17 Celo: Financial Inclusion and Mobile First Light Clients with Marek Olszewski

Celo is a Proof-of-Stake network focused on usability and financial inclusion in emerging markets. The team is combining innovations that aim to financially empower unbanked people in developing economies. In this episode Brian talks to Marek Olszewski, founder and CTO of Celo Labs. The episode specifically tackles Celo's staking and full node incentive design, but also goes into how Celo built a mobile-first smart contract platform. This includes a lightweight identity protocol that maps phone numbers to public keys, a protocol to create stablecoins through overcollateralization, economic abstraction to allow fee payments in different tokens, an innovative light client protocol, as well as pilot programs that the team of 40 are currently working on in different parts of the world to test out their technologies. Celo Website: https://celo.org/ Celo Github: https://github.com/celo-org Polkadot NPoS Podcast Episode: https://chorusone.libsyn.com/2-polkadots-nominated-proof-of-stake-with-alfonso-cevallos Cosmos Stake Distribution Post: https://blog.chorus.one/stake-distribution-diversification-cosmos/   Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: http://chorus.one/telegram