The potential of DeFi in Latin America, according to Avalanche and Foundation Celo

The decentralized finance ecosystem expands based on offering tokenization solutions to obtain liquidity for social projects, or to explore new technological tools such as gaming, as well as its financial inclusion solutions. In this regard, Avalanche and Celo explain their position to us.

The decentralized finance ecosystem continues to grow, as of last November, the 100 DeFi tokens reached a market cap of $174 billion, while last January, decentralized wallets accounted for 4.3 million unique addresses, while monthly revenue of the ecosystem (as of this year) increased to more than $3.9 billion, according to a latest ConsenSys report.

Two of the projects with the greatest potential are Celo and Avalanche. The Celo Foundation made progress in 2021 in the DeFi Token development of its open platform and mobile technology, by launching its Valora application, which at the end of the year was already being used in more than 120 countries, while the app that is within its ecosystem, Ubeswap, increased their mobile traffic by 86%. Such is the utility of its decentralized platform that, in December, Kickstarter announced plans to build an open source decentralized version on top of the Celo blockchain.

On the other hand, as we pointed out on BeInCrypto, until the end of the year, Avalanche pointed to an average of 475,000 transactions per day, a figure that represents 40% of the transactions of Ethereum (ETH), which has around 1.35 million daily transactions, while its AVAX token went from 35 to 108 dollars in 2021, and last December, its token was one of the fastest recoveries, when it added a streak of 40%, which was due to the addition of USDC, which saw it rally 10.5%.

During the decentralized finance (DeFi Development Services) meet up , organized by the Blockchain Academy Chile at the Bitcoin Embassy in Mexico City , Avalanche addressed "Gaming & Crypto 2022", while Fundación Celo did so with "DeFi en Celo", where they agreed that Latin America has the potential to tokenize social programs, as well as to promote new talent in gaming or to create solutions that "make life easier".

The growth of the Celo Foundation in Latin America

In an interview, foundation Celo's Ecosystem Lead, Angélica Valle, explained that Celo offers global solutions and some of the solutions based on its blockchain have had a regional impact. She emphasized that Celo is a decentralized Proof-of-Stake blockchain that prioritizes smartphone usage to reach more people. And for this, they have a stock of stablecoins: Celo Dollar (cUSD), Celo Euro (cEUR), and their latest launch, Celo Real in Brazil, in addition to their governance token, $CELO.

One of Foundation Celo's strongest strategies is its DeFi financial system focused on reducing banking service fees for people, facilitating loans and making investments more fluid, and all through a mobile device . In this regard, Angélica Valle details that her native application Valora seeks to offer the greatest number of solutions that encourage financial inclusion.

Regarding the potential of Celo's open blockchain , Angélica deepens that the code grows "so fast" and compared it to the Internet, where pages appear every day, that is, everyone has the availability of the code to "get to mount" a solution that generates traction from one day to the next:

Gaming in the sights of Avalanche and what is coming for the region

In an interview, the Developer Evangelist & CM Latam of Avalanche, Andrea Vargas, said that the platform is concentrating on the gaming part, (as the crypto ecosystem is doing), since they have among their ranks Ed Chang, former director of Gaming from Electronic Arts (EA) and deepened that one of its titles that are one of its main bets is Crabada, a game like Axie Infinity.

Andrea Vargas exposed the following:

“The gaming part will come strong. At Avalanche we have Ed Chaing, who was director of gaming at Electronic Arts. He is a person with a lot of experience advising projects. There are many games emerging, Crabada is an Axie Infinity type game, and it has already achieved the market volume that Axie Infinity moves in 24 hours. The topic of subnets is beginning to have a lot of potential. Isolated environments of some particular game mode will be born, or some game that can create its own blockchain dynamics or tokenomics.”

Likewise, the Avalanche Developer Evangelist & CM Latam explained that the DeFi Development world continues with a "strong momentum" since last year and that they had the Avalanche Rush (incentive program) last year, as well as the Blizzard program, that it started with an incentive of 200 million dollars, while the rush was for 180 million dollars and that there are many incentives in that aspect. She emphasized that, coming out in September 2020, Avalanche will continue its continuous improvements and that even the protocol will be updated all the time.

“Avalanche is a very young technology, it came out in September 2020. It is being updated all the time, even to the protocol itself. What is coming is to give a lot of impetus to the subject of subnets. There is a primary subnet, which has three main chains and we have in Testnet two subnets, one that has its own virtual machine, which is a dictionary type for that, as a demo type. And another, with certain characteristics. The purpose is to test the performance of a C-Chain with certain modifications. They are in Testnet, but we are going to see many more subnets, and in gaming there is a lot of demand.”