Valora

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!

How is this different from Venmo?

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

Amazing team and amazing product. I use it daily.

I have been testing the app for a few months now and I'm in awe with the user experience. Also, it masks efficiently the real magic going on: as a user I am in full control of my wallet, with no intermediaries in between my funds and transfers.

Hi Everyone! Jackie here, Head of Marketing & Consumer Growth at cLabs and one of the makers of Valora. We’re really excited to share Valora with you all today. And I'd like to highlight real life examples where Valora has helped people to define their own values. We believe it is a blockchain app for real people, and have a cool little video that features stories from all around the world: We hope Valora provides a new way to share what you value, with who you value. Please let us know if you have any questions & feedback!

I would like to see the staking, voting & delegating-feature within the valora app. I know these cool ways to take part in the celo-ecosystem already exist outside the app but are unreacheable with my technical knowledge. I think, background music would enhance the userexpirience with valora!