypto, and is one of the largest operations of that sort, actually gaining real-world adoption. This is a remarkable feat. So how did they get people to go through all of this compliance and then continue to use their app for payments daily?
OPERA
Prior to MiniPay, Celo partnered and integrated with a trusted brand that had already found an edge in emerging markets: Opera. Not shattering vocals and tiny glasses — the web browser. Specifically, Opera Mini: the company's lightweight mobile-first browser that can use 90% less data than Chrome or Safari and is designed for low-bandwidth environments. This is particularly useful where mobile data is not unlimited and/or where 3G networks remain common.
Opera launched the first version of Opera Mini way back in 2005. Through the 2010s, they deepened their presence in Africa and South Asia via partnerships with device OEMs and telcos, and by 2017–2018 had formalized an explicit "Africa First" strategy backed by over $100M in investment, with local data centers in Nairobi, Lagos, and Africa-first applications. In December 2018, Opera introduced a mobile browser with a built-in crypto wallet (a proto-MiniPay) and a dapp discovery module.
Celo had notable strengths to compel Opera to bet on them. Celo was always mobile-first — a clear decision for emerging markets where people may not have a laptop but definitely have a phone. Celo was also cheap.
In the era of $100 ETH transaction fees, Celo was one of the fast, cheap ETH alternatives suitable for emerging market commerce. In 2021, Celo's stablecoins were the first offered in Opera's crypto wallet, and Opera joined The Celo Alliance for Prosperity, a network of 100 mission-aligned organizations, including Coinbase and a16z.
Users First. HODLrs next.
The crypto revolution proved slower than people thought, with rapid cycling through narratives that fell apart quickly. Stablecoin market cap and transactions remained relatively steady and then began growing again despite all of this. Bear markets drive home a core point: build a product with the user in mind, and with distribution. This is product 101 in most industries, but rather novel in crypto, where token prices drive "revenue," defined as dumping your token on retail before building anything sustainable, buying a mansion, and abandoning the project.
On September 13, 2023, Opera and Celo announced the launch of MiniPay — a stablecoin-only wallet directly built into the Opera Mini app. The wallet focused on doing one long-tail thing: making mobile emerging market cross-border payments more accessible. They wanted to do this first in Nigeria, Opera Mini's stronghold. This was a strong contrast to the everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach of most crypto projects. MiniPay prioritized user experience while maintaining permissionless and decentralized values. How?
Recoverable self-custodied wallet
Key storage is encrypted automatically on Google Drive or iCloud, tying a user's biometrics or PIN to the account so they can recover it if they forget, lose their phone, or get a new one.
Privacy-first naming protocol
Users only need each other's phone numbers to send and receive money, with the added benefit of confirming one account per user to prevent common crypto fraud vectors.
DeFi mullet-style stablecoin balance
No "Connect Wallet" or "Sign transaction" inside MiniPay. There is a brief explanation at signup so users know their balance isn't a bank account. Balance defaults to USD display with a local currency mode showing NGN, KES, etc.
Localized fiat on/off ramps
Fonbnk and Bitmama provided Nigerian bank accounts on/off ramps at launch. Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa followed. Today, MiniPay is available in 60 countries with payment methods including M-Pesa, Airtel, Mercado Pago, and PIX.
Nearly free
Gas fees are sub-cent (>$0.004) and payable in stablecoins — users do not need to take exposure to volatile crypto assets just to buy a sandwich.
Shareable cash link for non-MiniPay users
A proven onboarding method: send a MiniPay link where new users can download the wallet to receive money.
Meet Where USERS Are
Opera's brand brings trust — critical when you are asking people to trust you with their money, especially given the past follies in crypto. Opera positioned itself as "Africa First" and committed to building not just a browser but a product suite catering to the market.
Opera News and Opera News Hub were the first examples: the former is a personalized, localized newsfeed delivered in local languages to over 350 million global active users; the latter compensates 40,000+ content creators in six African countries based on traffic and engagement.
These payouts are small, and volumes are high — a classic space where bank and card fees would eat into creator earnings. MiniPay was added as the default payment method, simplifying the cross-border payout.
MiniPay launched inside Opera Mini, giving it immediate visibility. Even so, market experience indicates users don't want to use a browser to make payments — MiniPay announced a separate downloadable app in Q1 2024. Once again: you can fight an uphill battle to change user behavior, or you can embrace user behavior and grow rapidly. MiniPay chose the latter. Most of crypto chooses the former.
SUNSET WHERE USERS ARENT
MiniPay's success led Opera to sunset the original crypto web3 wallet in the browser, with a six-month transition for users to move to MiniPay, which still retains the original self-custodial framework on a public blockchain.
In a world where private chains, FI-owned chains, and permissioned chains are becoming the norm — supposedly catering to financial institutions coming into the space due to GENIUS — it is notable that one of the most scaled use-cases in the world right now uses a permissionless public chain (albeit with permissioned tokens, i.e., stablecoins).
The target audience Celo is focusing on is the one the correspondent banking system serves the worst: individuals sending small-value transfers across borders. The value of blockchain has always been to be available when the institutions are not — when you travel, when war breaks out, or when institutions fail.
“Even the financial institutions ultimately need blockchains that are neutral if they want to transact with anyone other than themselves. Does Citi want to build on JPM's blockchain?”
To scale, many of the private chains will need to pivot into industry-wide consortiums. Financial history supports this: when Bank of America was the only credit card issuer, it eventually spun the project out to create Visa.
Long vs SHORT-TERM GAIN
The dream of a global Venmo — where money sends like email — relies not just on technology but on a sustainable business model. Currently in crypto, the business model is issuing a token and dumping it on retail. This will not be a long-term sustainable business, and this may be why altcoin prices have fallen and are not recovering.
Celo, like many, did raise capital with a token, reaching $2.1B in value in 2021. Allegedly, 75% of the token allocation went to the project team, community grants, operational grants, and staking/validator rewards and reserves — a sum significantly larger than what most startups raise.
Celo's subsequent behavior, however, is abnormal for crypto: the near-term incentives do not promote building products that last. They have instead created a wave of founders cashing in on hype and then cashing out to the beach, often without ever having built a product people use. Having a giant slush fund means many projects are fat, lazy, and lack the hunger of typical startups. This dynamic has not incentivized teams to build user-first products like MiniPay.
CELO, as a result, has traded down, been ignored, and is caught in the same draining effect impacting the entire altcoin market. Their current market cap? Well under $100mm. The price of the CELO token impacts earnings in the Celo ecosystem from validators to Celo's operations, and means that what was once a multi-billion dollar treasury is now quite lean — perhaps also a cautionary tale about not managing your cash flow and treasury.
As a result, Celo founders Marek Olszewski, Rene Reinsberg, and Sep Kamvar launched the Celo Tokenomics Initiative to rethink their tokenomics and better align usage, revenue, builders, and token price. Discussions are in progress, including CELO buybacks and burns, and pausing non-essential community fund spending.
Against this backdrop, Celo's net revenue figures are uneventful, though moving in the right direction. They made $428K total in 2025 — a 3x increase from 2024's $167K. Even so, valuing them at a 10x revenue multiple means the chain is worth about $4.3mm, not exactly the blockbuster valuation they wanted.
Why is the revenue so low if they have real users and activity? Transaction revenue comes from sub-cent fees shared with validators. The thing about sending money via email is that the "free" part is typically subsidized by other business activities.
Google sells data. Proton charges subscriptions. AOL, well, basically died. In cross-border payments, "free" usually implies the fees are in the FX spread — and here, third-party providers take their cut while the CELO token clearly is not getting one.
Celo will need to find a business model that keeps the people operating the chain happy. Otherwise, they will end up in the exact same place as many now-defunct fintechs: users, but nobody who was actually paying for anything. At least that's one step better than most crypto projects, which never even got the users’ part.
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You can set your watch by the regular appearance of "crypto is useless" takes in news outlets catering to the comfortably numb. This time it was a column in the New York Times titled "Crypto is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That." The authors, Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein, are former economic advisors to the Biden Administration.
Their case is not just weak — it's an embarrassing, incoherent jumble of recycled non-sequiturs.
They begin by arguing that because the price of Bitcoin and other cryptos declined sharply over the past year, they are useless. This is like saying an Instant Pot is useless because its manufacturer declared bankruptcy. The arguments go downhill from there: the bubble caused by Donald Trump's election is more evidence of Bitcoin's failure, as if crypto is the sole financial asset subject to animal spirits and political winds. Cummings and Bernstein cite crypto's use for fraud, as if electric vehicles or rental office space haven't proven far more useful vehicles for predatory scamming of retail. They even gesture at the crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried — a person the Biden administration itself gladly welcomed as an "adult in the room" on crypto regulation — as if his low-IQ centralized-exchange rug-pull had anything to do with Bitcoin.
These are in every case recapitulations of arguments crypto has weathered without blinking for more than a decade, most often from the liberal-centrist wing of the Democratic party. They avoid any engagement with the technology itself; with the rights of individuals to use it; or with its real-world role as a unified backstop for a global banking system that is fragmenting before our eyes. And of course, that's the real motive behind such obfuscated arguments: the establishment, or whatever might be left of it, takes these insubstantial swipes at crypto out of its deep fear of losing America's easily-weaponized control of conventional banking and rails like SWIFT.
It's shameful that Trump and his allies followed crypto's worst actors into not simply fraud, but political corruption. But this criminality was in fact enabled by the Ezra Klein set's inability to process the implications of a truly new thing in the world — and by their insistence, for on the order of a decade, that it be ignored rather than regulated. Gary Gensler and Joe Biden had a chance to, for instance, pass legislation affirming that memecoins like $Trump were securities. Instead, they left a vacuum which Trump's natural corruption gladly filled. For that matter, a Democratic Party with even a few fragments of arthritic backbone left might actually consider making a case against the criminals, rather than their tools.
Ultimately, the latest midwit salvo against cryptocurrency is emblematic of the deepest failing of American politics, on both sides of the aisle: the default assumption that voters should be talked down to like sugar-addled children, their brains too broken to grasp anything more complex than a falling bomb.
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In late February, the Wind Down Trust — bankruptcy administrators for Do Kwon's hilariously failed Terra/Luna project — sued trading firm Jane Street for alleged insider trading. The basic claim is that a former Terraform employee turned Jane Streeter, Bryce Pratt, funneled nonpublic information from his old job to his new bosses. Information via Pratt triggered Jane Street to withdraw $85 million from Terra's depository Anchor protocol, leading to a liquidity squeeze and triggering a "death spiral" in the algorithmic TerraUSD stablecoin.
The news was first reported by the Journal, and the best analysis is, as usual, by the FT.
Jane Street's involvement here is triggering for a few reasons. Jane Street has been accused of serious market misconduct recently in India, and Jane Street cofounder Rob Granieri was recently found to have funneled money to a coup plot in South Sudan. Granieri is also an avowed "Effective Altruist," and Jane Street gave Sam Bankman-Fried his first job — and introduced him to his co-conspirator Caroline Ellison. That all lines up with the conclusions of my recent book, Stealing the Future, that Effective Altruism is a covertly authoritarian moral abomination that leads to comically bad and/or comically evil decisions.
That malign context led Crypto Twitter and the more downwardly mobile fringes of FinTwit to greet the Terraform lawsuit with two wild leaps of logic: first, that Jane Street "killed Terra" and "kicked off the crypto winter" of 2023, and second that Jane Street has been secretly manipulating the price of Bitcoin to create and profit from a coordinated "10 a.m. dump."
Those two takes both show an unfortunate misunderstanding of markets. Jane Street didn't "kill" Terra/Luna any more than CZ's threat to sell FTT "killed" FTX. In both cases, market actors simply exposed the fragility of structures built and promoted as "safe" by someone else. And there's not much substance to the idea that Jane Street withdrawing $85m from Anchor makes them Terra's murderers.
(This is also a clear contrast with the too-similarly-named Jump Trading, which colluded directly with Do Kwon to fraudulently support the Terra "algorithm" with manual trades.)
As the FT points out, any Economics 101 class would have provided the same insight as the alleged insider information that led Jane Street to dump its position. Terra's algorithmic stabilizing mechanism was clearly fragile to anyone who understood basic finance. In fact, I wrote exactly that in a CoinDesk column about two weeks before the Luna implosion — no insider trading necessary.
In particular, compare Jane Street's $85m dump to Galaxy Digital, which reaped hundreds of millions in profit from dumping its Luna position while CEO Mike Novogratz continued endorsing it (Galaxy was fined $200m). Jane Street's liquidity pull may have directly triggered the unstablecoin's mint-redemption death spiral, but Do Kwon created the conditions for doom as soon as he tried to print dollar bills from thin air.
Jane Street does absolutely seem like a hive of scum and villainy. But blaming it for killing Terra is like blaming a stiff breeze for knocking down a house of cards.
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David dove into the Epstein emails to trace unsavory connections in the crypto world for The Verge. That includes hints that Epstein played some role in the 2017–2018 "Block Size War." He unambiguously encouraged shitcoin gambling through two PR agencies that promoted frauds while laundering his reputation. Masha Prusakova and Masha Drokova ran those agencies — read more about them at Dark Markets.
David discussed the research with Wajahat Ali: Watch Here.