Cardano Rumor Rundown MAY 15 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go....

Newly covered today:

1. The Cardano Development Update for this week is out. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-05-14/
2. The Cardano 360 team also dropped a video with specific mid-month Alonzo testnet updates. At the timestamp in the link below the vid lays out the various test groups and when they will participate. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1393258090703826944 https://youtu.be/5mPC4uLMdEw?t=532
3. We are seeing some small pools retiring. We’ll obviously see more and more of this as time marches on. But, here’s a salute to the small pools that gave it a go! This SPO also brought us poolpeek.com which we have covered here before. https://twitter.com/CardanoBudz/status/1393252321845465088 www.poolpeek.com
4. John O’Connor on CNBCAfrica! He gave a really good explanation of how Africa with it’s already very high adoption of mobile payment wallets can leapfrog the legacy payment systems currently in use in more developed countries. He also reiterated that Cardano will expand to five countries this year and 20 next year! https://youtu.be/RET8hIQQLUA

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. LunarCrush interviewed Charles and he gave us some more details on the Ethiopia deal and Africa: 1) the IOHK office in Ethiopia is merging with the Singularity Net Office (it’ll be 30-50 people...so pretty large presence); 2) Africa special to be announced very soon; 3) they will be doing fintech & govtech, 4) everything on the governance side is going to be upgraded across a wide swathe of African nation states in next ten years, 5) lots of possible use cases including supply chains in agritech, putting land on a ledger, voting, identity, reputation (i.e. credit), & payment systems; 6) Africa is like investing in China in the 1980s; 7) the demographics of Africa make it a really easy call to direct investment there; 8) charles said “Ethiopia, in particular, is very special to us and WE HAVE ACTUALLY CLOSED SOME DEALS...we’ll talk about those at the Africa Special”; 9) there will be security token plays in Africa in the mid 2020s since there are no stock exchanges; and 10) there is a big unannounced partnership called “the DCF” with a brand name consultancy we will recognize. Here’s the LunarCrush interview. All queued up to the exact spot for the Africa discussion--https://youtu.be/GWpqNPdOf9E?t=3804
2. Occam has announced that the Occam Razer IDO (Initial Dex Offering) is completed and that it sold out in 30 seconds. There was no lack of criticism for the way in which the IDO was carried out. https://twitter.com/OccamFi/status/1382377423757570052 https://twitter.com/DCdoso/status/1382406641404977157
3. Cardano and Ergo got some positive coverage in CoinTelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/life-beyond-ethereum-what-layer-one-blockchains-are-bringing-to-defi/amp
4. Thought: the crypto knowledge stack as to adoption is really tripartite: 1) technical, 2) crypto sentiment, & 3) legacy sentiment toward crypto (including financial sector, central banks, regulatory, and general public).
5. The Cardano Foundation drops the Native Token Registry! https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1382700374755323916
6. Heavy criticism of the Occam Razer IDO continues. https://twitter.com/DCdoso/status/1382464770398371842 https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1382677290916712448 https://twitter.com/LiquidLandon/status/1382439109763891203
7. Occam replied with an open letter. https://twitter.com/OccamFi/status/1382432862654369798
8. You can now get Cardano exposure in your 401(k) and IRA accounts via iTrust Capital. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cardano-ada-ira-401k-funds-113800620.html https://twitter.com/iTrustCapital/status/1382461184461271041
9. Santo Staking Pool will be launching “Skullys” NFTs on Cardano. https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/santo-blockchain-labs-mints-50-134500914.html
10. Yesterday was “Get ADA DAY” with the end of Epoch 259. I hope everyone straight killed it on staking rewards!
11. Now there is an app that will show you all of your Cardano NFTs. https://twitter.com/nft_craze/status/1383196757622878208
12. As always, we are the github champions this week. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1383087802305380359
13. Charles is right about the Doge bubble. This could be the excuse that the regulators use to go after the whole space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM9DWe3-glg
14. Here’s the Cardano Development Status Update for last week. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-16/
15. A Cardano stake pool is actually helping people avoid scorpions, spiders, & snakes in Africa?!? https://twitter.com/DenicioBernier/status/1383497821026807818
16. There is really good information about Cardano’s deals in Africa and its developer adoption strategy in this Cardano Chats interview that kind of flew under the radar. Probably worth a listen if you haven’t heard it. https://youtu.be/m6TeNLvMTXI
17. There are even Ouroboros Omega tattoos now! https://twitter.com/Coinfera1/status/1383560914
18. We just experienced a big flash crash in price. A prime suspect is the drop in hash rate in BTC due to the Blackouts in China. Is the crypto space ready to accept that Nakamoto style consensus on PoW leads directly to unacceptable levels of centralization? This has been the dirty secret of PoW crypto and its decentralization loving enthusiasts for years. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-drops-as-blackouts-instituted-in-china
19. Charles posted a somewhat cryptic tweet that read “Omega + Hydra + Mithral = GG”. The Ourobors Omega, Ouroboros Hydra, & Mithral parts we’ve covered before. Omega is a capstone rollup of Praos (2017), Genesis (2018), + Redux, +Chronos, +Ledger Combiners, +some other things from the rest of the space. Hydra is layer two. Mithral is trustless light wallets via zk-SNARKs. Guesses as to the “GG” ranged from “Good Game” (as in game over for competitors) to “Goguen”. See today’s video at the link above for more discussion on this. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1383792375860924424
20. Danger Will Cardanoson: we’ve got fake rare NFTs being minted in Cardano now. Always check the Policy ID. https://twitter.com/pool_pm/status/1383892319896621059
21. Today is Get ADA Day with the end of Epoch 260! I hope you crushed it! https://adapools.org/epochs
22. Hard wallet Catalyst voting is on the horizon! https://twitter.com/ATADA_Stakepool/status/1384204498009157635
23. IOHK is hiring something like 80 people. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1384116617588535303
24. Biden Administration in early stages of regulating crypto. But, the news outlet here is reporting chatter among securities lawyers that Gary Genseler (new SEC Head) will approve a crypto ETF as a means of throwing a bone to conservative law makers. https://twitter.com/HukAleksandra/status/1384261829463924744
25. Africa special going down April 29th, 16:30 UTC!!!!!!! That’s 9:30amPacific; 10:30am Mountain; 12:30pm Eastern, 5:30pm Dublin; 7:30pm Addis Ababa; 11:30pm Bangkok. https://africa.cardano.org/ https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1384587491190222849 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1384582745116987393
26. Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI (the first recipient of a Cardano CFund investment), says he just finished recording his segment in the Africa special which he mentioned was airing at the end of April prior to the IOHK announcement of April 29th. He also said: 1) ADA Pay may be ready in early May or maybe even late April; 2) there will be a big launch for ADA Pay and once the Africa Special airs “everything will connect”; 3) “people are probably not getting how big this is….but you will down the line”; 4) COTI integration with a major exchange is happening, progress is not as quick as they would like, but it’s progressing; 5) last week they released the possible designs for debit cards, they are even considering some designs submitted by the community; 6) and iOS and Android integration is coming along nicely and well on the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EorsiQfEV7o
27. For a little more background on the work going on between COTI and Cardano, check out these links. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJbMUHXmeOg https://news.bitcoin.com/cardanos-cfund-first-capital-goes-to-israeli-fintech-startup-coti/
28. It looks like Yellow Card and Payway are listed on the Africa Special website. Given their business models, it is easy to guess that they could be valuable in the Pan Africa Strategy. https://payway.et/ https://yellowcard.io/
29. Partnership with World Mobile in Tanzania. Credit to Reddit user /u/ricklepicklemydickle for originally finding this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6TeNLvMTXI&t=2242s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX3Fnb_l4zA https://worldmobile.io/ https://newslogical.com/cardano-partners-with-global-telecom-company-world-mobile/
30. Recap from yesterday: the Africa Special Announcements revealed some additional puzzle pieces 1) COTI’s AdaPay is possibly the larger payments infrastructure puzzle piece, 2) payway.et is possibly the local payments puzzle piece, 3) yellowcard.io is possibly the local coin exchange puzzle piece, and 4) World Mobile (not mentioned at africa.cardano.org AFAIK) may be the network connectivity puzzle piece. I think they are going to connect a lot of disparate pieces for us on the 29th.
31. Once again we are the champions! Not just of github commits this time, but also of total staked asset value. https://www.stakingrewards.com/
32. Rick interviewed CardStarter which is a Cardano accelerator. The interesting items are 1) it appears they are purporting to somehow insure their community backers against certain financial losses with caveats, 2) they plan to fund projects prior to token launch through token vouchers, and 3) it sounds like they are building a DEX called Card Swap. Notice that the “insurance” comes with caveats. They were very transparent on that point and people should take notice. Is CardStarter good? Is it bad? I have no idea. Watch the interview and form your own opinion. https://youtu.be/nIklWKtr_aY https://cardstarter.io/
33. The Cardano Foundation has adjusted its delegation strategy. This brings up a question: where does the balance lie between allowing Adam Smith’s hidden hand to work its free market magic and trying to help small pools? https://forum.cardano.org/t/the-cardano-foundation-s-delegation-methodology-is-changing/58465
34. More details on what the COTI/Cardano partnership will actually look like. Also COTI’s Trust Chain runs on a DAG. It’s probably high time we all understand WTF a DAG is. https://cotinetwork.medium.com/how-the-cardano-deal-can-grow-the-coti-ecosystem-some-personal-thoughts-8a6b495e3e3d https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
35. We’ve had really good reporting from the community on World Mobile developments with Cardano. I just want to take a second to thank you guys. Reddit user /u/ricklepicklemydickle first alerted us to the World Mobile developments and then youtube user Whiskey 1234 (love both usernames btw) let us know that he attended a conference where he encountered World Mobile and “asked them if they knew about Cardano blockchain and the reply was they were announcing partners at the end of this month.” Thank you very much for this intel guys.This is what Army of Spies is all about. Many thanks for your contributions, gentlemen.
36. Alko Sumatra Kopi is going to export 100 tonnes of coffee from Sumatra to China and track it all farm to cup using Emurgo Trace! We reported previously on the engagement of Emurgo Trace here and now it’s being put into action. https://emurgo.io/blog/emurgo-client-alko-is-the-first-enterprise-to-utilize-blockchain-for-coffee-traceability-in-southeast-asia
37. In Charles’s recent AMA, he mentioned that the Africa Special will be a Pan African event and they WILL talk about various deals they have in multiple countries. So, this tells us they do have multiple deals in multiple countries. That was a little unclear previously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP0JSgf9CU
38. IOHK’s Development Update for this week includes news that end-to-end tests of the ERC-20 Converter are commencing along with a mention of some oracle work under the Goguen update section. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-23/
39. The number of defi projects that have announced plans to be on Cardano just keeps climbing with Yayswap.io joining the list of Liqwid, Occam, and CardSwap/CardStarter.
40. Kraken publishes a “What is Cardano?” article. Says “...Cardano may not promise new ground-breaking features..” Oh yeah? What about native tokens that don’t require smart contracts? What about the EUTXO model allowing predictable and accurate local calculation of transaction fees in your wallet before you execute? What about a consensus algorithm that’s so good, another top 10 coin made their system derivative of it? That’s all standard these days? https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/1386038990864793607
41. There’s a new stake pool explorer on the block. Check out the geographic map and the epoch calendar. https://poolpeek.com/epochcalendar
42. First reactions from the “Ocean” are looking good! https://twitter.com/Saifadin/status/1386305951293075456
43. I hope everyone enjoyed their sweet, savory, and delicious staking rewards yesterday! https://adapools.org/epochs
44. In today’s video, we’re also going to go much deeper on how the COTI DAG works. But, don’t worry at all you’ll totally understand it when we’re done.
45. Binance Smart Chain has already laid out a very compelling argument that we’re going to CRUSH Ethereum. https://twitter.com/TheADAApe/status/1386583952668958720
46. Charles does a big interview with Forbes and points out the huge differences between a bonded staking system (ETH) and a liquid staking system (Cardano). This is highly overlooked. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2021/04/26/cardano-and-ethereum-founder-analyzes-the-newest-evolutions-in-crypto-and--blockchain-technology/?sh=6acb258e3e52
47. Charles also covers his projections about interoperability and the future converging on a “wifi moment” when an interoperable “internet of blockchains” emerges. In this future, it will be a race to the bottom and the systems that are too expensive to operate will simply be priced out of the game.
48. New Africa Special Trailer dropped. The narrator: “We are partnering with African governments…” That was PLURAL governments, guys! This is getting exciting. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1386772333902319618
49. The Africa Bird lands a few days early!!!!!!!! It’s a deal with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education to provide a Cardano ID solution and unified records system for 5 million Ethiopian students. Charles says there will be more news tomorrow at the Africa Special. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/business/dealbook/tesla-earnings-bitcoin.html. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOTRp3PQKVk. https://twitter.com/IOHKMedia/status/1387051830442553351 https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/04/27/blockchain-finally-comes-of-age-with-worlds-biggest-blockchain-deployment/ https://www.cityam.com/ethiopia-overhauls-its-education-system-with-iohk-blockchain-partnership/
50. We’re getting reports from Army of Spies member /u/ ricklepicklemydickle that World Mobile is reporting in its telegram group that it will be dropping some news tomorrow!
51. A new Cardano metrics platform has launched https://cardanowaves.com/
52. Today is the Cardano Africa Special. It’ll be at 9:30am Pacific, 10:30am Mountain, 12:30pm Eastern, 5:30pm Dublin, 7:30pm Addis Ababa, 11:30pm Bangkok. 1:30amTokyo. Go enjoy! We’ll recap it after.
53. In today’s video we also cover questions about the relationship between Atala Prism and ADA and who will actually benefit from the Cardano Projects with African governments.
54. The Africa Special made it clear that Cardano has a brilliant grand strategy for the developing world. As framed by John O’Connor this would be: 1) provide digital identity; 2) provide digital transfer of value; and 3) provide programmability of that digital value.
55. Mickey Watkins (CEO of World Mobile) added a step zero to the formula above with: 0) provide access to the digital world.
56. As has previously been mentioned, it was officially announced that Cardano is partnered with World Mobile to provide digital connectivity to people in the developing world starting in Tanzania. They plan to have 100k subscribers in Zanzibar by the end of the year.
57. This is just the beginning in Africa. John O’Connor had a nice tweet that very succinctly laid out some future plans. https://twitter.com/jjtoconnor/status/1387919060197855234
58. Coindesk editor refuses to acknowledge that Cardano has a deal with a national government, gets relentlessly trolled, then finally capitulates and decides to cover the Ethiopian Ministry of Education project. https://twitter.com/zackseward/status/1387744629693599744 https://twitter.com/HukAleksandra/status/1387788814022844421 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1387937546978545667 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1387939251275198466 https://twitter.com/Cshuggin/status/1387986678741151745 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1388113533435482115 https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1388192121006534657
59. The Cardano Africa Mini addition gives us more details on the actual rollout of the Ethiopia Ministry of Education deal: 1) all 700k teachers and a subset of the students who will get tablets will be registered in the first year; 2) all secondary school students will be registered in the second year which will bring us to 5MM students; and 3) the data will be used to analyze both students and teachers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKT_3clxeqw
60. If you don’t believe that Atala runs on Cardano please watch this video which lays out definitely and exactly how Atala runs on Cardano. Please feel free to wantonly debunk anyone on the interwebs who says otherwise. Thank you to IOHK technical architect Alexis Hernandez for this video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AbgzvOeb6w&t=31s
61. I don’t know if everyone watched the last few minutes of the Africa Special. But, I think a lot of people missed the section where John O’Connor said the goal of Cardano in Africa is to issue 100 MILLION digital identities in the next two years. To give you some idea of scale here, adapools.org shows a highest ever daily number of new wallets at around 71k. If we onboard 100 Million people via digital identity over two years that would be 136,986 people per day. ETH only has 150MM unique wallets to date. https://youtu.be/yRjj662kJsk?t=8615 https://adapools.org/analysis-query/wallets https://etherscan.io/chart/address
62. John also mentioned that all of the 100k subscribers to World Mobile in Zanzibar this year will have digital identities on Atala Prism. They will also be offering so-called “RealFi” loans by Q1 of next year that will be made via Cardano liquidity and will act as a bridge to real world value. https://youtu.be/yRjj662kJsk?t=8628
63. Charlie Munger thinks crypto is “disgusting”. That’s a wonderful thing because it tells you how early you are. This is especially true in Cardano which is a project that leads with empathy for the developing world. Will he still call that disgusting if we’ve brought financial inclusiveness to an entire continent in five or ten years. Probably he won’t say anything because he won’t have lived that long. But, you get the point. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/charlie-munger-calls-bitcoin-disgusting-and-contrary-to-the-interests-of-civilization.html
64. The state authorities in Wyoming are so far ahead of the curve it’s scary. Now they’re putting aside $4 million for staking. On the private side, Caitlin Long should be declared a state treasure for making a lot of this happen. https://twitter.com/Cardanians_io/status/1388756653311414272 https://decrypt.co/69390/university-wyoming-generate-revenue-crypto-staking
65. I will be in a tent in a beautiful place where there will be very limited internet access. So, no text format Cardano Rumor Rundown until Saturday. The youtube version has been pre-recorded and is scheduled to come out on the normal daily schedule: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnSP49DJf-G9E0VfqDdBCA.
66. There is supposed to be some kind of mid-month update on Plutus. Charles hinted in a recent update that everything is going really well on that front. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=786mOp2Xq7s
67. There will be an update on Mithril at the end of the month. You will remember from previous coverage that Mithril is a means to create trustless light wallets via recursive snarks similar to Mina. ZK-SNARK = zero knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=786mOp2Xq7s
68. Charles is setting aside $9MM to be shared by two research labs to be set up: one at University of Edinburgh and one at an undisclosed institution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=786mOp2Xq7s
69. Doge Mania might be hitting a new peak (as a cultural artifact at least) tonight with Elon’s appearance on SNL. There are many different perspectives you can take on how this might impact ADA. I find the following two the most interesting: 1) if the Doge pump is followed by an inevitable crash it could sour a giant group of new adopters on crypto; or 2) it might be a gateway drug that will turn a large group of new adopters on to better projects. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1390774840135766019
70. The Essential Cardano List is published by IOHK. (credit to /u/cascading_disruption for pointing this out) https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1390728385945550848
71. Cryptodoggies.org NFTs are now available. The website says 50% will go to a community voted animal charity. https://www.cryptodoggies.org/
72. For those learning Haskell, Check out this new video on Type Theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7blCeETJo8
73. Also, Lars puts out a new Plutus Pioneers video on Native tokens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VbhY162GQA
74. ADA is the most crypto of all cryptos. George of CryptosRUs pointed out in a recent video that he couldn’t find any trace of a VC firm owning Cardano in its portfolio in his search of the categories section on CMC. This makes sense if you know Cardano. Would freedom and decentralization loving Satoshi not throw up a little in his mouth to find out that VC ownership of cryptos was a metric people would care about in 2021? The lack of VC stake in the very decentralized and freedom loving Cardano only adds to our already iron-clad claim on the mantle of the most crypto of all crypto projects. Our ecosystem never sought to attract VC money that would only centralize ownership in a smaller number of hands. This doesn’t even address the current extreme centralization of block validation in BTC and ETH. https://coinmarketcap.com/cryptocurrency-category/ https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://www.blockchain.com/charts/pools
75. IOHK has dropped a new article on the status of KEVM and IELE. Grigori Rosu of Runtime Verification says a proof-of-concept of IELE should be ready in six months. This is a key component in how we get to the ocean of all developers as we grow beyond the pond. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/10/runtime-verification-iele-from-interoperability-to-universality/
76. Cardano saw a new challenger enter the scene with Internet Computer (ICP) debuting very high on the CoinMarketCap charts. However, a look into ICP makes one question whether they are really in the Gen. 3 Blockchain race at all given that available information indicates the blockchain runs via datacenters hosting standardized hardware and that those datacenters can only join the network with the permission of the “Network Nervous System”. You could say that the winner of the Gen. 3 Blockchain race needs to solve the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security, and scalability. If that’s true, then it’s arguable that ICP is not even competing in the decentralization leg of the race. https://youtu.be/zHl-oVPoX88?t=97
77. The new venture of Sebastien, Nico, and Robert Kornacki is announced: https://twitter.com/dcspark_io. That’s a hell of a team!!!!
78. The Cardano Subreddit hit 400k users! https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
79. Alonzo Testnet Updates. https://cardanoupdates.com/ https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1392457888636022789
80. IOHK drops a blog entry on the strategic partners in the Plutus rollout! https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/12/developers-add-muscle-to-plutus-smart-contracts-on-cardano-for-defi/
81. Does Elon’s move away from BTC (ostensibly for environmental reasons) hold promise for ADA? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392602041025843203
82. The case for Cardano to replace BTC with Tesla and beyond is building. https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1392806669810339851 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392950720979030019
83. Charles makes the case for collaboration with Starlink in Africa. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1392916783854616577
84. People are starting to realize what the real value of NFTs will be. It’s not in collectibles. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1392939118355783682

~Army of Spies