A slew of leading Ethereum based DeFi protocols– including Aave, Sushi, Curve, and PoolTogether– recently announced a $100M DeFi adoption initiative with Celo, a mobile platform for financial dApps.
Announced today, the recent “DeFi for the People” initiative’s numerous founders include Aave, Curve, Sushi, PoolTogether, 0x, UMA, Valora, Ubeswap, and Moola Market, alongside educational and infrastructure partners including Chainlink, Wrapped.com RabbitHole, and The Graph. All partners are united by a goal of making DeFi services accessible to 6 billion people on the planet who own a smartphone.
The $100M being pooled into the program includes a variety of incentives, grants, and educational initiatives.
Product integrations are already available with many partners, including PoolTogether, which is now offering over $500k in prizes in its no-lose lottery pool on Celo. According to PoolTogether founder Leighton Cusak, prize savings are “one of the most important and effective on-ramps into savings for underbanked people,” and therefore, his program on Celo will help spur DeFi adoption among those people.
“PoolTogether on Celo can facilitate crypto and DeFi adoption for the unbanked and users in developing markets who benefit most from low gas fees and fast transaction times”.
Other product integrations, including Aave’s liquidity protocol, are coming soon. In collaboration with DeFi’s biggest players, Celo co-founder Rene Reinsberg says that they’re “excited to bring more than 1 billion new users into the DeFi ecosystem over the next five years.”
While the DeFi industry has exploded in recent months, only 10% of DeFi application users currently live outside of developed countries, which are usually the countries that require non-custodial financial technology the most. This is why bridging DeFi market accessibility to mobile phone users will be such an important step for the industry, as it will open the market to 6 billion people owners of those devices with an internet connection.
Similarly, Open Ocean has recently formed partnerships with mainstream decentralized exchanges, including Avalanche, expanding the liquidity and exchangeability of various DeFi tokens at low cost.