Cardano Rumor Rundown September 9, 2021

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Newly covered today:

1. Coinbase reveals they received a Wells Notice from the SEC on their crypto loan product. This is relevant for Cardano loan projects. A low professor subsequently posted a takedown of the Coinbase Chief Legal Officer’s view on the SEC notice. https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1435439291715358721 https://twitter.com/AdamLevitin/status/1435650584271589376
2. We just saw a record number of daily transactions on Cardano (Sept 7)! https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1435559731133825031
3. Messari has updated its “Initial Token Distribution” chart to include a previously missing project and Cardano is still among the very best in the Gen 3 space in terms of broad public coin ownership. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1435708439951552513
4. After lots of criticism of Cardano layer 2 possibilities by ETH maximalists, Vitalik has announced that ETH NFTs need to be moved to layer 2. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1435413681588736007

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. Cardano has been listed by Bitpoint in Japan! https://www.bitpoint.co.jp/news/info/info-2021080301/
2. 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
3. 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
4. The Yoroi Wallet is already making improvements in preparation for the dApp Connector release! https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1422905221793996809
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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
14. 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
15. 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
16. No agreement on an amendment to the crypto tax reporting provisions of the Infrastructure Bill materialized today. https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1424543439396429828
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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
25. IOHK’s “Essential Cardano” list of projects keeps growing! https://github.com/input-output-hk/essential-cardano/blob/main/essential-cardano-list.md
26. dcSpark is hiring for a few non-programmer positions. https://twitter.com/dcspark_io/status/1425490454787739649
27. We got some coverage in Forbes over the Alonzo date reveal. https://twitter.com/ForbesCrypto/status/1425409227594555393
28. Over $1 million in NFTs has now been sold on cnft.io. https://twitter.com/CNFT_IO/status/1425550638507769859
29. This graphic pretty much sums up all the Cardano criticism. https://twitter.com/SmaugPool/status/1425403742925565956
30. 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
31. 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
32. Alonzo (smart contracts on mainnet) is scheduled for the 12th of September! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1426182060683796483
33. The Cardano Ecosystem Infographics are still getting bigger and bigger. https://twitter.com/Coin98Analytics/status/1426051817876586499
34. The rankings looked a little different today! https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1426331710107619328
35. An insane amount of native assets have been issued on Cardano already. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1426692124448333826
36. 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
37. 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
38. 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
39. 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
40. The Cardano treasury is getting unbelievably huge at almost $1 Billion! https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1426789664338284546
41. 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
42. 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
43. 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
44. The Plutus Mainnet Candidate has been released to the Node Team. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1427359174220996612
45. Weiss Crypto really loves the Cardano consensus protocol. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1427646299936014337
46. Applications are now open to be a local Cardano Meet-Up host for the Cardano Summit 2020. https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1427309534226300928
47. 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
48. CNFT.io is back in action after a brief period of absence! https://twitter.com/CNFT_IO/status/142808300944668262
49. The Djed Stablecoin paper and an explanatory article are now out. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1427933093210607619
50. 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
51. 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
52. 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
53. 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/
54. It never ends. We are the Perma-Techno-Kings of the Github Commit! https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1428748675032010758
55. It’s looking like the Cardano Summit is going to be huge. https://twitter.com/I_Am_DTaylor/status/1428791321440002054
56. The Essential Cardano List has grown even larger! https://github.com/input-output-hk/essential-cardano/blob/main/essential-cardano-list.md
57. Cardano is still crushing everyone else in terms of dollars staked. https://twitter.com/CryptoDiffer/status/1428368524745973773
58. The August Cardano 360 will be this Thursday August 26th. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1428756331423571972
59. 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
60. 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
61. 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
62. The ADA treasury is worth $1.6 Billion right now?????? https://twitter.com/nierop_pieter/status/1429656224732225536
63. 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
64. 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
65. 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/
66. ADA is officially on Bitpoint Exchange in Japan! https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1430317131699163140
67. 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
68. 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
69. 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
70. 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/
71. 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
72. The August Cardano 360 is out! Another great job by Tim Harrison and company! https://youtu.be/baS9efSa2F8
73. 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
74. The “Buy Cardano” keyword hits a three month high on Google. https://twitter.com/OldPaSink/status/1430946116359516160
75. 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
76. IOHK has initiated the testnet fork (Aug 27)! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1431286232278085634
77. 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
78. Here’s a good side-by-side of the size of the ecosystem in the past and now. https://twitter.com/CardanoRise/status/1431703062486392837
79. Fortune ran a very positive piece on Cardano today (Aug. 20). https://fortune.com/2021/08/20/cardano-ath-price-biggest-cryptos/
80. It looks like the details of the extremely mysterious “Cardano City” project should come to light today. https://twitter.com/CardanoCity/status/1431338443381092355
81. The Wall Street Journal runs a Cardano article. https://www.wsj.com/articles/cardanos-ada-is-the-latest-cryptocurrency-to-surge-heres-what-you-need-to-know-11630143002
82. The COTI/Wolfram/IOHK project to build an NFT Auction Site is now live. https://twitter.com/COTInetwork/status/1431971503093002243
83. CNBC runs an article on the effect the grassroots effort to the fix the crypto tax provisions has had on policy makers in Washington, D.C. These policies will affect Cardano and every other crypto. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/28/tax-reporting-proposal-creates-defining-moment-for-crypto-industry-.html
84. Beware of FlanoWallet and Flano Swap!!!!!!!! They are accused of malicious code that harvests your recovery phrase. https://twitter.com/bigpeyYT/status/1432450913487183874
85. Sebastien confirms that dcSpark is getting a ton of interest from developers wanting to work in Cardano. https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1432416579107495942
86. Charles talks about Cardano compliance functionality and confirms that he perceives heavy regulation coming for DeFi in the next 24 months based on EU and US Treasury comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ESn46Hj9Y4
87. A new John O’Connor interview is scheduled for today (Aug 31). You may want to tune in to get the latest on Cardano’s Africa Operations from the man himself. https://twitter.com/jjtoconnor/status/1432395067185106951
88. The Public Testnet will be forked to Alonzo today (Sept 1)! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1432769865958531080
89. Some future Cardano dApps have so many followers on twitter that ETH maximalists are publicly expressing their disbelief. https://twitter.com/Southrye/status/1432515727433601024
90. Even prior to the launch of smart contracts, Cardano is generating quite an impressive amount of transaction fees. https://twitter.com/DCdoso/status/1432761425089470469
91. The Cardano Testnet has now officially forked to Alonzo allowing Plutus smart contracts. We are on track for the mainnet hardfork combinator event on Sept 12th. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1433166757620064260
92. IOHK is changing their delegation process. They will be taking applications from SPOs and asking that they recommend two other pools based on contributions in terms of building, creating, or educating. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1433104060647985157
93. Another signpost for Cardano DeFi projects. Gary Gensler (SEC Head) tells the Financial Times that in his view DeFi platforms have “a fair amount of centralisation” and “[i]t’s a misnomer to say they are just software they put out in the web...” https://www.ft.com/content/fb126d79-2e60-4002-8aba-b08887fca609
94. Cardano gets positive coverage on French Television for being “ecological”. https://twitter.com/YoadaStakepool/status/1433127940334792708
95. Charles is on CNBC talking about how crypto could be used to resist the Taliban in Afghanistan. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/09/01/cryptos-will-play-larger-role-in-afghanistan-after-us-exit-ethereum.html
96. The first solution for custom Cardano wallet addresses seems to be picking up steam. https://twitter.com/adahandle
97. One of Cardano’s competitors continued to have additional “performance degradation” and “instability” issues on it’s mainnet today (Sept 2). https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1433438629020454917 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1433429598230876173 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1367189272797798404
98. The SEC is investigating Uniswap. This is a very big deal! https://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-investigate-crypto-exchange-developer-uniswap-labs-11630666800
99. Another Japanese exchange appears to be adding ADA on the 7th. https://twitter.com/sentosumosaba/status/1433714023468437508
100. We are always the github champions (again as of Sept 3). https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1433822104634408966
101. Yet another Cardano project drops their account of how they’ve already handled concurrency. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1434304535061729281
102. Here are two other Cardano projects explaining that they’ve already handled concurrency. https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/cardano-decentralized-exchange-occamx-reaches-key-technical-milestone https://twitter.com/CardanoMaladex/status/1434115402725052418
103. Only one more week until smart contracts on mainnet (as of Aug 5)! Get your whiskey ready!
104. IOHK releases a detailed thread on concurrency and upcoming documentation to help quell some of the misinformation currently circulating on this topic. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1434518391465943048
105. Cardano City has finally dropped. The mysterious project appears to be art NFTs as expected. https://cardanocity.io/
106. Here’s a cool website that attempts to rundown all the Cardano projects. https://www.cardanocube.io/
107. Only 5 more days to Alonzo (as of Sept. 7)!
108. Despite all the negative posting about Cardano smart contracts on eUTxO, it ironically looks like some in the ETH community are actually trying to build ETH L2 on UTXO. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1434570158853529606
109. Here’s a great article on Cardano’s Determinism by IOG’s Polina Vinogradova. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/
110. World Mobile has released a new video of towers going up in Zanzibar! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGx_hwupsc
111. Charles releases a new video on the Alonzo Update Proposal (on Aug. 7) being submitted so that we can go live on the 12th. He also gives some hints as to his thoughts on the short-term planning of some “flavor of the week” blockchains vs. the long term planning of Cardano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhujKbMpTEA
112. Weiss Crypto lays down yet another very positive thread about Cardano. They acknowledge that they can’t see the future of Cardano, but they vehemently reject a lot of the anti-hype. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1435261343456768005

~Army of Spies