2025 Recap: While Crypto Talked, Celo Delivered

Every year, I write a letter to capture what has happened across our ecosystem and the industry at large––not just what it felt like inside the bubble, but what impact we’ve collectively achieved in the real world. 

In 2025, the signal was crystal clear. 

While most of crypto cycled through familiar rhythms––narratives, hot takes, and resurfaced debates, like L1s vs. L2s (spoiler alert: the latter will win)––Celo hyperfocused on something less exciting in the short term, but far more important in the long term: proof.

We shipped milestone infrastructure, like our L2 migration, and reached all-time adoption highs, becoming the #1 L2 in daily active users (DAUs) ahead of behemoths like Base and World, and crypto’s #1 transport layer for USDT by weekly active users (WAUs) ahead of Tron, thanks to everyday users in emerging markets. 

And in a year when crypto went mainstream, flooded with institutional projects promising adoption, the onslaught of corporatized chains, and countless “logo x logo” announcements, we got something even more rare: product-market fit and a roaring distribution engine that we built from the ground up, hand-in-hand with our partners like Opera, architects of MiniPay, crypto’s fastest growing use case.

Our teams have quietly delivered what countless projects have failed to achieve. Not ideas. Not intentions. Not spectacle masquerading as progress, or grandstanding product reveals engineered for the cameras and timeline rather than for the benefit of everyday users. 

I’m talking about usage that repeats, and product that becomes habit. Not only have we cracked the code to find product-market fit, what the industry has been starved for, we have done this across the Global South: for the forest conservationist in Ñuiyanzhi, Colombia, the local merchant in Nairobi, Kenya, and the crypto builder in Lagos, Nigeria, among many others.  

Networks grow because the experience is better and the plumbing (boringly) works, not because a story is louder. While the promise of a “New Day One” is sexy, only the daily, unglamorous, and necessary work of making payments faster, cheaper, and more accessible where it matters most prevails. For all the shiny projects that captured mindshare and the trends du jour only to fizzle out, Celo’s staying power is a testament to those who prioritize mission over marketing, verifiable usage over hype.  

2025 was the year of compounding adoption, when impact became proof that scaled. What we’ve built is becoming inevitable, mainstream, and here are the real-world metrics to support it: 

• 790K peak daily active users (#1 L2 for DAUs)

• 3.3M+ peak weekly active users of USDT (#1 chain)

• 5.2M+ new users in 2025 — 79% of whom were using the chain for the first time

• $65.916B+ stablecoin volume year-to-date, +142% vs. 2024

• 11M+ Opera MiniPay wallets across 60+ countries

• 300M+ stablecoin transactions processed through Opera MiniPay alone

• 1B+ lifetime transactions on Celo

• Deployed critical DeFi building blocks, including Aave, Velodrome & Uniswap V4, including pioneering pools with boosted yield for Self-verified humans

• 634 monthly active developers, +15% vs. 2024

• 180 full-time developers, +7% vs. 2024

• 1.2M original commits

• 57 governance proposals submitted

• 4.8M+ social impressions

Of course, this adoption didn’t happen by accident. It was earned day to day through deliberate choices, difficult engineering (cLabs’ completed four hardforks this year alone, including last week’s Jello hardfork, which made Celo a ZK fault-proof rollup), and a commitment to meet users where they are. In fact, one of the most important things we did this year––migrating to an Ethereum Layer 2––was also the least visible to most users.

Yet we chose to do the hard thing, crossing a defining threshold and setting a standard for others to follow suit. We returned home to Ethereum with 100+ day-one partners across infrastructure, wallets, DeFi, identity, payments, and developer tooling in a systems-level shift that unlocked:

• Deeper alignment with Ethereum’s security and ecosystem 

• Easier interoperability and integration paths

• A foundation built for scaling without compromising the user experience that made Celo work in the real world

• Costs reduction of 99.8%, supercharging chain revenue by 10x

And importantly, the experience didn’t have to change for users or builders. Celo remained mobile-first, low-cost, fast, and practical. 

We also stopped talking about crypto as a “feature,” but an assumption, because we knew that for the mission to go mainstream, the product had to be invisible. In 2025, we saw more and more moments where:

• Someone sends money across a border and doesn’t think about settlement

• Someone pays or gets paid and doesn’t think about fees 

• Someone uses a mini app and doesn’t think about chain selection

• Someone saves in a stable asset and doesn’t think about volatility

That’s not just adoption, it’s normalization. 

Celo has always believed that the “real world” isn’t niche, but a destination. Impact isn’t about idealism or virtue signaling, but concrete execution and practice. This year, we turned aspirational belief into a platform advantage, with a plan to evolve our tokenomics to support the network’s tremendous growth.

We saw stablecoins become a global need and behave like money for everyday transfers, payments, and savings, especially in mobile-first markets. We also launched the most dollar-denominated and local-currency stablecoins (25 total) of any other ecosystem.

Distribution strengthened and the ecosystem leaned into consumer accessibility with wallet UX, mini apps, and real-world partnerships led by MiniPay, whose growth is the clearest proof with 11M+ wallets and 300M+ stablecoin transactions processed through the self-custodial stablecoin wallet alone. It is our continued pleasure to build with this team, with whom we recently announced a strategic extension of our partnership at Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai. Opera has 300M+ active users across their various products, and we want to bring MiniPay to all of them and beyond, really onboarding 1 billion people by 2030 to this new digital economy.

Our DeFi building blocks also became stronger, with the integrations of Aave v3, Velodrome, and Uniswap v4 joining Chainlink, Curve, Bancor, and others; coupled with ecosystem incentives, such as boosted yield for Self-verified humans, stablecoin liquidity was pushed even deeper.

As for Self, Celo’s zk-powered proof-of-humanity and identity layer, its launch at EthDenver was category-defining and a breakthrough for accessibility, leveraging government-issued biometric passports and IDs. Not only did Self partner with Google Cloud for three pioneering use cases, but it also added support for India’s Aadhaar ID, opening a path for verification at a truly global scale.

We further pushed privacy forward on Celo with Nightfall’s Layer 3 testnet, bringing enterprise-ready privacy payments onchain using EY’s open source stack, purpose-built for a payments-focused ecosystem, a development our builder community and SMEs were particularly excited to see. 

So why else did 2025 matter? It cemented our path forward. We introduced Vision 2030, an ambitious initiative to create a trillion-dollar economy built on Celo where open, onchain rails underpin a massive world economy, one that creates opportunity broadly, not narrowly.

We know that proof changes everything, attracting more builders, partners, and distribution, turning a mission into a movement. If 2025 was the year proof became undeniable, then 2026 will be the year we scale it responsibly by: 

• Making stablecoin payments feel native everywhere (faster, simpler, more integrated)

• Expanding the mini-app economy (more everyday use cases, more local relevance)

• Strengthening the rails for trust and safety at scale (identity, reliability, user protections)

While crypto talked, Celo delivered. Not because we’re better at narratives, but because we’ve been obsessed with the same thing for years: making the real world the center of our design––a focal point that the industry’s crypto OGs recognize and respect. 

So thank you for building this with us. Thank you for using Celo. Thank you to our community members and teams for holding the line on mission while pushing the frontier on execution. To quote Vitalik again from earlier this year, “The Celo community are some of the best examples… that the Ethereum ecosystem and crypto as a whole has to offer.”

If our rails are the limbs that reach far and wide, you are the beating heart––thank you for keeping the pace. Let’s keep proving what’s possible, together.

Onwards,

Rene

Read the comprehensive recap of 2025 key milestones and metrics on the Celo Foundation blog