Textile, the self-service platform for onchain private credit, is developing a global lending pool on Celo, the leading network for programmable global finance with 600K+ daily users worldwide. By bringing on Tala, the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority, the pool will expand access to emerging market borrowers, with the goal of reaching users through non-custodial stablecoin wallets such as MiniPay, built by Opera on Celo.
The onchain pool, targeting $25M in committed liquidity, structured by Tribeca Park Capital, introduces an open marketplace structure where multiple lenders compete to finance the same borrowers, replacing the closed bilateral facilities that have historically priced credit in emerging markets.
Since launching on Earth Day 2020, Celo has facilitated 1.3B+ transactions, expanding access to accessible, affordable financial tools throughout the Global South. Textile launched on Celo in February of this year as the first self-service platform for onchain private credit and has since grown to over $500K in Total Value Locked (TVL) across 10 transparent credit pools serving businesses in Nigeria, Colombia, Kenya, and beyond.
Billions of people continue to be invisible to the financial system, especially in emerging markets. Traditional lending in these highly underserved markets has been constrained not by borrower creditworthiness but by capital structure and lack of formal lending history. Lenders originate loans and prove out borrowers, then institutional capital steps in through closed facilities that finance only a selected subset of repeat customers. Each facility sees a slice of the market, and each borrower is locked into a single capital channel where their reputation cannot travel. The result is predictable: limited competition raises the cost of capital, and end borrowers pay the price.
Textile’s open credit marketplace inverts that model. Built on Celo, the platform makes borrower identity portable, lets capital compete for yield, and allows reputation and repayment history to compound across pools rather than resetting at each facility.
Tala brings a decade of AI-native unsecured credit underwriting infrastructure built specifically for thin-file borrowers in informal economies. The company’s AI-underwriting models are built from deep, alternative, real-world behavioral data from 14 million borrowers and $8 billion in lending performance data globally. Tala’s end-to-end infrastructure includes KYC, underwriting and liquidity orchestration to verified wallets all through a single SDK and set of APIs making it easily available to all the family of apps/wallets on Celo.
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Here’s how the marketplace will work:
- Each borrower is assigned a persistent onchain identity
- A global pool provides liquidity to fund loans, with Tala’s AI models handling underwriting
- Repayments flow onchain back into the pool
- Multiple independent lenders allocate capital dynamically, competing for yield
- Borrower credit data is hashed onchain — no raw data is exposed
- Credit scores and history update continuously across pools, so a single borrower’s reputation compounds across every lender they touch
“Textile and Tala are proving what Celo was built for: stablecoin infrastructure that puts global financial rails on every phone in the world. An open credit market for emerging economies is exactly the kind of application those rails make possible,” says Marek Olszewski, Celo co-founder and Celo Core Co. CEO.
“Tala’s mission is to unleash the economic power of the global majority. By combining our AI decision engine with the efficiency of onchain credit capabilities, we make it possible for any wallet, app or issuer to be able to offer instant liquidity to their customers.” said Shivani Siroya, Tala CEO and Founder.
“Closed credit facilities are an artifact of legacy infrastructure. Once underwriting, repayment, and reputation can all live onchain, the natural shape of credit is a market, not a product,” says Tomer Bariach, Textile founder and CEO.
The marketplace is designed to expand. Future pool structures are expected to integrate Self.xyz, Celo’s native privacy-preserving proof-of-human and identity protocol — giving Tala’s underwriting a new layer of verified credentials on every borrower, including as a way to pre-qualify borrowers, and also unlocking new pool types gated by Self credentials.
The Tala lending pool will be live in Celo in the near future. Developers building on Celo can learn more at celo.org.