The non-profit Celo has announced an “Alliance for Prosperity” – a blockchain-based platform that allows developers to create social and financial apps for mobile devices.

The initiative, which has been launch it Yesterday, with more than 50 partners, provided critical financial tools to the 5.6 billion mobile phone users around the world, including those in regions without banking infrastructure.

The new alliance prides itself on having a number of unique features that set it apart from a large number of other blockchain-based offerings.

For example, users can exchange cryptocurrencies for “Celo Gold” which in turn can be used to purchase the “Celo Dollar” stablecoin.

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In addition, the Celo Dollar stablecoin can be sent directly to a person’s phone number rather than a complex address, which greatly enhances the ease of use of the platform.

Celo also has a host of other functions and features such as cash transfer programs, peer-to-peer lending, micro-cooperative insurance…

Chuck Kimball, Head of Business Development at Celo’s cLabs and President of Alliance for Prosperity, describes the ambitions of the Celo project as follows:

Use cases include operating mobile businesses online, enabling faster and more affordable transfers, reducing operational complexities to deliver humanitarian assistance, facilitating payments, and enabling microlending.

“Celo” and direct competition with the “Libra” project:

Project Celo is in direct competition with Facebook’s Libra project.

Any entity can join the Celo platform without any required minimum financial investment.

On the other hand, Libra requires from Facebook a minimum investment of $10 million from its supporters as a prerequisite for joining the group and the alliance.

In addition, Celo is not trying to replace any sovereign currency with its own digital currency, so it may not face the regulatory hurdles that Libra currently faces.

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But this does not mean that the “Celo” project is perfect and there is nothing wrong with it, as the project’s platform is supported by its reserve system in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, meaning that the support is not completely guaranteed.

This can leave the platform vulnerable to so-called “bank runs” which are a series of withdrawals that drain liquidity out of the system.

In addition, the price of the digital currencies on which the system is based can collapse, which means that the value of the reserve will be significantly reduced, leading to operational instability.

“Celo” became aware of this and suggested two currencies, which are the volatile digital currency “Celo Gold” and the fixed currency “Celo Dollar”.

For information, the “Celo” platform is still open source in the experimental stage, and it is expected to launch its main network “mainnet” next April.

A decentralized app for Celo, the Celo Wallet, is already available on iOS and Android.

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The Celo Foundation, a non-profit that was founded in 2017, has raised an estimated $36.4 million in funding so far.

130 teams have expressed interest in building on the Celo platform.

While Libra revealed that about 1,500 organizations expressed interest in the project four months after it was revealed.

Interestingly, the Celo Alliance is backed by some members of the Libra Association, including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, Bison Trails, Anchorage and Mercy Corps.

Which means moving from mere competition to a conflict of interest.

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