Facebook Libra ‘Rival’ Celo Says its Mainnet Is Now Live

Celo, a blockchain project that has been deemed as a competitor to Facebook’s Libra project, says its mainnet is now live, following almost three years’ worth of development.

The project’s operators stated that the mainnet’s Celo Gold (cGLD) stablecoin was now available for transfer after work was completed by a group of what they called “over 100 independent validators around the world.”

If the project is indeed to go head-to-head with Facebook’s Libra, it already has a massive headstart, as its operators now claim they will turn their attention to “bringing off-chain prices for Celo Gold on-chain through a series of Oracles,” as well as launching Celo Dollars – a USD-pegged stablecoin – and the release of a Celo Wallet to the mainnet.

The developments become all the more significant given the fact that South Korean chat app giant Kakao’s Klaytn network, touted as a Libra competitor that may be “months ahead of Facebook,” recently joined the Celo Alliance, along with a slew of other big-name companies such as Paxful.

The project operators received congratulations from partner companies such as ChorusOne, who took to Twitter to state that it was “glad to be part of” what it called a “vision-driven community.”

One of the Celo developers announced news of a breakthrough on Twitter late on May 18, with the project’s cLabs later confirming the successful launch in a blog post.

The operators claimed that an “oversubscribed” Celo Gold auction had “raised USD 10M” from its community.

cLabs claimed that almost 4,000 people registered for the auction, which saw 761 bids placed from 132 countries, with an average bid price of just over USD 5.

In Libra-related news, Visa has recently stated that it may be open to rejoining the Facebook-run project, and says it is still talking to the social media platform about its digital currency plans.