Introducing Valora

Today, cLabs is officially launching Valora, the first mobile peer-to-peer payments and remittance app built on the Celo platform! Valora was inspired by the idea that everyone should have full control of their money — without being beholden to intermediaries — and that sending money should be as easy as sending a text message.

After a successful pilot last fall, we’re excited to make Valora globally available for download by anyone with a smartphone. A huge shout out to the cLabs engineering and go-to-market teams for all of their work these past few months!

Anyone who has ever tried to send money to a friend or family member abroad has experienced the challenges of doing so firsthand: traditional money transfer fees can cost as much as 15% of the total transaction and take several days to settle. With Valora, you can reliably send and receive value from anywhere in the world, easily and instantly, for as little as $0.01 per transaction, making international money transfers cost-effective and accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. And because transactions run on the Celo blockchain platform, transferring funds globally is fast, secure, and cost effective.

To see this in action, check out a recent transfer made using Valora — less than 5 seconds to confirm a transaction and a fee of about 0.0001 Celo Dollars, paid in Celo Dollars (yes, you read that right — Valora transfers currently cost about 1/100th of a cent).

Here’s a snapshot of how Valora works:

• Download Valora from the Google Play or App Store
• Sign up for an account using your phone number
• Fund your Valora app with Celo Dollars (cUSD)
• Select anyone in your contact list to send funds
• Your recipient receives a text message to redeem their cUSD

In addition to sending a peer-to-peer payment, Valora users can choose to pay for goods with select merchants that accept cUSD directly, transfer funds to a crypto exchange, convert cUSD to gift cards at major retailers such as Amazon, Starbucks, and Walmart, or securely save their cUSD in Valora.

Since launching in pilot last fall, Valora has already been widely adopted: Today, there are twenty five thousand users (and growing!) across more than 100 countries, with hundreds of thousands of cUSD transactions across the platform.

People around the world are using Valora in their local communities — whether it’s to send a remittance back home to the Philippines, purchase groceries at a supermarket in Brazil, or split the lunch bill between friends in California. This kind of local participation is made possible by the open nature of the Celo platform and power of the communities that are adopting Valora to meet their needs.

To help early adopters get up and running on Valora, the Celo community is funding a rewards program that will offer CELO to confirmed addresses that maintain savings in cUSD, with higher gifts of CELO for those who save more cUSD. Learn more about how you can start earning CELO rewards here.

Ready to get started? Download Valora today and start sending funds to your friends and family, worldwide.