Cardano Rumor Rundown APR 18 2021: Scorpion Fighting Edition

Hey Everyone!

I've been consuming all the Cardano news and media on a daily basis for years now. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share a list of what I'm seeing for anyone else who's interested. Feel free to make additions as you see fit. Many of your additions from yesterday are in the “Newly Covered” list for today. Also let me know if you think any of the “Previously Covered but Still Interesting” items are no longer interesting and should leave the list.

Check out the youtube companion to today’s post: https://youtu.be/qJQ9b725SFI

Let's go....

Newly covered today:

1. Here’s the Cardano Development Status Update for last week. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-16/
2. A Cardano stake pool is actually helping people fight scorpions, spiders, & snakes in Africa. https://twitter.com/DenicioBernier/status/1383497821026807818
3. 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

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. Charles posts a pic of a taxidermy African bird called a Turacos. He follows up that post by saying "Guys sometimes a stuffed Ethiopian exotic bird next to an old identity book is just a stuffed Ethiopian exotic bird next to an old identity book. Stop reading into things". Everyone enjoys speculating what exactly this could mean with the obvious implication being that the African bird announcement involves digital identity in Ethiopia. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369397063583227911 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369402020067766275
2. It's announced that 591 different assets have been minted on Cardano in the last eight days. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1369347294324162561
3. Catalyst Fund 3 Voting is ongoing, it looks like the Yoroi team has worked out the voting problem in the Yoroi wallet. https://twitter.com/YoroiWallet/status/1369050858546200585
4. Charles says they are actually going to hire investigators for the IOG anti-scammer team. People with a law enforcement or intelligence background should feel free to apply. Should have a report on the team’s first investigation soon. Hopefully, this will contribute to scammers actually actively avoiding (those alliterations tho!) Cardano. Could also be a nice basis for an intelligence apparatus and private military when we build the Cardano Citadel. I mean somebody is gonna have to man the watchtowers if we’re gonna keep out all the no-coiners and ETH people. Kidding...kidding. https://youtu.be/6God9Xtzuqs
5. Cardano hodler Ben Askren continues preparations for his boxing match with Jake Paul. Being a Cardano hodler, it is already a foregone conclusion that Askren’s aura will cause Jake Paul to refuse to fight before the opening bell even sounds. https://twitter.com/Benaskren/status/1286094545973846017 https://twitter.com/Benaskren/status/1376021472993480705
6. We hit 100% decentralization of block production tomorrow. Breath it in, friends. Taste the sweet completely decentralized air. Many crypto ecosystems will never know that feeling. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1376527930159816706
7. Today is D-Day, d=0, complete decentralization of block production as covered in preceding days. Enjoy it guys!!!
8. The Daedalus wallet now supports native tokens! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1376936748715020288
9. Charles recently mentioned Senegal in the Julian Hosp interview. I believe that is the first time this nation state has been discussed in the context of the pan-African strategy for Cardano. https://youtu.be/Zm6I1agqPWQ
10. Yesterday, there was a dev community Q&A call with native token engineering lead and Plutus expert, Polina Vinogradova. Lots of good info shared there on all things fungible and non-fungible (including verification in the token registry and babel fees) in the Cardano ecosystem. To drive accuracy, only the party with the private key corresponding to the token minting will be able to make changes in the token registry as to that token.
11. In the native token call there was also a very interesting characterization of babel transactions as incomplete transactions that will include offers to exchange as a means to complete the transactions. “So, you will do two transactions or no transactions.” These incomplete transactions are called “liability transactions”. A group of them is called a “liability group”. When they get completed they are called a “closed liability group”. Babel fees are still very much in the paper writing phase. The team is currently agnostic as to how these exchange offers will be announced to stake pool operators. For more details on babel fees, we’ll have to wait for the paper.
12. Cardano Youtuber Big Pey just did two really good videos on the developing NFT scene in Cardano and how to accomplish manual escrow in discord so that you don’t get scammed trying to buy Cardano NFTs. The focus here was on the SpaceBudz series of NFTs. These kinds of manual procedures are probably the best that can be done right now. They also highlight how much easier everything will be once we get smart contracts with Alonzo since simple escrow like this is a prime use case for simple smart contracts that at the outset seem like they should be accomplishable even just in Marlowe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Yj_dvh7OA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-1TKq7okhs
13. Cardano hits 400k delegators! https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1377732956194766850
14. Graph blockchain has announced an acquisition of $300k in ADA for staking purposes. Once the corporate finance world finds understands the dynamic around staking in Cardano, we may see announcements like this with dollar values that are orders of magnitude higher. Right now the corporate world is considering holding BTC on their balance sheets. But, yield on ADA holdings might become hyperattractive to a wide spectrum of companies once they understand the dynamics of staking and that a compounding yield is available for capture. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/graph-blockchain-announces-acquisition-cardano-110000210.html
15. The Project Catalyst Fund 3 winners have been announced! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X6BnuFBvNO8yF2DeUgBqA3yyYSvqeKvg/view
16. Occam.fi is creating a defi launchpad on Cardano that will be called OccamRazer. Cointelegraph OccamRazer Article
17. Orion Protocol is aiming to be the first liquidity aggregator on Cardano. https://coinmarketcap.com/el/headlines/news/orion-protocol-and-cardano/
18. How hard is learning Haskell from scratch? Today’s youtube companion to this post describes my experience so far learning Haskell as a beginner with little programming experience. https://haskellbook.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters Derek Banas Youtube Haskell Tutorial
19. Charles tweets a pic of a Turaco and John Hancock. It seems safe to assume this means the minister has signed or is signing the Ethiopia deal! This could finally retire rumor #1 that started the Rumor Rundown. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1378416705282613253
20. Cardano NFTs get some coverage on CoinTelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/wild-west-as-developers-macgyver-highly-popular-nfts-on-cardano/amp
21. Emurgo Academy for blockchain education? Has anyone heard of this? https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1378346801598754816
22. Onyx Stake Pool announces Cardano’s first Quantum block! https://twitter.com/onyxstakepool/status/1378848216578412547
23. SpaceBudz published a great article on how they were able to distribute 10,000 NFTs. https://spacebudz.medium.com/how-we-pulled-off-the-sale-9dbe54c30ba5
24. For those learning Haskell/Plutus, check out this awesome one hour video from 2012 with Brian Beckman that introduces monoids and monads in a very non-scary way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuHCtR3xq8
25. Sebastien was recently on Kaizen Crypto and detailed how Emurgo plans to deliver Proof of Keys for Cardano whereby users could sign a message to prove that they own the private keys to a certain account in a standardized format. All queued up to the exact spot: https://youtu.be/VcRlL-6YROY?t=625
26. ...AND STILL....CARDANO=THE KING OF GITHUB COMMITS! https://twitter.com/wiSource/status/1379142670686294017
27. Liqwid founder, Dewayne Cameron, did a great interview with Cardano with Paul. It sounds like Liqwid is currently having a team of Haskell developers build out their product in Plutus for a target launch around the same time as Alonzo. This is great news since earlier in its history it looked like Liqwid would initially build in Solidity and use the KEVM bridge. Making their product native to Plutus out of the gate seems like a great move! Dewane also had some really good info about working with IOHK and how a team of seasoned Haskell devs could walk in and probably build anything in Plutus over a not too long timeline. Also a really good discussion of how EUTXO will give their users an advantage in predictability of transaction cost over users of account-balance (e.g. ETH) based competitors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUDze81LCWs
28. Occam Association President, Mark Berger, also did an interview with Rick McCracken on Cardano Live. He provided some good detail on what Occam would like to deliver and where they currently are in their development. https://youtu.be/vTBLIZ7voz8
29. Tomorrow we’ll hit the items from the roadmap video that Charles just did.
30. Cardano is now being used as a traceability solution in conjunction with Scantrust for wine from the Nation State of Georgia. This is a great use case for the Cardano blockchain! https://cardanofoundation.org/en/news/cardano-reveals-its-first-supply-chain-solution-in-association-with-scantrust/ https://www.scantrust.com/
31. The latest roadmap video from Charles covered a lot of ground. We’ll tackle it piece by piece. https://youtu.be/WRYRjmMvkJM
32. Ourobouros Omega. Ourobouros Classic 2016 was a “theoretical artifact” that IOHK could build upon. Ourobouros Praos was 2017 and it’s still running now. Ourobouros Genesis was 2018. Ourobouros Omega is going to be the capstone. It will be a rollup of all the previous iterations plus Redux, Chronos, Ledger Combiners, and some things they’ve learned from the larger industry. The paper and a prototype will be this year. We want to be there by Cardano 2025.
33. Light Clients/Wallets (e.g. Yoroi). Great way to get a view on the blockchain through a server. Trouble is that it’s not trustless as to the blockchain since you don’t download it. Protocols currently on the market like Mina are using recursive snarks (“zk-snark” = “Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge”). You can basically have a proof that proves 1) coins exist, and 2) haven’t been double spent with a goal of 22kb of data (very small amount of data). IOHK has been following Mina and “Bulletproofs” (also a type of snark). IOHK will bring out a paper and (hopefully) prototype of the Mithral Protocol this year. It will be a similar trustless model where light wallet is the default and you can still trust the blockchain on the server is correct without downloading the chain.
34. Today will be Part II of the coverage of the lates Roadmap vid from Charles. https://youtu.be/WRYRjmMvkJM
35. Sidechains. They call the main chain the “Cardano Settlement Layer” (CSL) and the side chains are called “Cardano Computation Layers” (CCL). They are looking at having CCLs for the EVM, IELE, Catalyst, and WASM (web assembly). They are trying to figure out how to pay for the maintenance of these side chains. A current thought is to possibly create a mechanism where you can “refine” ADA to get “fuel” for these sidechains. You could even have a Plutus side chain that runs on its own fuel. This year they will propose a Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP) to see if the community wants to update the monetary policy in an HFC event to go in this direction. This could be a good way to include the parachain ideas from Polkadot. They could also add Hyperledger related permissioned sidechains with this.
36. Layer Two. A lot of deal flow with Prism right now around digital identify for things like authenticated wallets, KYC/AML, regulated DeFi, and human readable addresses. Charles will probably do a full video on this. Hydra is the other piece of off-chain infrastructure for this year. IOHK has a whole team working on this. They’ve already put out two papers on this. Will put out two more papers this year and a prototype will also be on the way. Hydra will be run by the stake pool operators.
37. “With all this, we’re going to piss all over what ETH 2.0 is trying to accomplish”. I’m paraphrasing slightly, but I almost spit out my coffee when he said this.
38. Quantum Resistance. This will be a big project involving: QR VRF, QR zero knowledge stuff, quantum signatures, and modeling of a quantum adversary. This is a huge amount of work. But this is a whole agenda that is in scope for Cardano 2025.
39. Catalyst & Voltaire. Right now Catalyst is mainly about treasury but it needs to be linked to Voltaire which is all about protocol updates. This will probably mean a bicameral voting model that controls hard fork combinator events.There will be DAO as a service to provide voting rights for your users if you build a dApp or other project on Cardano. They will move from the current plutocracy to something that is hybridized between the current system and “proof of merit”. This is going to require a lot of thinking around the social science behind governance. It will be a more nuanced power dynamic.
40. Approach to the Reference Client.Right now it’s just Haskell, they will probably also build out clients in Python and Rust. Eventually they may have things like Agda, Idris, or Coq at the core. This notion of a “Core Developer” could end up being a digital identity that is authorized through voting.
41. Commercial. On the commercial side they are really going to scale things up to the eight figure level. There’s a lot of good news coming there. Charles says he is reserving that for the Africa Special.
42. Coinbase now has a Cardano Explainer. https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/what-is-cardano
43. “Smart people end up in Cardano one way or another.” https://twitter.com/Adavanz1/status/1378405038608031746
44. IOHK drops a good summary of the Alonzo Smart Contract timeline. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/04/08/smart-contracts-%E2%80%93-here-we-come/
45. You can now buy Cardano Estates wine with ADA. This is not a novelty crypto wine. This is legit wine. https://twitter.com/Jack22220741/status/1380603834947485700
46. Cardano gets a little coverage on nasdaq.com. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cardano-is-worth-considering-for-its-utility-and-strong-leadership-2021-04-07
47. The Cardano native token space continues to flourish. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1380600524853108738
48. Dewayne Cameron was on Cardano Live. Whether you are interested in DeFi or not, this is likely to be one of the big early Cardano based projects. This interview has all the latest info on Liqwid. Sounds like the alpha testnet will be end of April/early May with three or four core contracts. Rick does a really good job of asking questions that a large spectrum of listeners will be able to relate to and they get into the details of how the contracts will work. At 20:01 Dewayne mentions a “Cardano Dex, or the Dex that IOHK and Emurgo are working on...” Very interesting tidbit there! https://youtu.be/JhO5iC08xSA
49. The Plutus Pioneer program has been open sourced! Lecture #1 has an extremely good explanation of why the EUTxO model in Cardano is so much more conducive to security and much greater predictability than the account balance model in Ethereum. https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program
50. There is now a website that will mint Cardano NFTs for you. Thanks to Cardano subreddit user Padierfind. https://www.nft-maker.io/
51. Yesterday was “Get ADA Day” with the end of Epoch 258. I hope everyone did well in their staking.
52. Here’s a great way to visualize token minting and other on-chain activities thanks to Smaug Stake Pool. https://pool.pm/
53. It looks like the automated NFT maker covered yesterday, nft-maker.io, actually charges 10 ADA per NFT. Just an update on the price there since it was unknown yesterday.
    
54. The Cardano tattoo phenomenon continues. This time, we even have one that actually features a depiction of the namesake. https://twitter.com/jp_tattooist/status/1381236949567086592 https://twitter.com/jp_tattooist/status/1381351429554724875
55. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed outlines how he will liberalize the telecom industry in his country and lays out his four pillars of “Digital Ethiopia 2025”: digital ID, interoperable payment platforms, e-government applications, and e-commerce. https://telecomreviewafrica.com/index.php/en/articles/exclusive-interviews/2240-liberalization-of-telecoms-in-ethiopia
56. Beta version of the Emurgo dApp Connector (a Metamask Killer) is out! As planned, it runs on Ergo for now but Cardano later. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1381675733605474307
57. Charles did a quick but very interesting interview with Alessandro Konrad, co-founder of SpaceBudz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxlL3RA3UyI
58. Emurgo Traceability Solution being used to track coffee from Indonesia to China. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1381617916018319363
59. New IOHK blog post on Plutus from Lars. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/04/13/plutus-what-you-need-to-know/
60. Occam.fi partners with Bitcoin.com as custodian to create an ETH-ADA bridge. According to the article, this will allow for any Cardano native token to seamlessly switch to an ERC-20 token and vice versa. The vice versa part is what the ERC-20 Converter does for us already right? https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/bitcoincom-to-accommodate-occams-ethereum-to-cardano-cross-chain-bridge
61. 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
62. 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
63. 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
64. 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).
65. The Cardano Foundation drops the Native Token Registry! https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1382700374755323916
66. 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
67. Occam replied with an open letter. https://twitter.com/OccamFi/status/1382432862654369798
68. 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
69. Santo Staking Pool will be launching “Skullys” NFTs on Cardano. https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/santo-blockchain-labs-mints-50-134500914.html
70. Yesterday was “Get ADA DAY” with the end of Epoch 259. I hope everyone straight killed it on staking rewards!
71. Now there is an app that will show you all of your Cardano NFTs. https://twitter.com/nft_craze/status/1383196757622878208
72. As always, we are the github champions this week. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1383087802305380359
73. 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

~Army of Spies