Deutsche Telekom invests in the mobile-focused public blockchain Celo

German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom has invested in the public blockchain network Celo, the firm announced Tuesday. 

Deutsche Telekom purchased an undisclosed amount of CELO tokens and plans to stake them. Through doing so, the company’s subsidiary T-Systems MMS will operate as a validator using the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC), a scalable cloud infrastructure system the company developed.

According to the announcement, the OTC meets the security and compliance requirements of European regulations to ensure all financial services are secure and properly regulated. 

“Our investment in CELO, combined with infrastructure operated by T-Systems, allows our company to take a strategic approach to participating in a public blockchain network. We are able to secure the Celo network with our investment and our own cloud infrastructure while facilitating user onboarding and use-case development on top of the Celo network,” said Adel Al-Sale, Deutsche Telekom board member and CEO of T-Systems. 

Celo is an open-source global payments platform that allows users to make payments with a mobile phone. 

In addition to being a validator on the network, Deutsche Telekom will allow validators to send verification text messages using its SMS API. 

“Increasing the diversity of SMS providers on the Celo platform improves both the security and reliability of the decentralized phone verification protocol, which plays a central part in making the Celo blockchain easy to use,” the announcement stated.