Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, creators of Locu and former vice presidents at GoDaddy, have raised $6.5 million dollars in funding to develop an inexpensive blockchain-based social payments platform aimed at being accessible to all.

The platform will be called “Celo”, which in Esperanto translates to “purpose”, and in an initial round of funding, gained support from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Coinbase, Lakestar and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, among others.

Reinsberg and Olszewski founded Locu out of internet creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s MIT lab in 2011. Locu sold to GoDaddy for $70 million dollars in 2013, and the two founders became GoDaddy vice presidents.

Reinsberg and Olszewski will be joined at Celo by MIT professor Sep Kamvar, who co-invented “Eigentrust”, and led personalization at Google until 2007.

The Celo team is developing a system they say will make sending cryptocurrency payments “as easy as sending a text”, and which they hope will build financial empowerment in underserved populations. The platform will facilitate exchange through Celo tokens, a stable coin backed by fiat currencies to minimize volatility.

The new platform will target emerging markets where it aims to “remove the barriers for large-scale adoption of cryptocurrencies as means-of-payment.”

Celo notes that mobile money services have contributed to an increase in financial inclusion for many that are unbanked, but many of these systems are currently costly and fragmented. In addition, cross-border money transactions are still challenging.

Celo’s blockchain will be based on the Ethereum protocol and consist of a decentralized database that maps users’ phone numbers to the encryption keys required to transact with a cryptocurrency.

“We’ve been trying to be very thoughtful about the approach,” said Reinsberg to Fortune. “We actually believe that our system is very shock resistant and that it works well for the use-cases we’re pursuing. We’re happy with the results so far.”

The Celo white paper warns the proposition is “not risk-free” and could be derailed by a major, unforeseen, event. Celo outlines countermeasures for such an event to protect its success, saying that “simulations across a range of market assumptions will be presented in a forthcoming paper.”

Celo has an internal test-net active and plans to launch an early stage, public prototype of the system later in 2018.

The post Ex-GoDaddy Team Gain Substantial Backing for a Blockchain-Based Mobile Payments App appeared first on UNHASHED.

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