BREAKDOWN: Why Crypto Matters for Financial Inclusion, Feat. Celo's Marek Olszewski
In a world of centralized mobile money solutions, do decentralized, permissionless currencies matter?
ABOUT
This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.
In a world of centralized mobile money solutions, do decentralized, permissionless currencies matter?
Around the world, an estimated 1.7 billion people remain unbanked and lacking access to high quality financial services.
Some projects see cryptocurrency as an answer. In this episode of The Breakdown, NLW speaks with Celo co-founder Marek Olszewski about:
- How Celo was designed differently to address financial inclusion as a primary use case
- The problems with centralized approaches to mobile money like m-pesa
- Why true financial inclusions solutions must be permissionless
- Why technology design isn’t enough and projects that seek to gain adoption require ground up go to market strategies
- The impact of Libra’s launch on the “bank the unbanked” narrative
- How the COVID-19 crisis has changed the narrative around and demand for stablecoins globally
HOST
CoinDesk is the world leader in news, prices and information on bitcoin and other digital currencies.
We cover news and analysis on the trends, price movements, technologies, companies and people in the bitcoin and digital currency world.

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