All you need to know about the lending industry

For blockchain to be a viable alternative to our current centralized financial systems, it needs to support a high number of transactions. But unfortunately, many are lagging behind non-blockchain options for actual usability. Celer aims to change this, and Celer network coin is right at the forefront of the battle.

Ever thought that blockchain solutions need to be better, faster, stronger? The Celer network developers would agree — and they’re trying to change that using Celer network coin (CELR).

Using new technological advances, Celer aims to create a hub where developers can make effective Blockchain applications without sacrificing security or decentralization. We’ll explain how Celer aims to do it, why it even wants to, and whether you should get involved.

For apps developed on the blockchain to be feasible, developers usually find themselves choosing between fast transaction speeds, security, and decentralization. This is also known as the famous “blockchain trilemma”. Celer was created as a solution to ensure they won’t have to.

The Celer Network is a layer-2 scaling platform. But that might not mean much to you, so let’s explain in a little more detail.

Layer-1 protocols are the surface-level architecture in the blockchain — generally, these are the parts that relate to transactions like mining, voting, staking, and more. The best-known cryptocurrency networks are usually layer-1 protocols, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Meanwhile, layer-2 protocols are built on top of the layer-1 architecture to add extra capabilities, such as the ability to make “off-chain” transactions (which don’t use the layer-1 protocol). In the case of Bitcoin, its Lightning network is a layer-2 protocol.

You can have layer-1 architecture without layer-2 architecture, but you can’t have layer-2 architecture without layer-1 architecture.

Celer is a place where developers on any blockchain can build decentralized apps (dApps), This provides more use cases for underlying layer-1 blockchains and their cryptocurrencies.

Since layer-2 networks like Celer build on top of protocols based on the first layer, they make use of the chain’s existing security and verification protocols. This allows them to focus solely on efficiency or new functions while the original chain worries about basic functions like transactions. 

One example of a layer-2 project is Augur. Augur is a Dapp built on Ethereum that lets you bet on the outcomes of different events around the world with your ETH. This is something Ethereum alone couldn’t offer and in return, it increases the demand for the Ethereum blockchain.

Since crypto protocols need to introduce complex solutions to keep their platforms decentralized, they often end up running slowly and less efficiently. This in turn makes it more difficult for them to produce more tools on their blockchains which limits their usefulness and can limit adoption.

Celer network’s native coin, CELR, is used to ensure liquidity, stability, security, and connectivity of the economic system within the Celer network, aptly called the cEconomy.

CELR is essential for the three following processes:

CELR is also used to pay transaction fees and make payments to service providers (who make dApps) within the Celer network.

Celer network was launched in late 2018 by a self-described team of PhDs from MIT, Princeton, and UC Berkeley — many of whom formerly worked for tech giants like Google and Amazon.

The first Celer Network token sale took place in March 2019 on the Binance Launchpad. It raised $4 million in 17 minutes on the platform, with Binance accounting for 97% of the initial trading volume. Not a bad start.

In the second half of 2019, Celer partnered with TROY to improve the platform’s layer-2 trading. And in February of 2020, Celer partnered with Polkadot to bring layer-2 scaling to a new blockchain network called Parity.

When CELR launched back in 2019, it was worth roughly $0.02 per token. Its value has mostly remained between $0.001 and $0.02 ever since. The price failed to increase dramatically after its launch.

Although there was a high point at the beginning of 2021, when Celer coin’s price shot from $0.004 to $0.02, it dropped down again soon after.

Not exactly the most promising growth path for investors.

However, as mentioned earlier, Celer has successfully collaborated with two major crypto projects. These prove Celer has some traction within the industry.

Another exciting development was the launch of Celer’s mobile gaming app, CelerX. In September 2020, it became the first mobile esports platform using blockchain to bring in more than $3 million from player winnings in a month.

It’s easy to argue that the performance of Celer network coin’s price has been lackluster so far, but if you believe in the mission of the technology, you might think it’s worth taking a look at.

If you fancy investing in CELR, you can of course purchase it on an exchange. But if you don’t want to trade your crypto for it you might want to buy it on loan through platforms like MyConstant. 

We’re a P2P lending platform that lets you use your crypto for a USD of stablecoin loan. If you choose to take your loan in a crypto like CELR, we scour all the major exchanges to find the lowest price on the market at any given time and make the trade for you.

A crypto-backed loan from MyConstant also offers:

If you want to dip your toes into a CELR investment but are wary about selling your crypto, sign up for free today and see what you could be doing with your crypto today.

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As industry-focused news outlet Crypto Briefing on Aug. 17, John Wang, NEOs director of Eco Growth, said that integration with Celer is under discussion. Celers platform is a solution that enables faster off-chain transactions both for payments and generalized off-chain smart contracts.To transfer value across the network, Celer uses its native CELR tokes. According to the report, community members say that Celer is fifteen times faster than Bitcoins (BTC) Lightning Network. Commenting on the development, Wang said:A public blockchain is more than a currency: it needs to have the infrastructure for lots of users to come to it to enable people to do anything.New prospects for scaling In March, major crypto exchange Binances token launch platform, Binance Launchpad, completed a $4 million sale of CELR tokens, following two other initial coin offerings such as the BitTorrent (BTT) token sale in January and the Fetch.AI (FET) token sale in February.Earlier in August, blockchain-based decentralized application platform (DApps) Tron (TRX) released a sidechain scaling solution, the V1.0 code, designed to enhance and ensure the supposedly unlimited scaling capacity of the Tron mainnet. This will purportedly let DApps consume less energy and run with higher security and efficiency on Tron. 2Comments Editors Choice

NEO, one of the largest and most promising blockchain networks in the market, has recently partnered with Celer Network to integrate a second layer scaling solution. Moreover, the NEO Foundation finalizes its 2019 mid-year financial report.Partnership With Celer NetworkNEO and Celer Network a partnership to improve the scalability and usability of the NEO dApp ecosystem for mass adoption. With this partnership, it will be possible for NEO to integrate Celer Networks layer 2-scaling solution and expand the usability of its dApps.In order to help power Celers State Guarding Network to secure oo-chain states, the NEO Foundation is committed to staking CELR tokens and become one of the major nodes on the Celer Network.The blog post released by Celer Network explains that the NEO dApp ecosystem needed to solve the scalability challenge. In order to do so, the blockchain network decided to work with NEO and fix this issue.NEO Foundations H1 Financial ReportThe NEO Foundation released its 2019 related to the NEO Foundation holdings in GAS and NEO, investment funds and other assets. The report also provides information about the expenditures of the foundation.The NEO Foundation spent 566,553 NEO and 62,118 GAS in order to motivate NEO core developers and support the operations of the Foundation and its global development. This is equal to over $9.97 million in NEO coins.The Foundation has also revealed they have invested 126,125 NEO in other blockchain projects. 104,358 NEO were deployed to motivate the growth of the NEO ecosystem. These two items are equal to $4.06 million.In addition to it, the NEO Foundation held 43,664,133 NEO and 4,123,533 FAS. These assets were valued at $745,750,676. The NEO the Foundation holds is equal to over 60% of the current circulating supply.They also registered other assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ontology (ONT), Ontology Gas (ONG), USD and CNY. These assets were valued at $78.6 million.With the addition of hedge funds, the total valuation of the funds held by the Foundation reaches $871 million.NEO Amsterdam HackathonFinally, the is currently planning to deploy a secure messaging app to the MainNet. The hackathon was held on September 4th and it was held in coordination with the Delft University of Technology and the University of Twente.Users had to create a messenger application such as WhatsApp or Telegram in a decentralized manner. Moreover, there should have been a focus on privacy.The winning version of the application is expected to be deployed to the NEO MainNet. At the same time, they will also be working with NeoBlocks founder and COZ member, Thomas Lobker.

Off-chain scaling has been one of the more popular solutions that are being considered for the issue of low throughputs on modern decentralized blockchains. Second layer platforms that would take most of the load off the actual blockchain can create an environment where it’s possible to exchange cryptocurrency in a fast, easy, and secure manner. One such platform recently saw itself become Binance Launchpad’s third ICO and is being touted as the next best thing in crypto. The name of this platform is Celer Network and we’ll be taking a closer look at its features and prospects in this article.Celer Network is a project that wants to provide an infrastructure for development of highly scalable, decentralized applications. Unlike with other two Binance Launchpad projects, Celer’s idea is nothing really new and has been addressed by several other cryptocurrency projects. Check out our review of Fetch.ai and Bittorrent token – first and second ICO launched by Binance Launchpad.Lightning Network or RSK for Bitcoin, Raiden Network or Plasma for Ethereum, and blockchain agnostic protocols like GEO, Loom, and others have all delved deep in the idea of providing off-chain solutions for issues like scalability, privacy, liquidity etc.Celer’s focus will be on scalability, looking to improve the throughput of many crypto blockchains. The project is blockchain-agnostic, meaning that its application won’t be limited to a single decentralized ledger. “It enables everyone to quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and incentive-aligned cryptoeconomics,” to quote the project themselves.Overall, second layer platforms have solidified themselves as popular solutions for known blockchain ailments. By moving most of the transaction activity off-chain and then simply emitting the final balances on-chain, it’s possible to scale a decentralized blockchain network to where it’s capable of handling millions of transactions per second. Celer is confident that on-chain solutions won’t bring the desired global throughputs to future decentralized blockchains and are proposing to solve this problem with their off-chain platform. Celer Network is not a standalone blockchain but a networked system running on top of existing and future blockchains. Its architecture is named Cstack; this architecture will be layered to enable faster development/maintenance. As such, Celer Network will have four main layers:cRoute – This layer is in charge of value transfer routing. It uses DBR (distributed balanced routing) to distribute payment traffic in a decentralized and trust-free manner. cRoute is transparent, decentralized, and can achieve 15x greater throughput than Raiden or the Lightning Network.cOS – This layer is the project’s off-chain Dapp development framework/ mobile-based off-chain operating system. It provides design patterns and standardization, enabling developers to handle operation, storage, disputes, and tracking of the off-chain infrastructure.cChannel – This layer is a sidechain suite that provides liquidity and assists rapid state transitions. eChannel is a generalized state channel which utilized DAG technology to support off-chain state transactions. This layer allows gaming applications, exchanges, insurance platforms, and other high throughput applications to function on Celer Network.cApps – Application layer of the ecosystem. Designed to scale and maintain user privacy.First launched token by Binance’s token sales platform was BTT – read our price prediction for Bittorrent token.Celer Network’s layered architecture is cleanly split up to allow for rapid evolution of each individual component. With its generalized state channel and sidechain suite that support fast and generic off-chain state transitions, its value transfer routing mechanism that can outperform other popular state-of-the-art solutions, its development framework and runtime environment for off-chain applications and its new cryptoeconomic model that provides network effect, stable liquidity, and high availability for the off-chain ecosystem, many see it as the solution that will unlock internet-level blockchain scalability.Celer Network token was given the ticker CELR and is of the ERC-20 standard. It has a total supply of 10 billion CELR and 6% of that were sold in a public ICO that was held on March 19th, 2019. The ICO was a one-time only event and all tokens were sold out within seconds, with the project accumulating $4 million worth of sales.  ICO investors were required to use BNB to purchase their CELR.One interesting thing about the ICO was the token price; each CELR was priced at $0.0067 per token. Public investors will be pleased to hear that his price didn’t differ much from the token’s seed sale price (11.5% of tokens were sold during this stage), which sat at $0.0065. Also worth noting is the private sale (15.5% tokens allocated) which saw the tokens go for $0.0150; all of this implies that investors should be discouraged from dumping their tokens early, meaning that the price should remain stable. Naturally this only works in theory as CELR price dropped significantly in just a couple of days since the ICO. The token currently sits at just above $0.002 which shows us that someone did in fact dump their tokens onto the market. That “someone” might be coming from one of the groups that were handed the rest of the CELR supply:Remaining 25% will be handed out to Celer nodes as mining rewards.The token will be used to drive the network’s economy (called cEconomy) and perform the following services:This economy will look to provide stable liquidity and availability to every member of the ecosystem and will include a proof of liquidity commitment, liquidity backing auction, and state guardian network.Celer Network introduces a consensus algorithm called Proof of Liquidity Commitment (PoLC). Liquidity can become a problem for off-chain scaling, and the project introduces this type of mining to incentivize liquidity providers (called Network Liquidity Providers or NLBs) into locking their liquidity into “dumb boxes” or Collateral Commitment Contracts (CCCs). While their funds are in these boxes, they can only be used to supply Celer Network’s liquidity.Liquidity Backing Auction (LiBA) is another element of the project’s economy, enabling off-chain service providers to solicit liquidity through “crowd lending”. Off-chain service providers who lack liquidity can start a LiBA on Celer and borrow liquidity for a certain amount of time; interested “whales” can provide said liquidity by bidding to stake their funds into a CCC and after some complicated mathematics takes place, one of them will become the liquidity backer. PoLC and LiBA are designed to make the process of bringing transactions off the chain simple and feeless.Final element of the project’s economy is the State Guardian Network, or a special side chain which monitors the entire ecosystem. CELR token holders can stake their CELR into SGN and become state guardians. Users who are going offline can submit their state to SGN’s and have them watch over it for a certain fee. Goal of SGN is to make sure that only the most recent states are broadcast onto the blockchain. This feature is similar to Lightning Network’s Watchtowers. The project recently saw the launch of the 2.0 version of their public testnet, alongside the release of CelerX, a layer-2 Dapp gateway mobile application/wallet. Testnet 2.0 (officially called Sirius) will see the project’s developers work on “refining user experience and expanding development framework features”. CelerX is a part of this refinement effort, as it represents a unique layer-2 platform for iOS and Android users. It contains several interactive games and even a prediction market which users can access and use with minimal transaction latency. The platform also features feeless transactions and off-chain smart contract execution. On the development framework side, the new Sirius testnet provides a variety of useful features for those who are looking to build on top of it:There’s more to the technology of the project which isn’t anything new or revolutionary but seems to be very well implemented and actively developed (project’s GitHub is regularly updated and development/community channels are generally buzzing). Near future will see the devs working on various aspects of the project’s architecture, before a full Ethereum mainnet is rolled out in Q2 of 2019. Fully functional network is expected in second half of 2019, with SGN and LiBA features set for their mainnet launches at that time. For more details, check out Celer Network’s official whitepaper and roadmap.Nothing really stands out about the project’s team, as most of the individuals involved seem to have significant experience with coding and developing. Most important members of the team are:Celer Network has made many technical partnerships with some popular blockchain-focused projects like AELF, ChainLink and QTUM. The project has received financial backing from various sources, including Arrington XRP Capital and FBG Capital. Perhaps most importantly they were invested in by Pantera Capital, a well-known supporter of some of the more successful blockchain projects on the market. Celer Network definitely stands out of the Binance Launchpad bunch mainly due to its relative readiness for real world application. While it’s still in early stages, it seems to be much closer to being implemented than Fetch.ai and at the same time doesn’t suffer from questions about its necessity that BTT struggles with. Ultimately, Celer is a project aiming to provide multiplatform scalability support for the blockchain market; whether or not their solution turns out to be effective and commercially accepted is only a matter of time.CaptainAltcoin’s writers and guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the mentioned projects and businesses. None of the content on CaptainAltcoin is investment advice nor is it a replacement for advice from a certified financial planner. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CaptainAltcoin.com

Binance Launchpad, the exclusive token launch platform of global cryptocurrency exchange Binance, today announced the launch of its next supporting project, Celer Network, a testnet deployed solution bringing Internet scale to every blockchain, on March 19, 2019 at 9am EST, 10pm GMT+8. Celer Network has created the blockchain industry’s first known solution to comprehensively allow developers and companies to build, operate and utilize interactive and low-cost decentralized applications that match the user experience of centralized applications. Bringing on Celer Network to Launchpad is also part of Binance’s mission in supporting and responding to the market needs in prioritizing infrastructure and development tools to advance robust utility frameworks and tangible use cases. “The lack of valuable solutions and good user experiences of blockchain-based technologies are caused by its limited scalability possibilities which have been a major hurdle towards unlocking its significant adoption potential to date,” said Binance CEO and Founder, Changpeng Zhao (CZ). “Celer is currently at the forefront of solving this challenge with the early demonstrations of its sustainable crypto economics construct and layer-2 blockchain architect powering it.”Through its blockchain-agonistic, layer-2 scaling technology and incentive-aligned crypto economics architecture, Celer Network enables instant, easy and secure blockchain transactions. Celer Network’s testnet currently hosts Ethereum transactions, and its finality latency, to be 20,000 times faster with zero-fees for smart contract transactions, which is positioned to unlock blockchain’s innovation potential on a larger scale for various real-world use cases and solutions such as interactive gaming, general pay-per-use services, non-custodial financial assets exchanges, microinsurance; and decentralized derivative exchanges, electricity power exchange and Internet services. This February, during its testnet launch, Celer Network released CelerX, the earliest layer-2 application platform for iOS and Android, backed by an advanced off-chain scaling platform where CelerX users have tested and continue to use its instant and payment-free application for the skill-based game, Gomoku.This is Binance Launchpad's third inaugural project of 2019 following the post-ICO era to help transformative blockchain startups raise funds needed to develop its products aiding in cryptocurrency adoption by providing them with Binance’s advisory resources and access to its ecosystem. Binance Launchpad hosts high-quality token projects, hoping to create a higher standard for the token launch market and continuing to help projects raise awareness and capitalBinance Launchpad continues to conduct a rigorous vetting process to select projects that are compliant, have strong teams and products with large scalability potential that benefit the global cryptocurrency community. Learn more about Celer Network and its tokenomics from Binance’s in-depth research report here: https://info.binance.com/en/research/CELR-2019-03-05.htmlAlso, join Binance’s AMA with Celer Network’s CEO and Founder, Mo Dong, on Friday, March 8, 2019 at 10pm PST to ask and learn about Celer’s tokensale and layer-2 scaling platform. Stay tuned for the latest updates via the official telegram here: http://t.me/celernetworkTo learn more about Binance Launchpad and pre-registration information for Celer Network, visit: https://launchpad.binance.com/Binance Launchpad is the exclusive token launch platform for entrepreneurs to bring the most transformative crypto projects to life, with the help of Binance users around the world. Projects accepted to launch on Binance Launchpad will have greater access to resources and support from across the Binance ecosystem.Binance is a blockchain ecosystem comprised of Binance Exchange, Labs, Launchpad, Info, Academy, Research, Trust Wallet and Charity. Binance Exchange is the leading global cryptocurrency exchange, with users from over 190 countries and regions. Capable of processing more than 1.4 million orders per second, Binance is the largest crypto exchange by trade volume and one of the fastest in the world. The platform focuses on security, robustness, and execution speed — attracting enthusiasts and professional traders alike. For more information, visit: https://www.binance.com

We are very excited to announce that Celer Network partners with Binance Labs as a mentor for the Binance Labs Incubation Program.Binance Labs is the venture arm of Binance and an initiative to incubate, invest, and empower blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, projects, and communities. Binance Labs Incubation Program is a 10-Week On-Site incubation program designed to identify and help top early-stage blockchain projects deliver something that has strong product market fit. This partnership will allow Celer Network team to share experiences and lessons learnt in the early product growth phase, technically empower the new projects with Celer Network’s advanced layer-2 scaling platform and organically grow Celer Network’s ecosystem.Celer Network shares the same vision of product market fit with a proven track record. Recently, Celer Network launched Sirius Testnet along with CelerX, the user entry point to Celer Network on mobile platforms. Within one month, CelerX quickly acquires 22,000 monthly active users, has more than 20% 7-day retention ratio and engages each active user for more than 12 mins per day. One interactive game application, Gomoku, in CelerX is played 110,000 times monthly, generating more than 4 million transactions on the testnet. Even though Gomoku is the only decentralized application on Celer Network and still runs on testnet, it has become one of highest-DAU blockchain applications and achieves the level of user engagement statistics resembles centralized applications. What’s more, Celer Network’s growth is truly global with users coming from 58 different countries.“Mo will be a valuable mentor at the Binance Labs Incubation Program as Celer has been focusing on product market fit and user adoption since day one. We also expect to see and will support synergies and new growth points amongst Celer Network and the project teams through their interaction during the program,” said Ella Zhang, Head of Binance Labs.Dr. Mo Dong, CEO and Cofounder of Celer Network comments: “We truly appreciate and applaud the efforts and vision shown by this great incubation program from Binance Labs. This is exactly what blockchain industry needs right now. We thank Binance Labs for the opportunity to onboard us as a mentor. We look forward to meeting all the new teams and sharing our experiences on product growth, marketing, community and technology. We will also look out projects that are good fit for Celer Network ecosystem.”Together, we hope to bring mass adoption to blockchain technology.Founded by four PhDs from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and UIUC, Celer Network is a leading layer-2 scaling platform that enables fast, easy and secure off-chain transactions for not only payment transactions, but also generalized off-chain smart contract. It enables everyone to quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and incentive-aligned cryptoeconomics. For more information, visit: https://www.celer.network/Binance Labs is an infrastructure impact fund and an initiative launched by Binance to incubate, invest in, and empower blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, projects, and communities. The mission of Binance Labs is to solve the problems that matter most to the ecosystem and change the world for the better. Learn more about the Binance Labs Incubation Program at https://www.binancelabs.co/.Layer 2 Scaling Solutions: Bring Internet Scale to Every Blockchain

It’s been brewing for some time, but 2021 is finally seeing established payment companies take the opportunities of cryptocurrency seriously, and among those leading the pack is Visa V . 

An industry that was previously plagued by volatility and speculation is beginning to see its enterprise-friendly side blossoming, and according to the card network, the opportunities are abundant. 

“The world of digital currencies and crypto has moved and evolved quite significantly since the 2009 launch of Bitcoin,” explains Nikola Plecas, head of new payment flows, Visa Consulting and Analytics, Europe at Visa. 

“Visa's strategy is to be a network of networks and really be able to originate and terminate new payment flows outside of card rails. We have made tremendous push into these new flows over the last couple of years with products such as B2B Connect, Visa Direct, Push to Pay – and digital currencies naturally fall into that category.”

However, this doesn’t mean that the world’s most famous cryptocurrency – Bitcoin – features heavily in the card network’s plans. Instead, Visa characterises the industry as made up of two distinct groups: conventional, untethered cryptocurrencies and fiat currency-backed digital currencies, often known as stablecoins, which are attracting greater interest from institutional and government organizations despite currently a smaller part of the overall market.

The former is seen by the company as a tradeable asset with limited industry potential – CEO Alfred Kelly described it as “digital gold” in the company’s Q2 2021 earnings call. However, the latter is where Visa sees significant potential for payments.

“We see these as having the potential to be used by consumers and merchants in the same way as existing fiat currencies are,” says Plecas. “And when it comes to areas of opportunity, there are many for organizations such as ours.”

While many use the terms cryptocurrency and digital currency interchangeably, Visa has chosen to characterize the area it is focusing on – the stablecoin side of the industry – as digital currencies. 

Visa’s digital currency efforts currently fall into five areas. Some of these are well-established and already contributing to the company’s revenue growth, while others are in the early stages and are unlikely to make a meaningful impact on Visa’s top line in the near future. However, they together represent a long-term view of the market.

The first is perhaps the most obvious: making it easy for consumers to buy cryptocurrencies, which has involved working with wallets and exchanges “drive acceptance”. This area earned a mention in Visa’s most recent earnings call as being the second biggest contributor of growth in its card-not-present excluding travel segment – the biggest growth was the surge in ecommerce.

Second is a natural progression from the first: enabling cryptocurrency to be cashed out to fiat. 

“We want to make sure that you as a consumer, once you exit your cryptocurrency positions in exchanges and wallets can cash onto a Visa credential and then start spending at any of our 70 million-plus merchant endpoints,” says Plecas.

While those two are in full swing, a newer development is the third pillar, which is the use of digital currency APIs to enable banks and neobanks to add cryptocurrency options for their clients. This is in the early stages, with US neobank First Boulevard becoming the pilot customer earlier this year, however Plecas highlights that Visa is “looking to extend to other markets and regions” with the product.

“We quickly realized that there's potential to be the next gen of neobanks,” he explains. “They're also doing a lot of their treasury operations, paying vendors and employees already in stablecoins.”

In order to do this, the company needed to enable customers to “stay within their ecosystem when they also settled their obligations” with Visa, which is where pillar four, settlement in stablecoins comes in. This has seen Visa settle its first transaction in a stablecoin, US dollar-tethered USDC, this year. 

“Settling in USDC is very similar to settling in USD,” he explains.

“What we've done is an upgrade of existing treasury infrastructure operations to be able to receive these assets, because actually receiving them is now done through public blockchain rails. And as time evolves, we want to support other stablecoins.”

The final pillar, however, is the most long-term: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). According to the Bank for International Settlements, 86% of the world’s central banks are now considering the launch of CBDCs of one form or another, with more than one in ten currently engaged in pilots. 

CBDCs have a variety of benefits, including the potential to better reach the underbanked, and Visa argues that their implementation will require public-private partnerships.

“That way, they will be integrated in the right way into the existing payments' ecosystem,” says Plecas.

“At Visa, we want to make sure that our products and services are acting as a bridge between our existing clients and the new clients and blockchain rails involved with digital currencies.”

While much of this is focused on the consumer side of cryptocurrency and digital currencies, Visa also sees significant potential in B2B payments.

“B2B is an area of high growth, high importance and high interest to all of Visa. And we see that digital currencies can supplement and compliment some of the existing solutions that we have in the space,” says Plecas.

However, while digital currencies can impact the B2B space, and in some cases are already doing so, broader institutional adoption is likely to take time. 

Nevertheless, in areas with poor infrastructure, the potential of CBDCs in particular is strong for B2B.

“In some countries the infrastructure is just not there yet, and for these types of countries and regions, digital currencies can complement what we already have.”

One of the areas that is often raised in digital currency discussions is cross-border payments, with many citing potential speed and cost benefits. However, Plecas stresses that while there is potential, it is not a simple clean fix.

“The cross-border space is highly complex, and it has a large number of actors who are trying to solve for consumer experience in terms of end user price and time efficiency,” he says.

“It's not easy to solve for this, even if you're trying new technologies that would give you some advantages theoretically with this aspect.”

However, he says Visa sees particular opportunities in global marketplaces that bring together buyers and sellers from different currencies.

“In those instances, potentially digital currencies can help them reach some of these markets in a more time and cost efficient way.”

Daniel is Founder and CEO of FXC Intelligence, a financial data company specializing in the cross-border payments, cards and ecommerce industries. Daniel is a leading

Daniel is Founder and CEO of FXC Intelligence, a financial data company specializing in the cross-border payments, cards and ecommerce industries. Daniel is a leading influencer in the cross-border payments space globally. He is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and provide insights and data on the sector. His weekly industry newsletter is the most widely read in the international payments market.

What makes Celer different? Please read our 2018 Annual Report — Part I Technology Innovation.As the new year approaches, Celer Network team wishes everyone a wonderful new year! Thank you all for your continued support. Since we first came out of stealth in Q1 2018 with some early supporters, we have seen significant growth in Celer Network’s vision, technology, team and community. We would like to share our 2018 highlights with all of you! Our Annual Report 2018 is composed of four parts:In the next four days, we will release each part separately. 🙌Celer Network aims to bring Blockchain technology to mass adoption. It is an Internet-scale, trust-free, and privacy-preserving off-chain scaling platform where everyone can quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications. It provides unprecedented performance and flexibility through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and a crypto economics model designed based on game theory principles to bring essential value to the off-chain ecosystem.Celer Network is founded by PhDs from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and UIUC and has an all-star engineering team with years of industry experiences from top startups or tech giants like Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, HP and more.Celer Network continues to lead the technology innovation in the space of off-chain (or “layer-2”) infrastructure with many the world’s first: we led the cutting-edge research and development of layer-2 scaling; we delivered the world’s most advanced off-chain scaling Testnet; we released cWallet: the first-ever mobile wallet supporting Celer Network; we released first-ever mobile native off-chain SDK; we delivered on our promise of being “blockchain agnostic” by supporting two architecturally very different blockchains, Ethereum and DFINITY, at the same time.On the research front, we were the first to propose a complete technology and crypto economics architecture for the layer-2 scaling space. We were the first to publish a full spec of off-chain smart contract design and a three-layered off-chain technology architecture. We also introduce the first-ever layer-2 crypto economics design with the CELR token driving State Guardian Network, Proof of Liquidity Commitment and Liquidity Backing Auction (CESC talk). These mechanisms together solve the fundamental challenges of state availability, data connectivity and liquidity shortage. Our crypto economics model is now widely recognized by the entire community with our submission accepted by high-profile academic and developer conferences like CESC and Ethereum Devcon 4.We have also launched Celer Network’s first production-grade Testnet with code name Centauri (as the closest star system to earth). Centauri is the world’s first off-chain scaling Testnet with multi-hop generalized state channel network support. There is no other system running in the world where end users can be seamlessly connected together by a generalized state channel network and run general purpose off-chain smart contracts. Centauri is currently running on top of Ethereum’s Ropsten Testnet with both ETH and ERC-20 support. Not only being the first, Centauri’s transaction performance gain is a stunning 20,000X improvement: a transaction on Celer takes only about 25ms to 100% finality while an Ethereum layer-1 transaction usually takes more than 450s (30 confirmations) to be considered final on major exchanges. This level of latency reduction will directly translate to entirely revolutionized blockchain user experience. As for TPS, Celer Network keeps a horizontal scaling paradigm and therefore can increase TPS simply by adding more nodes.Along with the Testnet, we released Celer Network SDK on three platforms: Android, iOS and a Go client. With these SDKs, developers can build a long list of off-chain dApps including pay-per-use micro-services with SLA guarantee, instant machine to machine IoT payment and services, prediction market and decentralized assets exchanges with instant off-chain order matching, non-custodian hybrid exchanges, highly interactive blockchain games (such as Blackjack, Monopoly, Chess and Texas Hold’em), online micro auctions, micro insurance and many more. We would like to highlight that we are the world’s first to deliver a mobile native off-chain transaction SDK as we believe mobile platforms will be a prevailing platform for blockchain application adoption. You can access our SDK for Android here and for iOS here.Leveraging the Celer Network SDK, we have built and released alpha version of cWallet, the first-ever mobile wallet built with Celer Network support. Blockchain applications are in desperate need of good UX and many of the UX challenges are deeply rooted in the lack of scalability today. We have a focus on end user access to Celer platform from day 1.With cWallet, we confidently show that Celer Network Testnet is not an “obscure black console” or some exciting numbers on a website. Instead, Celer Network is something every user can touch and try today with instant off-chain payment and highly interactive fun games. See a video demo of cPay and cGomoku. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedbacks from the community. cWallet serves as not only an entry point to Celer Network, but also a reference design for our future crypto wallet partners to quickly provide a pattern for our partners to integrate with Celer Network. Finally, we have used cWallet to collect important feedbacks from users in terms of onboarding Celer Network platform and that has helped us to design a better user experience to onboard new users to the crypto world.Celer Network set out to a general layer-2 platform that brings Internet scale to every blockchain. We are delivering our promise by supporting multiple blockchains with drastically different architectures. We currently support all EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Ethereum, Thunder Token and Oasis Labs, and also support an entirely different programming paradigms proposed by DFINITY. However, with our cChannel abstraction, users and developers interacting with upper layer APIs won’t notice the differences in the underlying blockchains, and can focus on just building and using better apps. This layered abstraction brings a new level of interoperability that makes Celer Network a potential “narrow waist” in the broader blockchain ecosystem like TCP/IP is for the Internet architecture. Checkout our smart contract open source repo here.We have always believed that user adoption is paramount for blockchain’s progression and is the only way to progress to the next phase of blockchain industry. To this end, we released our user-facing app cWallet alpha on Android and iOS platform. cWallet allows users to access to cApps: cPay, a simple payment app with instant transaction and no fee; cGomoku, a board game where you can bet some testnet ETH with your friends on the outcome of the game, in an entirely trust-free way.Also, come and celebrate holidays with Celer Network by participating our cGomoku Pop-up Challenge and win ETH. Thank you for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow for our Part II update: Product Market Fit and User Adoption. Happy New Year!! 🙌Layer 2 Scaling Solutions: Bring Internet Scale to Every Blockchain

CELR Token’s IEO was successfully finished on 19 March 2019 at Binance Launchpad. About 3 thousand people out of 39 thousand interested investors became the happy owners of this asset. Will it rise in price? Let’s try to find out. Contents1 What Is Celer Network?1.1 CELR Token – Short Description1.2 Tokensale on Binance Launchpad2 CELR Token Price Prediction 2019-2020 This platform is designed to solve the problem of insufficient scalability inherent in modern blockchains. This is a nonstandard network that exists on top of other blockchains (already functioning and future ones). It is based on the off-chain scaling technology and allows one to create and use decentralized applications. Proof of Liquidity Commitment (protocol for the confirmation of liquidity obligations). This is a virtual mining, which is designed to maintain liquidity in the offline mode; Liquidity Backing Auction (auction to support liquidity). Using this mechanism, providers can directly request liquidity through lending. Lenders compete by setting credit terms (more or less acceptable). State Guardian Network (public trusteeship network). It is designed to ensure the availability of data in the offline mode. The platform’s token is used for rewarding users in the PoLC mechanism it also plays a significant role in Liquidity Backing Auction and State Guardian Network. It is an ERC20 token on Ethereum. During the tokensale on March 19, 2019, the exchange again experienced cache overload problems, as was the case with BitTorrent. Chief Binance tweeted that some users had such a problem and the next time they would try to apply a new model. However, sales were completed very quickly, in 17 minutes, although the record of Fetch.AI (11 minutes) was not beaten. The platform has a powerful team consisting of PhDs, people with broad experience from well-known startups or tech giants like Amazon and Google. It has been also partnered with many blockchain/crypto companies, including Waves, IoTeX, Quarkchain, Blockchain Global, etc. In addition, the token has become one of the few that have been selected for sale on Binance Launchpad. We can conclude that the management of the exchange sees it as a coin with high potential. However, according to CryptoPotato, the project has serious challengers on the market (in terms of solving scalability issue). Lighting Network is the most illustrious among them. So it will be a laborious task for the platform to get mass adoption. On March 25, the cryptocurrency was listed on Binance. #Binance Lists @CelerNetwork Token ($CELR) and Completes Distribution of $CELRhttps://t.co/CzGdwH847F pic.twitter.com/fyggkeCcz2 CELR’s price at the tokensale was 0.0067, at the time of writing it was traded approx. at $0.03. We expect price growth to $0.45 mark, then it may plunge to $0.03. However, in long-term it may rise up to $0.06 and higher (especially in 2020). Disclaimer. This forecast is based on our observations and shouldn’t be used as a guidance for investment activity. Be judicious and always do your own analysis. We simply highlighted key points worth to pay attention at. Celer Network (CELR) Token Price Prediction 2019, 20204.9 (97.14%) 7 votes

One of the most successful Binance IEOs, Celer Network aims to offer a scalable blockchain environment. 3 min Celer Network (CELR) unrolled its mainnet on July 8, keeping up with the previously announced deadline. The project, which received publicity by becoming one of the IEOs on Binance Launchpad, aims to create a fast, scalable blockchain 2CELR market prices stabilized around $0.016, dropping below the 2-cent mark. Binance remains the chief market for CELR activity. With the mainnet launch and a different mode of token transfers, CELR may see more active trading.Celer Network aims to build a new environment for developers and users, and bring new speed and scalability to distributed apps.https://twitter.com/no89thkey/status/1148102528057241600The project gained from showing up on the stage as 2019 arrived with significant price appreciation for most digital assets. July is also a month where multiple projects decided to move onto their mainnet stage, after long months of waiting during the bear market.The speed of Celer Network hinges on a second-layer solution, or transactions that are settled off-chain, then secured on the main blockchain. CelerX is the addition to the blockchain ecosystem, which offers crypto payment incentives for playing skills-based games.Unfortunately, CELR is not the most successful IEO token for Binance, as its Bitcoin (BTC) price is even below the mark for the private sale.https://twitter.com/Hala_2000h/status/1148131540188237824But IEO tokens and new projects are still in the price discovery stage, and it is possible CELR market prices make a move in the future. So far, the upcoming mainnet has failed to create hype, as CELR is still volatile because of its still-establishing trading.CELR is also near lows against Bitcoin (BTC) at 137 Satoshi, sliding gradually from the initial peak above 600 Satoshi. The asset also seems to be awaiting an altcoin season, where most assets appreciate in BTC terms.CELR may also benefit from the participation in the MOBI consortium, a gathering of blockchain solutions startups and projects:https://twitter.com/Andy9449/status/1147417228339318784Celer Network plans to offer the consortium its proprietary solutions for speedier, cheaper transactions. Talks of a potential partnership with Facebooks Libra have also been proposed, but are so far not confirmed.Reading now by Christine Masters, Yesterday Latest videos Events Top ICOs Raised

The Crypto Reporter™ • Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Industry NewsCoinspeaker Celer Network’s ICO Completed in 17 min on Binance’s LaunchPadIn an official release, the cryptocurrency exchange has announced the final results of the fundraising event for Celer Network. According to it, the entire sale was completed in a little over 17 minutes, raising the project’s hard cap of $4 million worth of CELR tokens. However, this is due to the new queue feature in the Launchpad.The sale for Celer Network (CELR) tokens raised more than $3.9M from 3,129 investors in the single session.Just under 600M CELR tokens were sold in a sale which completed in 17 minutes. Participants in the sale, which began at 14:00 GMT on Tuesday afternoon, bought CELR with the exchange’s native token, Binance Coin (BNB). Individual contributions were limited to $1,500 each.Total Token Supply was 10,000,000,000 CELR and the Public Token Sale Price 0.0067 USD what is, if you ask us, pretty big price.From Celer Network they say they want to develop a fast, scalable payments solution, which uses smart contracts to offer zero-fee transactions. Built on Ethereum (ETH), the project has already hosted seed and private funding rounds in 2018.CELR tokens were being sold at 0.00043400 BNB – roughly $0.006 – each. 1 BNB could purchase 2,303.35821 CELR tokens. Although this was higher than the seed-level price, it was a 55% discount from the private sale, as Crypto Briefing previously reported.Like previous Launchpad sales, CELR was oversubscribed. Some investors on Twitter described difficulties in participating, with many sale requests held in a queue and, ultimately, unsuccessful.More than 39,000 would-be investors tried to buy CELR tokens, only one in ten of whom were actually successful. Changpeng Zhao, CEO at Binance, has since come up with somewhat of an explanation, outlining that the platform experienced “capacity/caching issues” even with the upgraded version. He also noted that a grand total of 39003 people had tried to purchase CELR tokens, while only 3129 managed to get some.still had capacity/caching issues with this "upgraded" version. Will keep working on it for a better experience in the future.STATS: 39003 people tried to buy, 3129 people got some. 35000 people will be somewhat unhappy. pic.twitter.com/opJnNOeuhAWhile Binance Launchpad has so far proven its merit for launching fundraising events successfully, it’s definitely clear that there’s still a lot of work to be done in order to handle the massive demand of buyers.This marks the third successful token sale on the Binance Launchpad platform since the beginning of the year, and yet another one which managed to raise millions in a matter of minutes. The first one was that of Justin Sun-owned BitTorrent, which sold out in less than 15 minutes, while the second one was of Fetch.AI, which sold out even quicker.Celer Network is a layer 2 scaling platform designed to provide a scalability and efficiency boost to blockchains. decentralized applications. Celer Network employes a layered design consisting of “cCos”, “cRoute” and “cChannel”.The hard cap for the CELR is set at almost exactly $4 million, which goes in line with the Binance Launchpad strategy of setting lower hard caps than what we’re normally accustomed to seeing in token sales.We already wrote of how Binance Coin (BNB) achieved an all-time high (ATH) against Bitcoin (BTC) in the crypto markets. The new ATH of BNB is valued at 0.0036626 BTC. Further looking at the USD value, BNB peaked at a recent high of $13.75 and currently up 20% in 24 hours. Investors who had bought the dip on December 15th last year when BNB was at $4.50, are now in the range of 200% in profits.From Celer Network they said that they are looking to build a fast and free payments solution. Designed as a means to scale dApp activity on platforms like Ethereum (ETH), it uses smart contracts that effectively offer users zero-fee transactions. By going off-chain with DAG-based side channels, the project claims it can offer performance fifteen times better than solutions like the Lightning Network.All in all, it seems that Binance Launchpad is here to give ICOs the second chance. Though it has just started its functioning and it has hosted only two token sales yet, the community has already made a conclusion that thanks to Binance ICOs will be back.Celer Network’s ICO Completed in 17 min on Binance’s LaunchPadCryptocurrency is a digital currency that uses encryption (cryptography) to regulate the generation of currency and verify the transfer of funds, independently of a central bank. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third party adversaries.Blockchain 101 · Crytpo Currency Market --------------------------------------------------- Trezor: Hardware Wallet Binance: Exchange for Traders Ledger Nano S: Hardware Wallet Coinbase: Exchange for Investors CoinSwitch: Wallet-to-Wallet Exchange

Binance Launchpad, the token launch platform of the major global crypto exchange Binance, has completed a $4 million sale of Celer Network (CELR) tokens, the company wrote on March 19.The tokens sale was completed in 17 minutes and 35 seconds, with all 597,014,925 CELR tokens sold in a single session.As the company announced two weeks ago, the CELR token sale only accepted Binance’s own cryptocurrency Binance Coin (BNB), with each CELR token worth 0.000434 BNB or $0.0067 dollar equivalent. One BNB could purchase 2,303.35821 CELR tokens. The minimum investment amount was set at $20, while the maximum contribution amount was capped at $1,500.Binance Launchpad is an exclusive token launch platform of Binance that is designed to help blockchain startups raise funding to develop products targeting cryptocurrency adoption. As such, Celer Network represents a layer-2 scaling platform that aims to enable off-chain transactions for both payment transactions and generalized off-chain smart contracts.Previously, Binance Launchpad hosted two major tokens sales such as the Fetch.AI (FET) and the BitTorrent token (BTT). The BTT sale concluded on Jan. 28, with investors purchasing all 50 billion BTT tokens, worth of $7.1 million, in less that 15 minutes. The FET token sale raised $6 million dollars on Feb. 25.At press time, Binance is the second largest crypto exchange by daily trading volume, having been slightly overtaken by Hong Kong-based OKEx. Yesterday, trading analytics platform The Tie published research claiming that 90 percent of trade volumes reported by crypto exchanges may be incorrect.Intercontinental Exchange has added new coins to its cryptocurrency data feed and we’ve got the…Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has unveiled a new platform in Australia that allows users to buy…Sterling Witzke has been working at Winklevoss Capital — a venture capital firm set up… {"duration": "400ms","fill": "both","iterations": "1","direction": "alternate","animations": [{"selector": "#scrollToTopButton","keyframes": [{"opacity": "1","visibility": "visible" }] }] } {"duration": "400ms","fill": "both","iterations": "1","direction": "alternate","animations": [{"selector": "#scrollToTopButton","keyframes": [{"opacity": "0","visibility": "hidden" }] }] }

The CryptoDaily 21 Leaders Cryptocurrency Index improved to 54.06 on Saturday from 52.24 on Friday, a 3.48% improvement. The 21 Leaders Index is down 0.88% over the past 7 days and is up 7.47% over the past 30 days. Chainlink (LINK) led the gainers witThe CryptoDaily 21 Leaders Cryptocurrency Index improved to 54.06 on Saturday from 52.24 on Friday, a 3.48% improvement. The 21 Leaders Index is down 0.88% over the past 7 days and is up 7.47% over the past 30 days. Chainlink (LINK) led the gainers with a 14.5% rally to a market capitalisation of US$ 1.31 billion as traders continued to react to news the altcoin has been listed on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro. Litecoin (LTC) also contributed with a 12.4% climb, as did Tron (TRX) with a 5.9% gain.The CryptoDaily Large-Cap Cryptocurrency Index moved higher to 37.60 on Saturday from 36.74 on Friday, a 2.34% expansion. The Large-Cap Index is up +2.87% over the past 7 days and is up +13.25% over the past 30 days. VeChain (VET) appreciated 14.0% after the Chinese branch of Walmart reported it will team up with VeChain to address food safety concerns and traceability opportunities. Basic Attention Token (BAT) also contributed with an 11.1% gain while Pundi X (NPXS) led the laggards with a 0.4% decline.The CryptoDaily Mid-Cap Cryptocurrency Index jumped to 48.95 on Saturday from 48.20 on Friday, a 1.55% improvement. The Mid-Cap Index is down 3.47% over the past 7 days and is off 6.44% over the past 30 days. ZCoin (XZC) was up 18.6% to a market capitalisation of US$ 101.34 million as traders continue to react to achievements with the Sigma protocol. DigixDAO (DGD) also contributed with a 10.9% climb while Dent (DENT) led the laggards with an 18.7% plunge.The CryptoDaily Small-Cap Cryptocurrency Index improved to 2.85 on Saturday from 2.72 on Friday, a 4.78% improvement. The Small-Cap Index is off 5.63% over the past 7 days and is off 8.95% over the past 30 days. Celer Network (CELR) jumped 41.8% to a market capitalisation of US$ 58.97 million as traders position themselves ahead of the launch of the upcoming mainnet. Matic Network (MATIC) also contributed with a 29.1% rally and Menlo One (ONE) also notched a 15.4% climb.