Hi {{first_name}}

The past few months have been some of the most monumental in Celo’s history, and the short version is this: the stablecoin thesis we've been building toward for seven years is now visibly playing out on Celo. It’s been a busy few weeks, so we wanted to recap some of the latest milestones you might’ve missed, and share a link to claim some free USA₮ yourself.

Celo now hosts 33 live stablecoins, more than any other chain. Eight fiat-backed stablecoins deployed in a single eight-day stretch in late July and early August. Just yesterday, one more came to Celo: IDRX, the regulated, fiat-backed Indonesian Rupiah stablecoin. Where to find it? Textile FX’s IDRX <> USD₮ market on Celo is the most liquid of any chain.

Now, a quick look back at the "eight in eight days" run:

USA₮ (US). Tether's U.S.-regulated, GENIUS-compliant dollar, issued through Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. Celo is the first chain after Ethereum to host it. Full details, and a link to claim some yourself, are in the Payments section below.

wFIAT (Latin America). Ripio deployed its entire wFIAT stack on July 31. Six currencies at once: Argentine peso (wARS), Brazilian real (wBRL), Mexican peso (wMXN), Colombian peso (wCOP), Chilean peso (wCLP), and Peruvian sol (wPEN), each with no-cost on- and off-ramps into local banking rails. Ripio is one of the largest exchanges in LatAm. 

cNGN (Nigeria). cNGN deployed on August 6, the country's first regulated naira stablecoin, issued by WrappedCBDC Limited, with Textile FX providing day-one FX liquidity and Tribeca Park Capital as institutional liquidity provider. Nigeria accounts for roughly 60% of all stablecoin inflows into sub-Saharan Africa. Textile FX has already onboarded 78 OTC and cross-border payment companies there and cleared over $4M in volume last month.

cNGN exists on eight other chains. Celo is where it actually trades. The cNGN/USD₮ pool on Uniswap is now the deepest venue for the token anywhere onchain––deeper than Base, Ethereum, Polygon, or BNB.

Everywhere else. Mento continues to issue and maintain 15 local-currency stablecoins (USDm, EURm, BRLm, CADm, COPm, GBPm, CHFm, KESm, NGNm, GHSm, ZARm, XOFm, JPYm, PHPm, AUDm), with swap volumes growing alongside Uniswap.

None of this is a vanity count. Each one is a real currency corridor with real users on the other side, and each one deepens an onchain FX market that makes Celo structurally different from a chain that only hosts dollars. The traditional FX market moves roughly $7.5 trillion a day; bringing even a sliver of that onchain, with instant settlement and 24/7 markets, is the opportunity we're building toward.

USA₮ is live, and so is Google Cloud's faucet to distribute it. Tether's U.S.-regulated, GENIUS-compliant stablecoin, issued through Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., with reserves custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald, went live on Celo on July 29, making Celo the first chain after Ethereum to host it. Celo is now home to all three major USD stablecoins: USDC, USD₮, and USA₮, and all three can be used to pay for gas natively.

In August, the second half of that announcement went live too. Self and USA₮ launched the first regulated U.S. stablecoin distribution to verified humans, powered by Google Cloud and running on Celo mainnet. It is the first time a federally-chartered issuer has distributed a stablecoin on the basis of verified identity rather than to anonymous wallets. To date, over 8,000 real, verified humans claimed free USA₮ through the faucet.

The mechanics are worth understanding: a user downloads the Self app and proves (using a biometric passport, government ID, or Aadhaar) that they are a unique human, over 18, and not resident in an OFAC-sanctioned jurisdiction. None of that personal data goes to any third party; only the zero-knowledge proof of eligibility does. They then connect a Celo wallet (Ledger, Valora, MetaMask, or Rabby) and receive USA₮.

Regulated distribution, sanctions screening, and privacy in the same flow is a genuinely hard problem, and solving it is what makes stablecoins usable by institutions that could never touch an anonymous airdrop.

You can try it yourself here: Google Cloud's Celo mainnet faucet. It takes about two minutes. We'd encourage every one of you to run through it and understand what we've built. Free cash doesn’t hurt either. 

MiniPay's growth is compounding. Opera (NASDAQ: OPRA) reported Q2 results on August 19, and MiniPay is now at 19 million wallets, up 121%, with 3 million new activations in the quarter alone. Cumulative transactions passed 580 million with lifetime volume exceeding $1.9 billion as of MiniPay’s third birthday on September 13th. The wallet is live in 66 countries. "Pay with MiniPay" now spans 70+ Mini Apps, and the stablecoin-linked Visa card launched in June across the EU (600K+ waitlist), with a gradual rollout underway in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Opera Limited (OPRA) - Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call

Gas abstraction went mainstream. Ledger's CIP-64 support means 18 Celo-native currencies (e.g., USD₮, USDC, wrapped ETH, and all 15 Mento local currencies) can now be used to pay gas from Ledger Live. This was roughly four years in the making and it removes the single most confusing step in onboarding a non-crypto-native user.

Tokenized gold found a market. XAUT0 (Tether Gold) now has over 114,000 holders on Celo, which pushed Celo to the number two chain by tokenized commodity holders on Token Terminal.

CELO now has 107.6 million token holders, which puts it inside the top ten assets in crypto by holder count, ahead of most of the majors. Celo also ranks #1 across all L1s and L2s in 30-day token holder growth, holds over 80% L2 market share measured by token holders, and recently overtook Base in daily active users, running north of 600K DAUs.

The large majority of those holders arrived through Opera's conversion of browser reward points into CELO—a distribution channel no other network has, and a public commitment they are delivering on to bring more users onchain to Celo. 

That is genuinely differentiated, and it is exactly the kind of top-of-funnel we spent years trying to build. It's also true that many of these are small balances, and the work ahead is converting breadth into depth: getting those holders into MiniPay, into stablecoins, and into transacting. 

Two developments that matter for the institutional side of the story.

First, we completed a full disclosure submission under Blockworks' Token Transparency Framework, the industry standard now used in diligence by Coinbase, Kraken, Grayscale, Anchorage, VanEck, Bitwise, and roughly forty other firms. Our filing covers supply, governance, revenue flows, security architecture, market-maker and listing arrangements, and full fundraising history. We disclosed that we have no direct market maker agreements and no paid listing agreements, which is not true of most assets in our peer group.

Second, and as a direct result, CELO's transparency filing is now accessible through the Bloomberg Terminal. That is a meaningful unlock. Institutional allocators who cannot act on a Discord post or a forum thread can now pull standardized disclosures on CELO in the same workflow they use for every other asset they hold.

Alongside this: 300+ onchain governance proposals voted to date, a fixed maximum supply of 1 billion CELO, all onchain revenue directed to holders via the DAO-governed community fund, and revenue earned in non-CELO assets programmatically used to buy back CELO.

Our agentic hackathon drew 88 submissions that collectively generated 875K transactions and over $1.6MK in volume. Celo has since shipped its own native x402 facilitator, and is one of the first chains with both x402 and MPP support natively. Prezenti Season 2 accepted 19 teams with roughly $160K in grants, 47% of them agentic builders.

On 8004scan.io, the leaderboard for ERC-8004 agents, Celo-built agents hold the #1 and #3 positions, with our latest agentic hackathon now extended through Monday, September 21st.

CELOccelerate is executing. The 1.749M CELO in first-year sequencer fees has been returned to the Community Fund, and the programmatic base fee increases enabled by the Jovian hardfork are rolling out on the schedule we outlined. Net sequencer revenue is being converted to CELO via programmatic buybacks and routed to the Community Fund.

Marek recently sat down with MTS (Monitoring the Situation) for a wide-ranging conversation on Celo's stablecoin strategy and where the network goes next. [Interview begins at 4:09:48]

Earlier this month, Rene joined Stabledash to discuss Celo’s stablecoin ecosystem and Self’s identity infrastructure. CoinDesk also shared the news of Self and Google Cloud’s USA₮ Mainnet Faucet launch, following The Block’s coverage of the USA₮ deployment on Celo.

The through-line across all of it: payments volume, FX depth, and agent activity are all compounding on the same network, and CELO is now structurally positioned to capture that.