Cardano Rumor Rundown August 28, 2021

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Newly covered today:

1. Cardano competitor Ethereum suffered a consensus bug today (Aug 27) that impacted 54% of nodes. Apparently they were able to upgrade the version of Geth being run by a majority of the pools in time to head off a majority supported fork to the bad chain. But, the go ethereum developer in the link described it as “a really close shave”. https://twitter.com/mhswende/status/1431259601530458112 https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1431278258222338056
2. IOHK has initiated the testnet fork (Aug 27)! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1431286232278085634
3. The “go/no-go” meeting was today (Aug 27) on initiating the Alonzo hardfork combinator event for the 12th. The result was a “go”! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1431286232278085634

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. Wolfram CEO, John Woodard, drops a guest article with IOHK on NFT liveminting. The article seems to have a good amount of focus on the community building potential of NFTs. I think that could be a big growth area for the future. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/07/22/wolfram-and-cardano-build-communities-with-nfts-and-liveminting/
2. IOHK has released its Conclave paper on collective stakepools. https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/742.pdf
3. Here’s the IOHK Development Update for July 23! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1418635822987943939
4. Cardano received some coverage in the Motley Fool as an eco-friendly crypto! https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/cryptocurrency/articles/4-eco-friendly-cryptos-you-should-know-about/
5. Big lesson for future Cardano DeFi projects: Uniswap Labs just had to censor the Uniswap UI to ban synthetics of underlying securities. Bucket shops have been around for 150 years and illegal for 100 years. It turns out that you can’t do it in crypto either. https://twitter.com/Uniswap/status/1418697012095164420 https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1418961999539712006
6. Check out this new video of the World Mobile Team on the ground in Zanzibar. Doesn’t this feel like a better mission for our ecosystem than DeFi? https://twitter.com/WorldMobileTeam/status/1419051567878221828
7. Reports are coming in that Amazon plans to integrate Bitcoin, Cardano, ETH, & BCH in the very near future. This has apparently been a work in progress for several years. https://www.cityam.com/amazon-definitely-lining-up-bitcoin-payments-and-token-confirms-insider/
8. Adam Dean brings us open source code to accept ADA in your Woo Commerce store. https://twitter.com/adamKDean/status/1419495005983371264
9. Weiss Crypto has very good things to say about Cardano. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1419685634566938634
10. Check out this new bot that tweets every time it discovers a Cardano Giveaway Scam! The tweets show ISP and geolocation info for the scammers. Follow this bot and report the scammers! Brought to us by @nicknikiforakis. Thanks for building this, Nick! https://twitter.com/CardanoPhishing
11. The regulatory purge of stablecoins is getting into full swing now with Bloomberg running a piece on a DOJ criminal probe of the Tether founders. Of particular note for the Cardano ecosystem is that the first attack surface for regulators is the relationship of the stablecoin with legacy banking institutions. This is something that Cardano ecosystem stablecoin, Djed, may already fix with its own crypto backed reserve system. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/tether-executives-said-to-face-criminal-probe-into-bank-fraud?srnd=economics-vp
12. Nami Wallet now allows you to mint NFTs for no extra fees (only Cardano network fees) inside the wallet. https://twitter.com/NamiWallet/status/1420031000017608717
13. More pressure for Crypto regulation is coming to bear today in the U.S. This time it comes in the form of a letter from Senator Elizabethe Warren to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (in her position as Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council which brings together 10 different financial regulators including the SEC, CFTC, and the Federal Reserve). The letter was sent after a Senate Banking Committee hearing titled “Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?” https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/27/elizabeth-warren-presses-yellen-financial-regulator-to-manage-crypto.html
14. Stephen Wolfram does the first NFT liveminting event where he creates NFTs of cellular automata from the computational universe while live on stream. The first two created were “Crashing Waves” and “Down Arrows”. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1420087229104283656
15. A new Cardano NFT Marketplace is now live and receiving a lot of attention. https://twitter.com/CNFT_IO/status/1419655915226152961
16. Project Catalyst now has 30k members! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1420474342253678599
17. Emurgo has released an article about what we can expect from the Yoroi dApp Connector. https://emurgo.io/blog/emurgo-is-thrilled-to-announce-the-yoroi-dapp-connector
18. Reports are coming in that the new bipartisan Infrastructure Bill contains new provisions that might require a whole host of actors within crypto ecosystems like Cardano to report transactions over $10k. https://www.coindesk.com/new-infrastructure-bill-looks-to-raise-30b-through-crypto-tax https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-allies-rally-against-ignorant-new-tax-rules-in-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal-11627578844 https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1420724068286926853
19. But this bill is an even bigger deal. If passed as-is, we can probably say RIP to the Wild West Era of crypto (2009-2021). https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5307
20. The July Cardano 360 can now be viewed on Youtube. https://youtu.be/AG5DspF9tuA
21. John O’Connor was on SkyNews discussing the Ethiopian Ministry of Education project! He stressed that this was not a profit center for IOHK, and had a chance to refute the “crypto colonialism” strain of thought. https://vimeo.com/581137605
22. We are kings of the github commits once again! https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1421138529908842502
23. The differences between the currently dominant smart contract blockchain and Cardano’s upcoming smart contract architecture keep getting highlighted by dramatic failures of the former. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1421064543900418048
24. Don’t forget that registration for the Cardano Summit is live. https://summit.cardano.org
25. In case you missed the July Cardano 360 and don’t have a lot of time. Here is the always great Cardano 360 Mini! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1421803459997835266
26. Reports are coming in that we’ve got final language from the crypto tax reporting piece of the Infrastructure Bill. It’s better but not great or even good. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1422002228102107142
27. The Charles AMAs returned on August 1 after a brief break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKY6VwVq02s
28. A quarter million votes were cast in Catalyst Fund 5 voting! Apparently, this is over 10x what we saw in Fund 2. https://twitter.com/danny_cryptofay/status/1422253955816505345
29. Here’s a very good read on one vision for prosperity via CBDC and how such a currency should interact with existing blockchains like Cardano. https://twitter.com/RealNatashaChe/status/1422270993498705921
30. Cardano has been listed by Bitpoint in Japan! https://www.bitpoint.co.jp/news/info/info-2021080301/
31. Senators Wyden and Toomey are trying to fix the crypto provisions in the Infrastructure Bill! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-03/crypto-rules-in-infrastructure-bill-eyed-for-bipartisan-rewrite
32. SEC Chair Gensler gave another speech strongly signaling that a lot of stablecoins, lending platforms, synthetics platforms, and other DeFi projects are probably non-compliant in the eyes of the SEC. I would heed this warning very carefully if I were one of those projects. https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/gensler-aspen-security-forum-2021-08-03 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tusQLLCgrDs
33. The Yoroi Wallet is already making improvements in preparation for the dApp Connector release! https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1422905221793996809
34. We’re now up to 5 different states that are getting after BlockFi for their crypto lending activities. Reportedly, this includes New Jersey, Vermont, Alabama, Kentucky, & Texas. Probably relevant for those building lending solutions on Cardano. https://www.coindesk.com/blockfi-receives-fifth-cease-and-desist-from-kentucky-financial-regulator
35. Charles dropped an update to let us know that Light Purple Alonzo will come next week. That will bring in exchange partners. Mid-month there will be an update with official dates given for a primary date and a fallback date for triggering the hardfork combinator event. The fallback date will likely be one epoch (five days later). Part of this depends on how the exchange partners are doing with their integrations. Charles says it looks like late August or the first week of September. There will be a live HFC party where they will deploy “some things” minutes after the HFC. The Plutus Application Backend (PAB) might be integrated on something like September 10th. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y261_eImsE
36. Cardano’s closest competitor, Ethereum, carries out it’s EIP-1559 London Fork which creates a new transaction fee scheme including some burning of fees and a more predictable base fee with an additional tip option on top. While the long term impact is unclear, the immediate aftermath of the fork seems to be even higher fees. We’ll see if this is just due to high transaction volume at the moment. Of course, part of this is already solved by Cardano’s deterministic fee system enabled by its local state as opposed to the global state in the Ethereum system. https://twitter.com/Birdson64827145/status/1423324771303972867
37. Senators Toomey, Wyden, & Lummis took to the Senate Floor to plead for a vote on their amendment which would fix the overly broad crypto tax reporting provisions in the Infrastructure Bill. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1423381402905726983 https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1423413806634577922
38. The Toomey, Lummis, Wyden Amendment was then challenged by a competing amendment from Senators Warner, Portman, and Sinema which only excluded proof-of-work block validators and sellers of wallets from the tax reporting requirements. This terrible competing amendment was then immediately endorsed by the White House. This is a serious danger to our industry! Please call your Senators and ask them to support the Toomey/Wyden/Lummis Amendment! https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1423429377459736577 https://twitter.com/WardDPatrick/status/1423464991441702912
39. Charles announces the Alonzo Purple testnet is out! Many new segments of partners and others will be onboarding with availability to any developer soon! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1423704788512952331 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTExHbqVHAM
40. It turns out that Janet Yellen lobbied lawmakers on Thursday against the Wyden-Toomey-Lummis Amendment according to the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/06/crypto-bitcoin-infrastructure-senat
41. Check out this awesome “12 Facts” style article about Alonzo from Sebastien Guillemot form dcSpark. https://medium.com/dcspark/do-you-know-what-is-included-in-cardanos-alonzo-hardfork-changes-96cde16a8305
42. Senator Warner made not one but two revisions to his amendment to the crypto provisions in the Infrastructure Bill. Both revisions were good for Cardano since they included proof-of-stake implicitly and then explicitly. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1424040216961114112 https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1424074177770921992
43. Both Gene Simmons and Ted Cruz came out in support of the competing Wyden-Lummis-Toomey Amendment to the Infrastructure Bill. Gene Simmons has previously revealed his Cardano purchases. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1424097173172637697
44. After the Senate called it a day on the Infrastructure Bill Amendment debate, it sounded like there might have been some dealmaking going on among Wyden, Portman, Warner, and Toomey. The Senate will be back at it tomorrow at Noon. https://twitter.com/mikedebonis/status/1424143941914566659
45. No agreement on an amendment to the crypto tax reporting provisions of the Infrastructure Bill materialized today. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1424543439396429828
46. Senator Lummis (a co-sponsor of the proposed crypto-friendly Toomey-Lummis-Wyden Amendment) is holding out hope that they may be able to get a vote on amendments tomorrow. https://twitter.com/SenLummis/status/1424556793506635776
47. Charles is already planning a strategy for dealing with the bill once it’s in the House of Representatives. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1424561446973628421
48. Very action packed day today (Aug 9). The Toomey-Lummis-Portman-Sinema came together and proposed a compromise amendment to the crypto tax reporting provisions in the Infrastructure Bill. They were not able to include any section for exclusion of developers from the “broker” definition but did cover the previous progress on transaction validators and wallet sellers. https://twitter.com/SenToomey/status/1424777137500864513
49. Toomey-Lummis-Portman-Sinema sought the required unanimous consent, but their attempt was thwarted by a disagreement over $50 billion in defense spending. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1424832132204138503
50. Several co-chairs of the Blockchain Caucus have already written a letter to all the members of the House of Representatives letting them know of the dire need to fix these crypto provisions once the bill hits the House. https://twitter.com/RepTomEmmer/status/1424845416697323522
51. There’s a new CIP to create an off-chain metadata standard from Matthias Benkort, Michael Peyton Jones, and Polina Vinogradova. https://twitter.com/_KtorZ_/status/1425162918363111425 https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/112
52. The Biggest Lobster Trap Harvest ever!!! A hacker decided to harvest over $600 million from the Polynetwork Bridge. We learned this lesson in the 2016 DAO Hack, but it’s really time that people stop giving up custody of their coins. https://twitter.com/ksatyarth2/status/1425140128784084994
53. Senator Shelby laughably tried to claim he actually supported the crypto amendment in a tweet. The derision from the crypto community flowed like water out of the Amazon. https://twitter.com/SenShelby/status/1425142857199980550
54. IOHK’s “Essential Cardano” list of projects keeps growing! https://github.com/input-output-hk/essential-cardano/blob/main/essential-cardano-list.md
55. dcSpark is hiring for a few non-programmer positions. https://twitter.com/dcspark_io/status/1425490454787739649
56. We got some coverage in Forbes over the Alonzo date reveal. https://twitter.com/ForbesCrypto/status/1425409227594555393
57. Over $1 million in NFTs has now been sold on cnft.io. https://twitter.com/CNFT_IO/status/1425550638507769859
58. This graphic pretty much sums up all the Cardano criticism. https://twitter.com/SmaugPool/status/1425403742925565956
59. Emurgo has published an article about the status of Yoroi as the Metamask of Cardano. https://emurgo.io/blog/yoroi-wallet-what-it-means-to-be-the-metamask-wallet-of-cardano
60. We’ll get the August mid-Month Development Update today (Aug 13) and we’ll also find out the exact date for Alonzo! https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1425791321168568330
61. Alonzo (smart contracts on mainnet) is scheduled for the 12th of September! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1426182060683796483
62. The Cardano Ecosystem Infographics are still getting bigger and bigger. https://twitter.com/Coin98Analytics/status/1426051817876586499
63. The rankings looked a little different today! https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1426331710107619328
64. An insane amount of native assets have been issued on Cardano already. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1426692124448333826
65. We may see treasury guidelines on the tax reporting provisions soon (as of Aug 14). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/treasury-seeks-to-quell-fears-crypto-tax-rules-are-overly-broad
66. Senator Lummis is asking for requests if anyone wants to hear about what actually happened with the Senate mayhem. https://twitter.com/CynthiaMLummis/status/1426631432223481860
67. The maximalists of other projects seem to be really loving us lately. https://twitter.com/Bquittem/status/1426639546616254469 https://twitter.com/novogratz/status/1426757593737879552 https://twitter.com/joebirks/status/1426920500249481220
68. The Cardano Community breathes a collective sigh of relief that it doesn’t suffer from the incredibly high fees seen on Ethereum recently. https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1427006419463778307
69. The Cardano treasury is getting unbelievably huge at almost $1 Billion! https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1426789664338284546
70. Looks like 40% of crypto holders in Singapore have Cardano according to the Gemini 2021 Crypto in Singapore report. https://www.gemini.com/state-of-sg-crypto
71. The Wyoming Blockchain Stampede will be going on at the same time as the Cardano Summit and in the preceding days. If you’re going to Wyoming, you may consider attending both. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1427316556476866561
72. Apparently a “huge increase in user base” is responsible for the Yoroi downtime. That doesn’t sound all bad! https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1427283658432417794
73. The Plutus Mainnet Candidate has been released to the Node Team. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1427359174220996612
74. Weiss Crypto really loves the Cardano consensus protocol. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1427646299936014337
75. Applications are now open to be a local Cardano Meet-Up host for the Cardano Summit 2020. https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1427309534226300928
76. Anticipation for Cardano smart contracts keeps growing stronger as more and more ETH users are publicly venting frustration over fees and throwing their support behind Cardano. https://twitter.com/RandCorp_/status/1427473742742052865
77. CNFT.io is back in action after a brief period of absence! https://twitter.com/CNFT_IO/status/142808300944668262
78. The Djed Stablecoin paper and an explanatory article are now out. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1427933093210607619
79. In larger nation-state crypto adoption news (an area that is very relevant to Cardano), it looks like the Salvadorean Finance Minister is now saying that Bitcoin acceptance by merchants in El Salvador will actually be optional despite the language in the law. https://www.coindesk.com/el-salvador-bitcoin-not-mandatory-businesses
80. Various rankings websites are called out for what seems to be an unbelievable number of errors that imply an anti-Cardano bias. https://twitter.com/TheADAApe/status/1428312666569904129
81. Coinbase is going to invest $500M into crypto and 10% of all profit going forward (probably increasing with time) according to Brian Armstrong. Since Cardano is listed on Coinbase and it’s a good guess they will invest in the coins they list, this is probably very relevant for Cardano. https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1428489591665856512
82. If Google translate is correct, it looks like Bitpoint (a Japanese exchange) will begin its listing of ADA on August 25th. https://www.bitpoint.co.jp/news/info/info-2021081801/
83. It never ends. We are the Perma-Techno-Kings of the Github Commit! https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1428748675032010758
84. It’s looking like the Cardano Summit is going to be huge. https://twitter.com/I_Am_DTaylor/status/1428791321440002054
85. The Essential Cardano List has grown even larger! https://github.com/input-output-hk/essential-cardano/blob/main/essential-cardano-list.md
86. Cardano is still crushing everyone else in terms of dollars staked. https://twitter.com/CryptoDiffer/status/1428368524745973773
87. The August Cardano 360 will be this Thursday August 26th. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1428756331423571972
88. There is now an Eastern Hemisphere Catalyst Town Hall every Thursday with Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian language hosts. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1428649776111886336
89. We generally think of Cardano competitors being other blockchains or big tech. In one part of the world, the advent of CBDCs might make it “tokenless blockchains”. https://twitter.com/sinoglobalcap/status/1429430262102822920
90. If Web 3 will really be a building of new economies out of online communities and the units of value of those economies will be tokens and NFTs, it seems like a blockchain like Cardano that can generate those assets natively without smart contracts is going to be a central player. https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1429585831899983876
91. The ADA treasury is worth $1.6 Billion right now?????? https://twitter.com/nierop_pieter/status/1429656224732225536
92. There will be a crypto regulatory conference on the 23rd of September in Wyoming as part of the Wyohackathon just before the Cardano Summit. https://twitter.com/wyohackathon/status/1428718655362281479
93. Neel Kashkari of the Fed posts an anti-crypto tweet and gets heavily outliked by more than one pro-crypto response including a retweet from Charles. https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/1429886278942736385 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1429947349103742978
94. Forbes runs an article about how various cryptos including ADA could replace fiat according to a Deloitte survey of bank execs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2021/08/23/bankers-issue-seismic-warning-bitcoin-ethereum-bnb-cardano-and-xrp-could-replace-the-dollar-in-just-five-years-as-crypto-market-price-adds-1-trillion/
95. ADA is officially on Bitpoint Exchange in Japan! https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1430317131699163140
96. Charles gave us a brief update on Aug 24. Sounds like everything is right on schedule for smart contract launch on September 12. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1430230604071636994
97. Messari is reporting that Cardano moved more transaction volume over the last 24 hours than ETH. The amazing part was how much cheaper those transactions were on Cardano. https://twitter.com/TheADAApe/status/1430128107332280321
98. dcSpark is unveiling a sidechain project called Milkomeda that will use wrapped ADA and so-called “wrapped smart contracts”. The first sidechain, M1, will be an Ethereum Virtual Machine sidechain. This means Solidity devs can deploy their current smart contract code in M1 and those smart contracts will be accessible to Cardano users. This is “the pond”. This will be HUGE! Good work dcSpark! You guys are killing it! https://medium.com/dcspark/dcspark-announces-development-of-new-sidechain-protocol-milkomeda-cc28ed764a89
99. IOHK partners with European Business University of Luxembourg to offer scholarships including instruction in Haskell and Plutus to students across 25 countries in Africa. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/08/24/making-education-in-africa-more-accessible-affordable-and-equitable/
100. It’s interesting to note that (as pointed out by @Rob98550139) on June 23rd, EBU of Luxembourg also offered 5,000 scholarship’s in “Plutus Blockchain programming for Cardano Blockchain” to Nayib Bukele for El Salvador. Something unannounced going on there? https://twitter.com/EBULuxembourg/status/1407594850199953410
101. The August Cardano 360 is out! Another great job by Tim Harrison and company! https://youtu.be/baS9efSa2F8
102. The Cardano Foundation is reporting they have now received 440 applications to host local Cardano Summit meetups and that applications are now closed. Registration for the local meetups will come out soon. https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1430954186607415310
103. The “Buy Cardano” keyword hits a three month high on Google. https://twitter.com/OldPaSink/status/1430946116359516160

~Army of Spies