The Valora app explained

First, for those who are not familiar with the Celo mission, it is to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity — for everyone. The first product built by cLabs’ team, a Celo Alliance member, is Valora, a global payments app that allows you to exchange and securely store money on your mobile phone easily. This article explains what this innovative app is proposing and how it’s proposing a disruptive change to being adopted massively, leaving no one behind.

What is Valora’s proposal?

Valora’s disruptive proposal lies in user-centric design. As a result of this approach, Valora allows its users to transfer a crypto stable coin to anyone with a mobile phone number, even if this person doesn’t yet have a Valora account. This is a huge improvement from a user perspective when comparing to existing crypto products, such as Metamask, which works pretty well from a more technical point of view. Still, its learning curve is pretty high, even for people in the tech field, which effectively leaves out millions of people whose technical knowledge is low. Please remember that financial inclusion has been identified as an enabler for seven of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals to reinforce my previous statement. One of the main value propositions of the crypto community has been bank the unbanked, but this has been barely accomplished.

So what’s the difference between Celo and another stable coin?

First, let’s explain Celo offers two currencies: Celo (previously known as Celo Gold), and Celo Dollar, that interact in an interesting mechanism that could be discussed in a further article. The first one is fluctuating, serving to offer demands for the ecosystem, and the second has direct price equity with the dollar.

The difference is a workflow easier to adopt to make cryptocurrencies reach massive users leaving no one behind. Currently, if we want to transfer a stable currency, such as DAI or USDC, we need to pay the fee transaction with another currency, ETH. This from a non-crypto user tends to confuse, serving as an adoption barrier. Still, with Celo, even though you know you have a volatile and a stable currency, you can focus just on receive and send the stable one, and also pay the transaction fee with this same currency, which makes it so much practical.

Ok, but what about transaction fees?

The transaction fee per transaction is less than 1 cent, amazing, right? This is due, among other things, to the consensus mechanism used in the Celo Blockchain, Proof of Stake.

Nice, low transaction fees, but what about transaction speed?

Currently, transaction speed is around five seconds in the network.

Great, but how can I start using it?

The first step in either receiving a transfer or sending some Celo or Celo Dollars is installing the app.

An identity validation process starts from the user, asking for verifying its number. Three random validators in the network send different secret keys via SMS to the phone number, and the user will need to submit to verify its ownership. You would need to have some funds in your wallet (around 30 cents). You can select the in-app option, MoonPay, or make the onRamp on any exchange that has Celo listed on it.

Now you have your wallet with some funds on it, the only thing you need to do to send a transaction is to click on the Send button, select your contact from your address book, select the amount to transfer, and confirm. If the person doesn’t have the app installed, he or she will receive an SMS, and the app install and identity validation will be required to withdraw its funds.

Withdraw: cash out option?

Of course, this is a coming soon feature, and I will be sharing news when this is launched; stay tuned.