0x expands partnership with Celo to distribute $4.5M to DAO ecosystem

The two firms were part of a consortium of DeFi projects that founded the financial inclusion and education initiative DeFi for the People in August.

0x and Celo have announced a joint partnership to allocate $4.5 million — consisting of $3 million CELO and $1.5 million ZRX — towards the growth of 0x’s ecosystem via its community-centric decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

The news follows an agreement penned in mid-November between the two firms to integrate a zero-cost 0x API functionality on the Celo blockchain to enhance the experience of DeFi developers seeking to access multi-chain aggregated decentralized exchange (DEX) liquidity services.

Celo is an open-source collective of tech, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) unified to promote greater global access to decentralized applications (DApps) and cryptocurrency payments via its mobile-centric model, while 0x is a decentralized web infrastructure that facilitates tokenized ERC-20 investing through the use of public smart contracts. 

0x claims that, since its launch, its API feature has enabled more than 21 million trades across more than 1.8 million unique addresses for a sum of over $100 billion in volume across popular chains Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Fantom.

Celo's head of ecosystem growth Xochitl Cazador said the new partnership is designed to foster "rapid expansion" of a "truly decentralized DeFi within the 0x community DAO."

Founded upon principles of decentralization, community governance and transparent objectives, the re-emergence of DAOs over the past 12 months has ignited the conversation for the technology becoming the next major sub-sector of mass growth within DeFi during 2022 and as such, accelerating the growth of an industry that has already established a historic total value locked (TVL) of $274.65 billion. By comparison, DeFi's TVL was less than $20 billion a year ago and virtually non-existent at the start of 2020. 

Related: DeFi can be 100 times larger than today in 5 years

In August this year, both Celo and 0x were founding members of the decentralized finance philanthropic initiative DeFi for the People. The collaborative venture, which included notable projects such as Aave, SushiSwap and Curve, among others, raised $100 million to support a panoply of financial inclusion and education schemes. 

Aligning with these collaborative principles in this latest funding, 0x Labs’ co-founder and co-CEO Will Warren said the Celo partnership is expected to have a positive impact on his platform's native ZRX token. ZRX is currently valued at $1.07 for a total market capitalization of $910 million, according to CoinGecko.