Valora is a P2P payment app that allows you to send money like a text message to anyone worldwide. Powered by the Celo blockchain platform, Valora is the only wallet that enables trustless mobile transactions, with an easy-to-use UX, at near-zero fees.
Hi Everyone! I’m Nitya Subramanian, a Product Manager at cLabs and one of the makers of Valora.
We’re really excited to share Valora with you all today. We built Valora because we believe everyone should have full control of their funds without requiring intermediaries, and that sending money should be as easy as sending a text message.
With Valora, the 6 billion smartphone users around the world can reliably and trustlessly send, receive, and store value within seconds. This is because Valora is built using the Celo network (more at https://celo.org/) and completes transfers in Celo Dollars, so your value stays stable and can be transferred anywhere easily . And because transactions run on the Celo platform, transferring funds costs as little as $.01 per transaction. Transferring money internationally just became cost effective and accessible -- a huge breakthrough in peer-to-peer payments!
We’ve seen amazing traction for Valora so far. Since launching the initial Valora tests last fall, Valora has served more than twenty five thousand users across more than 100 countries, with hundreds of thousands of Celo Dollar transactions across the platform. It’s humbling to see how quickly people are adopting Valora in their 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.
Additionally, for our early adopter community we are offering a special rewards program! For a limited time, you can receive rewards for saving your Celo Dollar balance on Valora. Learn more about specifics and how you can participate here: https://valoraapp.co/3tkhFFA
A quick preview of what’s next for Valora: we’re working on more intuitive ways to add Celo Dollar balance, more identity & discovery features, and enhancements to the account key setup process to make Valora even more user friendly while still remaining non-custodial to give you full control over your wallet. If you have ideas for features you’d like to see, let us know in the comments below!
We’re super excited to have more people use Valora to trustlessly transact with anyone around the world easily.
Thanks for checking out Valora -- let us know what you think!
@jaketital Great Question! Valora is built on the Celo Blockchain Network -- In addition to giving you full control of your assets, this means that Valora is truly global from day 1, meaning you can send money to any phone number around the world.
@jaketital thanks for your question! Valora is different than Venmo in a few ways:
1) Valora works globally (Venmo only works in the US)
2) Valora is non-custodial, so you are in full control of your funds, so no banks or intermediaries. This is also why sending money internationally w/ Valora is so much lower vs. traditional means of sending funds via banks
3) Valora is permissionless and decentralized -- You can read more about this in the recent DeCrypt article about Valora here: https://decrypt.co/57246/celo-ra...
Hi, I’m Jean Regisser, an Engineering Lead at cLabs and one of the makers of Valora.
Bringing the power of Valora and the Celo Platform directly to anyone with a mobile phone, without intermediaries, is a mission we’re constantly motivated by. Making this vision a reality required some technical innovations I’m very excited to share with you all.
Intuitive
Valora lets you send money anywhere in the world using just a phone number. To make this possible, we built the Celo Lightweight Identity Protocol. It makes sending a payment to any phone number as easy as sending an SMS (and sometimes even cheaper!). It even allows you to send payments to your friends before they’ve downloaded Valora!
When you create your account in Valora, you’ll confirm your Phone Number using a decentralized phone number confirmation process, during which 3 randomly selected validators (part of the Proof-of-Stake Celo blockchain) independently confirm your phone number (expect to receive three text messages). Once you’re confirmed, your phone number is kept private on-chain using a distributed cryptographic privacy scheme.
If anyone sent money to your number before this point, the funds will be automatically transferred to your account after you confirm your number.
Secure & Stable
Valora lets you transact with Celo Dollars easily, allowing you to pay transaction fees in the same currency you are sending – a large improvement over the status quo for other crypto currencies.
Mobile First
With Valora, the benefits of decentralization are available to anyone. Valora runs the Celo ultralight client, a lightweight client syncing state with the Celo P2P Network, on-device to enable an experience where no centralized party is required to view your balance or submit a transaction. While we worked hard to make this extremely efficient. Additionally, Valora’s design is informed by the realities of wireless data access and smartphone capabilities worldwide -- if you’re in a low-connectivity environment (e.g. 2G) or using Valora on a highly resource-constrained device, just switch on Data Saver mode, which uses a trusted node to communicate with the Celo Network on your behalf -- the same level of trust as with any other experience, blockchain or otherwise.
We’ll be active here and would love to answer any questions on how we built Valora. We hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think!
P.S. we're also hiring! If our mission and making Valora even better resonates with you, come join us: https://clabs.co/careers
Swapping fees are ridiculous, I wanted to swap 6 cell coins from my stake celo.. not even 1 coin for swapping 6, not to mention it won’t let you Unstake my coins, the app won’t even let me delete it, says can’t delist number lol
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