Imagine a world where there’s never a need for a physical bank… customer service… or staff of any kind. That’s not a wild science fiction dream anymore. It’s happening right now.
In what may prove to be among the most valuable use cases for blockchain, we’re witnessing the birth of a brand-new distributed financial system springing up to parallel,and ultimately, rival the traditional financial system.
I’m talking about decentralized finance (DeFi). And it will do for finance what the internet has done for so many other businesses: Replace a high-cost middleman with a low-cost one.DeFi uses cutting-edge blockchain technology to slash costs by doing away with the need for trusted third parties.
Eventually, it’ll make banking, borrowing, lending, and investing more accessible and cheaper for billions of people.
That’s where our first pick in this special report
comes in: Celo (CELO).Celo gives anyone in the world with a smartphone access to public blockchains and financial services such as banking and lending.Celo is designed for mobile use and offers speed, transparency, and low costs. By using phone numbers as public keys instead of a long, random String of words and letters – that’s almost impossible to remember and too easy to input incorrectly – it aims to reduce one of the main barriers of entry to crypto.
Today, there are nearly 4 billion smartphone users around the world. And Celo opens the doors to new possibilities to every one of them, like DeFi applications and payments.
But where it’ll really make a difference is with those who are locked out of traditional finance. Take, for instance, the nearly 2 billion adults around the world who don’thave access to financial services.Of these individuals, an estimated two-thirds own a smartphone. That’s over 1 billion potential users who could use Celo for financialservices previously unavailable to them. Celo has also gotten support and interest from many companies around the world.
Today, over 140 projects and companies are expanding on its ecosystem.One of its latest partnerships is with Deutsche Telekom, the largest telecommunication provider in Europe by revenue, with over 242 million mobile customers.The mobile carrier will allow validators on the Celo network to send verification text messages to its users. This improves the security and reliability of decentralized phone verification, which is what makes the Celo blockchain easy to use.
In addition, T-Systems MMS, the subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, will operate a validator group to help secure the network and further develop Celo’s
infrastructure.To date, Celo has raised over $65 million from several big players in the industry, including Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital,
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and founder of Twitter and Square Jack Dorsey.These are just a few of the many institutions and individuals backing Celo’s journey to become the premier decentralized global payment infrastructure for entrylevel users.
The Celo Hyper Boom Remember, a Hyper Boom occurs when you have a massive influx of new users coming into crypto. Catch-Up Coins are some of the most sensitive coins to usage spikes. We find the best Catch-Up Coins by buying into projects that are seeing explosive usage, but their price action is either trending down from its peak or trading sideways.
When CELO first came on our radar, its price had plunged 70% from its April peak. Since then, it’s seen an increase in usage and its price has rallied (see the first chart above)...You can see the increased usage in the second
chart above...As you can see, the price action is not telling the whole story.
Now, CELO has begun to move up, which means it’s in the initial stages of its Hyper Boom phase.But we think there’s a much larger move ahead in the coming weeks as Celo launches its cross-chain bridge to Ethereum. This will enable users to move assets between the two networks.In the past, an efficient bridge to Ethereum has proven to be a key growth element for other blockchains. And we expect the same for Celo.
As mentioned above, there are about 4 billion smartphone users. And 1.3 billion of them are unbanked. This makes them prime targets for Celo’s services.
Let’s say Celo can capture 15% of unbanked individuals who own a smartphone – or about 200 million users – over the next five years.If each of them makes just one transaction per day… the network would process over 73 billion transactions per year.Now, let’s assume each transaction costs one cent. And it’s paid in CELO. That would translate to roughly $730 million in yearly demand for CELO.To get a sense of what this means for the price of CELO, we can compare it to Ethereum.In August, Ethereum users spent nearly $700 million on transaction fees. That’s about $8.3 billion in annual demand for ETH.Ethereum ended August with a $404 billion valuation. That’s about 49 times the annual demand for ETH ($404 billion / $8.3 billion = 48.7).Based on our forecast above, if we give CELO the same multiple as Ethereum… its value would be about $35.5 billion ($730 million x 48.7).At a market cap of $35.5 billion, each token would be worth $144.05 based on the current token supply… or a 2,747% increase from today’s price.That’s enough to turn a $500 investment into $14,234. And every $1,000 investment into $28,468.And remember, this estimate only assumes Celo captures 5% of smartphone users (banked and unbanked). If Celo could double that projected market penetration rate… under a blue-sky scenario, each CELO would be worth 288.10.That’s a 5,593% increase from today’s price, enough to turn $500 into $28,468 and $1,000 into $56,936.It’d take nearly 47 years to make those types of gains in the stock market.
By adding CELO to the portfolio today, we’re investing in the infrastructure that will improve financial services for the world’s unbanked population.
Action to Take: Buy Celo (CELO).
Buy-up-to Price: $12
Stop Loss: None
Buy It On: Coinbase (Under the ticker CGLD),
KuCoin, Binance