*BLUF
Celo built and integrated their stablecoin wallet, MiniPay, into Opera's browser, becoming “the Zelle” of the Global South.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
Celo operates 12.6 million wallets but $CELO is down 95%. What’s going on?
Table of Contents
Good morning,
Crypto's biggest issue is building Ferraris for… basically, no one.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
Most people, like my grandma, want to send money without the manual.
Crypto people who can't accept that doom themselves. Cool tech but like haute couture is cool. Fashionable but not functional. Sleek but not sustainable.
Celo gets it.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
Onwards,
Austin Campbell
Teaching students at NYU Stern
Teaching c-suites at Zero Knowledge
Olivia Chow
Teaching c-suites at Zero Knowledge
ZERO IN
BACK UP
🤷♂️ WTF IS CELO
Celo’s one mission is to fix remittances for the people paying the most for the least.
Globally, one in five adults has no bank account and uses a system that charges double-digit fees and takes multiple days to move money from one place to another.
🧐 WTF IS MINIPAY
MiniPay is Celo’s stablecoin wallet for sending money like sending a text.
Every product decision is built around the person who's never used a crypto wallet and doesn't care to learn.
SECURITY: No 12-word strings. Instead? Phone #. Face ID. Done.
RECOVERY: Lose your phone, save your crypto.
CURRENCY: Local currency, not cryptocurrency.
SHAREABILITY: No inscrutable wallet addresses.
Stablecoin-backed: Fast and no friction.
🫨 WTF IS OPERA
Opera is an African browser (not the art form Doja Cat beefed with Timothée Chalamet over - and Doja Cat is right, it is art) with servers stationed in Nairobi and Lagos to keep latency low and costs down.
SIM-verified, KYC-ed. Real users. Real world use. |
600K Daily Active Users more than most L1s worth 10x their market cap |
$1B+ Monthly Volume $153M paying bills, remittances, data. |
Not DeFi natives but are ordinary people using a financial product that happens to run on a blockchain… and not caring (even a little) about the blockchain part.
Opera's value proposition isn't crypto or the cult of Satoshi, it's that Opera Mini uses 90% less data than Chrome, which is what gets you installed in Lagos.
Opera built what their customers needed (rather than what one overcaffeinated engineer scrawled across 18 whiteboards).
BIG DEAL
🧅 LAY(ER)ING…
Being an L1 is like owning your own power plant: you get electricity but it's high-maintenance infra which means essentially, infra maintenance needs to be your full time job.
Being an L2 is like plugging into the grid: you get & use the same electricity, but you pay the utility bill (nothing else).
ETH-Killer → ETH-Extender.
In March 2025, Celo became the first Ethereum L1 to pivot into an Ethereum L2.
Because of this, Celo gets the best of both worlds : ETH’s security, speed, but without its highest costs & headaches.
Celo passes those benefits onto its user base, and then they can focus its product development on its users and its partners.
Correct. You cannot make people become the users you wish you had, you have to build products the users wish they had.
…WITH THE ENEMY
For a private chain to reach scale, it needs participants outside of themselves.
Bank of America’s BankAmericard only scaled once it spun the network out and let other banks in, creating what became Visa.
AT&T’s telephone monopoly only opened to real competition after the DOJ forced it to spin off local service into seven regional “Baby Bells.”
IBM’s 1981 PC became the industry standard precisely because IBM chose an open architecture that anyone could build on.
Partnering Celo didn't earn their users’ trust from scratch. Opera already knows what adds value for its users; that brings Celo 350M users.
Both ally. Neither reinvents.
BAG HOLDERS
📈 PRODUCT 📉 PRICE
Celo raised via a token that peaked at $2.1B (~75% to the project) which, TBH, raised more money than most tech startups dream of.
$2.1B Peak CELO market cap (2021) |
<$100M Current CELO market cap |
$428K 2025 net rev (from 2024, 3X) |
“Token price go down” despite the product helping a tons of users
→ Token holders still mad.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
Token price up but product is worthless? → Token holders glad.
Crypto’s ambition for mass adoption relies not just on technology, but a sustainable business model.
Currently in crypto, too many companies stop at issuing a token and dumping it on retail. That’s not a business, that’s an investment scam.
Founders who focus only on their token price, tend to run the product to rock bottom, which means eventually, the company and the product, collapsing.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
Projects with users can't raise money. Projects raising money without users / use case.
ZERO OUT
SERVING USERS (& HODLRS)
Can Celo sustain its business before its token price bleeds it dry?
Building for USERS or building for HODLers?
Both hard to love and be loved.
Original: "Forget You," CeeLo Green, Elektra Records
But no one said this type sh*t was easy.
ZERO INSIDER
Joined Paul Barron to break down where Clarity actually stands: the bank lobby, Trump's tweets, and the rare patches of bipartisan ground where blockchain just works.
Dove into the Epstein emails for The Verge: tracing unsavory connections in the crypto world. Including hints that Epstein played some role in the 2017–2018 Block Size War. In short, encouraged shitcoin gambling, through two PR agencies run by Masha Prusakova and Masha Drokova that laundered his reputation while promoting frauds.
Started a blueprint & set build for ZK's content media studio. Slated out an experimental pilot for educational content channels + formats. Started a fight (to storyboard & ship today’s concept art : CeeLo Green silent opera).
Should Zero In be :
1 More on Celo and the Opera play? Jump to Zero Insights.
2 Missed out? Banking Beast Mode, Sportsbook Stew, 2026 Crypto Grows Up