Today, an alliance composed of Ethereum-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols and projects announced DeFi for the People, a common goal united by cryptocurrency organizations: to bring DeFi to 6 billion smartphones worldwide user.

Built On Celo, The founding partners of the new plan include Aave, Curve, Sushi, PoolTogether, 0x, UMA, Valora, Ubeswap and Moola Market. Education and infrastructure partners include Chainlink, RabbitHole, The Graph, and Wrapped.com.

This new program will provide more than $100 million in educational programs, grants and rewards. In addition, most program participants will collectively contribute half of the funds to the reward program.

Complete product integrations with PoolTogether, Sushi, Moola Market, Ubeswap and Valora are now available, and more products are coming soon. Starting today, PoolTogether on Celo can get rewards, and reward pools for other DeFi protocols and projects will be launched in the coming weeks and months.

It is expected that Optics will be launched this fall, which is a fuel-efficient interoperability protocol for cross-chain communication. Using Optics, users will be able to easily transfer assets between Ethereum and Celo.

In recent years, DeFi has experienced explosive growth, but it has not yet been widely adopted. There are currently about 5 million people using DeFi applications worldwide, of which less than 10% live outside of developed countries. DeFi for the People aims to change this situation by bringing builders together to create products, making it easier for those who need it the most to access and use DeFi.

For billions of people, mobile phones are their most important device and often the only way for them to surf the Internet. Celo’s mobile-first platform-with more than 1 million wallet addresses in 113 countries-provides a unique opportunity to bring the benefits of DeFi to anyone with a mobile phone. New real-world applications for DeFi and Celo are already in progress.

In Colombia, for example, at the beginning of the pandemic last year, a pilot program provided the unemployed with small loans with insufficient Celo mortgages. These loans enable users to purchase motorized bicycles in order to deliver Rappi. By using the right equipment, some members of the pilot can double their income, in some cases quadruple.

This is just one example of how DeFi can provide millions of people with instant access to capital, especially for people in emerging markets where access to traditional financial services is limited.

“DeFi for the People aims to make DeFi available to everyone by supporting real-world use cases and focusing on mobile-first adoption. We are delighted to work with the largest project in DeFi, which will exceed 1 billion new projects in the next five years. Users are brought into the DeFi ecosystem.”
– Rene Reinsberg, co-founder of Celo

Now Live: PoolTogether on Celo is $500,000

PoolTogether is an open source and decentralized no-loss prize savings agreement. It is now online on Celo with a prize of more than $500,000. Users can deposit PoolTogether on Celo to get a chance to win prizes, even if they do not win, they can keep all the money deposited.

This is possible because the prize is paid for by deposit interest. PoolTogether is a unique “don’t lose lottery” because everyone who participates can keep their money.

“Studies have shown that bonus savings are one of the most important and effective entrances for people with insufficient bank deposits to save. PoolTogether on Celo can promote the adoption of encryption and DeFi by users in unbanked and developing markets. They benefit from low gas fees and fast speed. Benefit the most during trading hours.”
– Leighton Cusak, founder of PoolTogether

Coming soon

Aave has a $20 million incentive plan on Celo

Aave is an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol designed to enable users to obtain income from the crypto assets provided to the protocol and to borrow assets. Suppliers earn income by depositing digital assets in liquidity pools.

The Celo curve of the $14 million incentive plan

Curve is an automated market maker (AMM) protocol. Unlike traditional decentralized exchanges, it uses market-making algorithms to enhance the liquidity of its market. Curve on Celo provides users with a decentralized platform that allows users to conduct cryptocurrency transactions and earn returns.

Sushi on Celo, offering a $10 million reward program

Sushi is a DeFi platform that facilitates transactions, lending and revenue. Currently, Sushi users can use the Swap function to trade assets and provide liquidity on Celo, and high-yield agricultural rewards and incentives will be launched soon. With Celo, Sushi users can benefit from faster transaction speeds and lower fees through secure and Ethereum-compatible transactions on Celo’s Proof of Stake (PoS) network.

“Sushi AMM, Kashi Loan, and other BentoBox products provide the necessary primitives users need to connect to global and permissionless financial systems. By leveraging Celo’s mobile-first product suite and extending the user experience beyond the native encryption, Sushi can promote this One mission moves forward and brings DeFi to the next frontier.”
– Joseph Delong, Chief Technology Officer, Sushi

Join DeFi to serve the people

DeFi for the People is based on Celo’s mobile-first approach, making cryptocurrency and DeFi available to everyone. This is an open initiative for builders and entrepreneurs. Anyone interested in accelerating the adoption of encryption and DeFi in the real world is welcome to join.

Convene all builders: hackathon to receive 1 million US dollars in bonuses and seed funding

• As part of the commitment to introduce encryption technology to mobile phones, DeFi for the People will host a hackathon in October with the goal of bringing more DeFi projects to Celo.
• Developers from all over the world are invited to build their projects on Celo, which has a $1 million bonus and seed funding for the team to quickly start their projects.

To learn more about the upcoming hackathon, please visit defiforthepeople.org/hackathon.