Celo Proposes Shifting Opera to ‘Long-Term Stakeholder’ with 160M CELO Grant

Publicly traded web browser Opera (NASDAQ: OPRA) announced that it has committed to being a long-term holder of Ethereum Layer 2 Celo’s native token, CELO, according to press release published today, March 19.

Celo Core Co., the primary developer and steward of the L2, submitted a governance proposal today outlining the plan to restructure its five-year-old partnership with Opera, namely proposing to shift the browser giant “from a distribution partner to a long-term network stakeholder.”

If approved by the Celo community, the new structure has Opera set to receive an allocation of 160 million CELO tokens — worth about $13 million at current prices — from the network’s “unreleased treasury,” meaning the tokens would not be purchased from the open market.

CELO rallied over 7% on the day on the news, bucking a broader market slump, though the token remains 99% below its 2021 highs and was trading around $0.08 at time of writing.

Quarterly to One-Time Grant

Under the proposed deal, Opera would swap its existing quarterly grant arrangement for a one-time token payout that initiates an additional three-year partnership between the two organizations.

In December 2023, the Celo community approved a proposal to pay Opera $568,182 per quarter in CELO — dubbed strategic grants, with each grant put before a governance vote on a quarterly basis — through Q1 2026, for a total of nearly $5.7 million, calculated at the time. The approved 2023 proposal emphasizes that Opera intends to hold and stake CELO, and has the ability to participate actively in governance.

These grants were effectively a marketing deal to increase the adoption of Celo DApps, namely MiniPay, specifically across Africa, where Opera Mini was the most popular browser at the time, per the proposal.

The 160 million CELO allocation in today’s proposal, also presented as “a grant for distribution services,” represents what both firms note is a shift to a more long-term partnership and commitment to the Celo ecosystem.

The allocation makes up approximately 27% of CELO’s current circulating supply and 16% of its 1 billion maximum supply. The one-time token transfer would come from Celo’s treasury into an Opera-controlled wallet, with Opera’s governance influence capped at 10% of total staked CELO under normal circumstance, per the governance proposal.

The proposal has already drawn scrutiny from some in the Celo community. One member of the governance forum, under the username Ginsburg, left a comment on the proposal earlier today, raising concerns about the deal’s structure and requesting further clarity from the team:

“This proposal effectively allocates ~160M CELO to Opera in lieu of a cash payment, which introduces meaningful dilution (or at least supply overhang) for existing token holders. I understand the strategic intent—aligning Opera as a long-term stakeholder and scaling MiniPay distribution—but the key question seems to be whether the expected user growth justifies the size of this allocation. If this were a market purchase, it would clearly signal demand. In this case, it’s more akin to CELO using its token as equity to acquire distribution.”

The vote remains pending before the Celo community governance forum. Opera and Celo also announced plans for a joint roadshow in Southeast Asia and Latin America “to drive grassroots adoption and grow the Mini App ecosystem,” starting next month.

Five-Year Partnership

The original partnership between Celo and Opera began in June 2021, when Opera first integrated CELO and Celo’s native stablecoins into the browser’s built-in crypto wallet, bringing cUSD and cEUR to millions of users.

That relationship deepened significantly in September 2023 with the launch of MiniPay, Opera’s self-custodial stablecoin wallet built directly on Celo, which has since grown to 14 million account registrations and processed 420 million transactions across 66 countries, according to the release.

Celo’s stablecoin activity and user base began surging in late 2024 as MiniPay drove adoption globally. Stablecoins more broadly crossed into mainstream fintech in 2025, with total market cap rising 50% even as broader crypto declined.

According to L2Beat, Celo has approximately $247 million in total value secured, making it the largest chain in the validiums and optimiums category — but a fraction of the scale of major rollups like Arbitrum or Base, which each hold over $10 billion.

Where Celo stands out is in user activity: per Token Terminal, the network currently leads all Ethereum Layer 2s by daily active users, with roughly 660,000 DAUs — a figure Celo attributes largely to MiniPay’s global reach.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.