Celo Blockchain Unveils New Brand Identity, Announces a Campaign with Brave Brow...

Nigeria has officially restricted cash withdrawals from banks to a mere $44 per individual and $11,000 per business per week in an effort to control illict financial flows to curb inflation.

According to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), the directive is also meant to limit the number of banknotes in circulation and help modernize the payment system through digital money transfers, mobile money, and e-Naira adoption among businesses.

Government officials in Nigeria will also be barred from withdrawing cash from government accounts from March 1 2022, the head of NFIU said in a statement.

The new rules, which will apply to federal, local and state officials, are aimed at combating money laundering and corruption and are in line with government efforts to move Africa’s most populous nation toward a cashless economy.

“Civil servants are becoming more and more vulnerable to money laundering and its predicate offenses due to their exposure to cash withdrawals from public accounts,” said Modibbo R. HammanTukur, Director and CEO, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU).

According to NFIU, from 2015 to 2022, officials withdrew nearly 1.1 trillion naira ($2.45 billion) from government accounts, most of it exceeding previous withdrawal limits.

“In the unlikely event that a public official feels he may need cash withdrawal, he may apply for approval for waiver from the presidency which may be granted on case-by-case basis,” HammanTukur said in the statement.

In December 2022, Nigeria’s central bank began circulating newly designed 200, 500 and 1,000 naira notes and limited weekly cash withdrawals in order to curb inflation and move towards a cashless economy.

The Central Bank also decreased the weekly cash withdrawal limit for individuals to 100,000 Nigerian naira ($225) from 2.5 million naira ($5,638). A $45 daily limit on ATM withdrawals also came into effect in December 2022.

Almost 85% of the 3.23 trillion naira ($7.2 billion) in cash in circulation is now held outside of banks.

Part of the CBN’s strategy to drive down cash usage is to increase the adoption of the eNaira digital wallet that was launched in October 2021. Only one million Nigerians have downloaded the wallet since it was introduced with CBN vowing to increase sensitization efforts.

‘From today, we are going to carry out this sensitization program through all the nooks and crannies of this country until eNaira is widely accepted,’ an official said during the platform’s 1-year anniversary celebration in late October 2022.

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• The mission-driven blockchain looks towards mainstream adoption of Web3 with a re-imagined logo, branding, messaging, and website

• The brand evolution sees planned launches from Opera, GoodDollar, and an NFT auction with Valora and Arigallery featuring artists from Celo’s global ecosystem

• Celo’s new look is further driven by educational videos made by CoinMarketCap, and a campaign with Brave Browser

The Celo Foundation, which nurtures and promotes the mobile-first, carbon-negative layer-1 Celo blockchain and its ecosystem, reveals a reimagined brand identity and vision designed in collaboration with New York-based agency, Red Antler, alongside a series of partner launches and awareness campaigns aimed toward mainstream adoption of Web3 by everyday users around the world. 

The #CeloEvolution is here.

Introducing a reimagined brand and website, co-created with the Celo community, to further the collective mission to create the conditions of prosperity for all.https://t.co/ehf4mDUm0b

— Celo (@CeloOrg) January 11, 2023

As the regenerative blockchain making the world a better place, Celo’s new identity features a block system as a cornerstone to showcase the ecosystem’s connection to the world and the transformative impact it enables for un and under-banked communities and the climate. Complementing this visual system is fluid typography and bold color treatment, with core colors Prosperity Yellow and Forest. 

“Brand is often an afterthought in Web3, but mission-driven projects like Celo require attention to storytelling and emotion,” says Deana Burke, the Celo Foundation’s Head of Marketing. “We are excited to launch our new brand identity to garner greater awareness and understanding of Web3, and all those in our community who are building with purpose.” 

As a decentralized, permissionless platform governed by the community, the process of building brand consensus followed months of continued collaboration between the Celo Foundation’s Marketing team, led by Head of Marketing, Deana Burke, and active Celo community members, developers, founders, validators, and investors from Rio de Janeiro to Lagos, with over 75 meetings totaling 150+ hours.

“With the rapid growth the Celo ecosystem has seen over the past three years, it felt right to co-create this new brand identity and bring together the people who today shape where Celo is going. I love the result and think it is a true testament to the strength of our community,” says Rene Reinsberg, Celo Foundation President and Celo Co-Founder.  

In celebration of the Celo community’s mission to create the conditions of prosperity for all since the mainnet launch in April 2020, Celo’s brand evolution, or #CeloEvolution, sees partner launches from Opera (1/11), a Web3 browser that will integrate Mento stable asset cUSD into its Opera Mini Wallet, available to over 70 million users in Africa, and GoodDollar (February 2023), a Web3 protocol promoting Universal Basic Income (UBI).

On January 12 2023, a one-week NFT auction, created in collaboration with Valora, a Celo native payments wallet, and Arigallery, a mobile-first NFT marketplace on Celo, will debut, featuring eight global artists, including Mercy Thokozane Minah (South Africa), Juan Jose Giraldo Campuzano (Colombia), and Marzia Braggion (Portugal), among others inspired by Celo’s unique mission. 

On January 23 2023, CoinMarketCap will launch videos to educate users around the world about the blockchain’s regenerative ecosystem and how Mento stable assets (including cUSD, cEUR, and cREAL) can be used for real-world application.

Celo will also prominently feature its new branding in a spotlight campaign with Brave Browser, a Web3 leader with 59+ million users and built-in Brave Wallets that provide access to Web3 tools. This follows Brave’s integration of the Celo blockchain in September 2022, which provided Brave users with the ability to engage with Mento stable assets through self-custodial Brave Wallets, as well as with Celo’s diverse ecosystem of purpose-driven, decentralized applications (dapps), including EthicHub and impactMarket.

Concurrently, cLabs, a mission-focused blockchain technology organization and part of the community working on Celo, has been developing a technical roadmap for Celo 2.0 and will be sharing a progress report in the coming weeks for further discussion with the community.

To learn more about Celo and its new brand identity, please visit celo.org.

About Celo

Celo is a carbon-negative, permissionless, layer-1 protocol with a rich ecosystem of global partners building innovative Web3 applications within the DeFi, ReFi, and NFT sectors on Celo. Accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, the Celo ecosystem consists of a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (the Celo Protocol), the CELO native token, and several Mento stable assets (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL) that enable anyone to use digital assets like currency. Launched on Earth Day in 2020, the open source Celo mainnet supports 1,000+ projects by developers and creators located around the world.

About the Celo Foundation

The Celo Foundation was founded to support the growth and development of the decentralized, open source, mobile-first Celo platform to help build a carbon-negative financial system that creates the conditions of prosperity for all. The Foundation is guided by the Celo community tenets and contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach—activities that support and encourage an inclusive financial system. For more about Celo, visit https://celo.org/.

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