The future of Connect the World when Celo is an ETH L2

Governance
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Hi friends. This is Ed, from Lovecrypto. We have been part of Celo since before main-net launch and we are really committed to the Connect the World initiative.

Although not attending the ETHCC and the satellite events, we followed the conversations and news online. We are excited about the possibility of Celo becoming a L2, and we are intrigued to know what that would mean for the Connect the World initiative.

Would Fiat Connect incorporate other stablecoins in other ETH related blockchains? Like USDC, USDT and EURC in Ethereum, Optimism and Base?

In addition, in the spirit of collaboration that was the motto of the satellite event in Paris, I would like to share with you a few thoughts.

We have been talking with companies in countries like Paraguay and Angola, that could possibly become ramp providers in those countries. Also, based on our own experience in passing the Fiat Connect compliance review (regulation review, KYB, contract signatures and infosec review), we know what a company must do to be Fiat Connect Compliant. Finally, we started developing a few tools to facilitate our CICO operation. Like, a Fiat Connect compliant web based client where people can exchange from any wallet .

If we further developed these tools into an Open Source project that new ramp providers could easily implement in their own countries, this could facilitate the creation of new ramp providers in countries that the big ramp providers have difficulty getting in, like Paraguay, Angola, Uruguay, Ecuador, etc… Also, it could help the Valora team, because they have an implementation pipeline to handle. And they could choose which ones to implement next based on the performance of the new ramp providers with On Chain data. Finally, the open source project could also come with documentation on how to operate a ramp, like the business model and margins, what tools to use (multisig, crosschain conversion, liquidation for fiat money etc…)

We submitted this project to a Prezenti Grant. But I would like to consult the community on it. Would you like to see it happening? Would you like to start an On/Off Ramp operation in your country?

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Would Fiat Connect incorporate other stablecoins in other ETH related blockchains? Like USDC, USDT and EURC in Ethereum, Optimism and Base?

Spec changes would be needed to add support for other chains. There is a note on this in the spec here . You’d probably need to add a “chainId” parameter in a few places-- quote and transfer endpoints in particular-- and update the SIWE message. If this is something you’d be interested in driving, I recommend starting a GitHub issue on the spec repo it and soliciting feedback on Discord. We’ve had some success with that process for extending the spec in the past, see here for an example.

Regarding your suggestion of an open source web client for fiatconnect, I’d definitely be interested. One really cool outcome would be that fiatconnect-compliant CICO providers could be backend-only, e.g. they’d never have to develop or maintain their own frontend, since they could offer a fast and easy way to integrate (the web client) plus a more whitelabel option (the fiatconnect-compliant api, and the open source fiatconnect sdk). Unfortunately, idk how interested the Celo Foundation is on supporting the project at this time. Joe and I proposed the same thing a while back and they weren’t interested.

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Thanks for your input, Charlie. After we finish the Off and On Ramp of Celo assets, we can think of proposing the change to the Spec for Connect the world to become MultiChain.

Thinking in the economic point of view, increased competition would drive down prices in the CICO process. In addition, there are smaller countries like Paraguay, Uruguay and Ecuador that do not make economic sense to set up operations if you are an outsider, but that could be served by locals if we lower the barrier to entry for them.