Celo Rises 15% on Barcelona Reveal of $20M 'Connect the World' Campaign

CELO, the token of Celo, a proof-of-stake layer 1 blockchain, jumped in cryptocurrency markets on Monday as officials announced a new $20 million incentive campaign at the start of the Celo Connect conference this week in Barcelona, Spain.

The token's price has risen 15% in the last 24 hours. CELO was trading at $4.20 at press time and is up almost 50% over the past 30 days.

At an event in Barcelona on Monday, the Celo Foundation announced "Connect the World," a $20 million campaign to incentivize the development of high-quality Celo on- and off-ramps worldwide. The foundation also introduced "Fiat Connect," an open-source application programming interface (API) specification for payment providers that will make integrations more scalable, according to Celo Foundation’s Medium post.

Celo is currently ranked 19th amongst decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in terms of total value locked (TVL), according to analytics firm DeFi Llama. The coin has a market capitalization of $1.8 billion.

Celo is a protocol that acts as a global payment infrastructure for cryptocurrencies by using phone numbers as public keys and issuing a native stable-value token, according to Messari. It allows native and non-native digital assets (cryptographic and central bank digital currencies) to circulate freely across devices, carriers and countries, according to its website.

Edward Moya, senior analyst at Oanda, said Celo has been steadily attracting interest, as many investors are drawn to its crypto potential across smartphone technology and the opportunity it could have playing a key role in central bank digital currencies, known as CBDCs.

“What also helps Celo is that it works using proof-of-stake and is offsetting carbon, which makes it appealing to many climate-focused investors,” added Moya.

According to Lennard Neo, head of research at Stack Funds, Celo’s price action could be attributed to the Celo Connect event, which continues Tuesday.

“We reckon it is probably an event-related price rise as traders speculate on positive surprises during the conference,” added Neo.