Cardano Rumor Rundown June 18, 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

1. New algorithmic stablecoin paper coming in the next few weeks from IOHK. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1405737563030183936
2. The bank of England is getting very serious about how it “may wish to limit migration” of money from the legacy system to stablecoins. Wow. Just another example of why it’s such an asset (no pun intended) that Cardano is prepared for regulation. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1405712468823842816
3. Check out the newly “pimped up” Cardano documentation. https://twitter.com/theSavaSavic/status/1405526615585480730 https://docs.cardano.org/

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. Charles makes the case for collaboration with Starlink in Africa. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1392916783854616577
2. People are starting to realize what the real value of NFTs will be. It’s not in collectibles. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1392939118355783682
3. The Cardano Development Update for this week is out. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-05-14/
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. This tweet by u/TheADAApe pretty much sums it all up. When people ask me how I knew, I’m going to point them to this post. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1393606491110662146
8. To hear about something truly good happening in the Cardano ecosystem check out this interview with Mickey Watkins, CEO of World Mobile, on the Hotel Cardano podcast. Really good details on World Mobile's connecting the unconnected in sub-Saharan Africa! https://youtu.be/L15bn_b2moA
9. What if these two got to talking about what Atala Prism could bring to the table for students in the city of Miami? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393574632305868805
10. The saga of BTC maximalists being angry at Elon continues with Elon implying that Tesla could sell its BTC while Cardano continues just doing its thing like normal. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies
11. Likewise, Marc Cuban tried to FUD real world use of Cardano only to be confronted with a giant infographic of use cases and partnerships along with an explanatory video just for him. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1393646131708665858 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393689887648272384
12. Initial Stakepool Offerings (“ISOs”) are here. Crypto is no stranger to novel means of capital formation and now the Cardano ecosystem is getting in on the action. Here is SundaeSwap’s explanation of how ISOs will work. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/iso-sundae-with-the-works-c5c335101ef5
13. ICYMI, Manuel Chakravarty reminds us all that his Cardano Summit 2020 talk is publicly available for questions on native assets. Really interesting discussion of the asset identifier just being a hash of the policy script and how that helps create a super lightweight easy to use system. https://twitter.com/TacticalGrace/status/1394263629088923649
14. Elon confirms that Tesla has not sold any BTC. https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1394051036462071808
15. Charles makes a whole video about how to fix Doge. https://youtu.be/iQd9XjEm8EE
16. The Ecosystem is getting even bigger every day we inch closer to Alonzo! https://twitter.com/TyIsDigital/status/1394345977952284676
17. The Cardano Foundation is out to do something incredible with supply chains as described in the fireside chat! In his previous Cardano Live appearance, Frederik Gregaard, CF CEO, also expressed a very healthy and sustainable perspective on what DeFi should become. He compared the current state of DeFi to just moving funds from your left pocket to your right pocket and taking profit. https://youtu.be/d8uPMZplfeM https://youtu.be/xbMSQUA1lss
18. The ISO model entering the capital formation toolbox in Cardano is going to make the stake pool game extremely interesting with SPOs scrambling to find the right balance between rewarding ADA and giving their delegators other things like tokens. Some stake pools could even become like portfolio funds with relationships with many different projects the tokens of which are given to delegators. Babel Fees could also play a role here for smart SPOs as they may allow access to a wide variety of tokens in the ecosystem that could be used to reward delegators with a sort of index fund exposure to a wide variety of Cardano projects.
19. May Cardano 360 coming one week from today (always the last Thursday of the month). https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395117067960045569
20. New delegations from IOHK are out. Congrats to the selected SPOs. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395087751746310156
21. The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
22. In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
23. The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
24. The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
25. In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
26. The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
27. Charles has now added the Jack Dorsey edition to his series of “Let’s Educate Crypto Adjacent Celebrities” videos. https://youtu.be/lMZ1xQzWtl4
28. ...and still...KINGS OF THE GITHUB! May our reign never end. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1395771379929255945
29. Some banks still won’t allow customers to buy crypto with their accounts. In 2021, this is still a thing. https://twitter.com/CryptoCardano_/status/1395933037192437763
30. Even the Pope is condemning Proof-of-Work? At least, that’s how the crypto community took a recent tweet. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1394993742226939905
31. Apparently, you can now have your own Stakepool run for you for $122/month in a Stakepool-as-a-Service arrangement. https://twitter.com/ChrisGraff/status/1396169061487333380
32. If you want to see how the Cardano NFT space has been heating up, you can check out CNFT resale listings at Lovelace Marketplace. https://lovelacemarketplace.io/all-categories/
33. Ethiopia awards new Telecom license as promised. The winner, a consortium including Vodafone, Safaricom, and Sumitomo; will invest $8 billion in their network in Ethiopia in the next 10 years and will cover the country in 4G. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-22/ethiopia-awards-new-telecoms-license-to-vodafone-consortium https://twitter.com/AbiyAhmedAli/status/1396060475184533505
34. Check out this new infographic explaining how World Mobile Works! https://blog.worldmobile.io/post/how-world-mobile-is-connecting-the-unconnected-infographic/
35. Cardano hits 1MM wallets! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331888093061121
36. Set your calendars! The May Cardano 360 is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331908632653830
37. Charles releases a 90 Day Countdown to Alonzo video. https://youtu.be/u6negi1yAQQ
38. Institutional inflows into Cardano get some coverage by the crypto press. https://cointelegraph.com/news/cardano-sees-largest-weekly-inflows-from-institutional-managers-coinshares
39. Charles and Kim Dotcom have a conversation about PoW miners possibly fleeing China with all of their hardware. https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1396964996693708801
40. Cardano gets a little coverage on NBC for it’s energy efficiency. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cryptocurrency-goes-green-proof-stake-offer-solution-energy-concerns-rcna1030
41. Plutus Pioneers Lecture #7 is out. https://youtu.be/_EDJt55vOB0
42. Yesterday was ADA Payday with the end of Epoch 267. I hope everyone made lots of sweet delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
43. Paypal moving away from the “walled garden” model. This is decentralization teaching the legacy institutions a lesson. https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-will-let-customers-withdraw-crypto-exec-says
44. Charles is interviewed on Yahoo Finance where he explained: 1) how the lack of an obvious decentralized governance system in ETH and BTC will cripple their efforts as they attempt to scale and the founders/core developers start losing prominence, 2) the ADA EUTXO system is vastly more scaleable with it’s local state being so much more amenable to sharding than ETH’s global state system, 3) Cardano has a high willingness to bring on users in hypergrowth areas like Africa where ETH seems to have little interest, and 4) ETH does not seem to be as highly concerned with interoperability which might become highly valuable in the future. https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1397593275826151424
45. Cardano 360 is tomorrow. Don’t miss it if you want to hear about all the awesome things happening with Alonzo (smart contracts), Hydra (scalability), and everything else! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1397549347592675338
46. The May Cardano 360 was yesterday and we had lots of updates including the Color Coding for the different stages of the testnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS33gRj9JYE
47. Alonzo “Blue” Era Testnet (through mid June; <50 user cohort) will include the basic functionality of the system for testing basic contracts . Initially the SPOs will be included, then some of the Plutus Pioneers will be allowed in, then a few of the outside development firms (Plutus Partners). The Plutus Partners will be working on specific areas including oracles, DEXs, stablecoins, NFTs, and DeFi. This will produce code and documentation that will be publicly available.
48. Alonzo “White” Era Testnet (mid June to mid July; <500 user cohort) will add more Plutus Pioneers and more functionality. They will develop various dApps and there will be interaction on the user side of these dApps. They will do some benchmarking at this stage.
49. The Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator Event requires a lot of different pieces come together at the same time. But, this is not their first rodeo and they have a lot of experience with this from the ITN, Shelley, and etc.
50. Alonzo “Purple” Era Tesnet (mid July to mid August; fully public) will involve a full public network with all of the Plutus pioneers, the Rosetta Api to the exchanges, Daedalus, hardware wallets, graphQL, and full functionality. The purpose of this phase will be optimization.
51. Alonzo “Red” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will involve a new network where they can test scalability and stability.
52. Alonzo “Black” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will be the final public testnet where they will ensure they have their candidate mainnet releases ready to launch on the mainnet.
53. They are committed to making sure there is a very large group of people who are familiar with using the Alonzo testnet by the time the mainnet launches.
54. Alonzo Mainnet (August-September). It’s looking like Alonzo mainnet launch was positioned in very late August through September in the infographics. That makes me assume there is a chance of August, much better chance of September, and also some chance of October or later. This is blockchain development after all. Also, we’ve waited years. Why care about a few weeks?
55. There will be another Plutus Pioneers Cohort later this summer.
56. Marlowe Run will be a browser product that can run on mobile or desktop. It can be linked to your wallet and be used to run Cardano smart contracts simultaneously on a distributed basis across multiple user browsers. The user interface is light years ahead of anything we saw in Marlowe Meadow or the Marlowe Playground simulations. It will include a library of off-the-shelf contracts.
57. There will be a Marlowe Webinar on June 3. Register here: https://webinar.marlowe-finance.io/
58. The ERC-20 converter was looking very intuitive and seamless in the new demo. It should be on the testnet in June.
59. Manuel Chakravarty gave a big update on Hydra (layer 2 scaling). Hydra will not require that the base layer be modified since it will be implemented via Plutus smart contracts. Hydra is actually a collection of protocols including Hydra Head and Hydra Tail. Hydra Head is a symmetric protocol where multiple participants will be online simultaneously for the whole period of the head exchanging messages. Hydra Tail is an asymmetric protocol involving a high performance server and many clients that may be mobile and could be offline for large portions of the tail’s existence. There will also be “inter head & tail networking” which will allow for a network of heads and tails. They have a published research paper on Hydra Head. They are currently writing the Hydra Tail paper.
60. Hydra is distinguished from other layer 2 protocols by its isomorphic properties. This means you will be able to run any smart contract that works on the base layer in a Hydra Head! This is very special. We won’t need special purpose contracts built out just for layer 2. There are some big implications to this. Since a Hydra Head is essentially just a Plutus smart contract, this means you can run a Hydra Head inside another Hydra Head. It’s turtles all the way down, guys. It sounds like they can do this iteratively as much as they want.
61. Aggelos also gave a good presentation on the importance of “skin in the game” in resource based consensus protocols (both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake) and its effect on promotion or discouragement of centralization. He explained how Ouroboros has built-in safeguards to prevent centralization including the K parameter (currently at 500) which caps total rewards per pool and the alpha parameter (currently at 0.3) which splits rewards into a 77% piece and a 23% piece. A pool can take its share of the 77% piece based on the pool’s total stake and its share of the 23% piece based on the pledge of the SPO. A higher alpha parameter makes it less attractive for individual SPOs to proliferate multiple pools since they can’t be as leveraged on their available pledge and still get as big a share of the 23% piece. This also discourages Sybil Attacks. As Cardano on-chain governance progresses, these parameters will be controlled by the community.
62. There will be a Cardano Goguen Summit in September. It will be hybrid digital/in-person.
63. Charles is helping to bring the cryptographer who broke SHA-1 to the University of Wyoming. The Cardano funded blockchain lab there could be on the road to be a powerhouse. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1398290866419105802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiqun_Lisa_Yin
64. We don’t often get to hear from the engineers behind Yoroi over at Emurgo. But, here’s a podcast with Vicente Almonacid from Emurgo. Check out 12:50 where he mentions the dApp Connector (Cardano’s Metamask Equivalent). https://twitter.com/vacuumlabs/status/1397847633696280576
65. Check out this great article from Cardanians.io on the work being done at the University of Wyoming on a physical chip for transfer of private keys in day-to-day cashlike transactions. https://cardanians.io/en/cardano-can-give-crypto-a-cash-like-experience-58
66. Professor Aggelos Kiayias recently dropped a video explaining exactly how Mithril (apparently neckbeard dungeon master talk for elf armor) is going to allow for Perfect Cardano (ADA) wallets that combine the ease of use and convenience of light wallets with the trustlessness of full node wallets. We also learned exactly how Mithril is going to work. https://youtu.be/LhepJFCyWRk
67. In proof-of-work, bootstrapping can be done with blockheaders. This won’t do in proof-of-stake since we need information about stakeholder distribution to confirm block validity.
68. Mithril fixes this by being a cryptographic construction that enables a population of stakeholders to issue a signature consistent with certain constraints.
69. For Mithril to work in proof-of-stake, it needs three crucial properties: 1) it needs to enforce a threshold ratio of stakeholders before the signature is issued; 2) the pre-signature fragments must be independently verified and subject to public aggregation; and 3) it must be efficient in the sense that the final signature is of constant size and is logarithmically dependent on the # of stakeholders.
70. Stakeholders will issue special Mithril keys along with the normal cryptographic key material. Then at regular intervals, full nodes will test whether they can produce a pre-signature fragment. Only a random subset of stakeholders will be eligible to produce a pre-signature fragment. When a sufficient # of pre-signature fragments have been issued by eligible stakeholders then it will be possible to aggregate the fragments into a final signature.
71. This will be a checkpoint that will be verifiable with respect to previous check points all the way back to the genesis block. Such checkpoints will be cryptographic commitments of the relevant UTXOs.
72. Since the checkpoints will be trustless, a light client (i.e. wallet) will only need to verify the sequence of checkpoints up to the current time to trustlessly bootstrap.
73. The ecosystem is growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with all the projects without these infographics at this point. https://twitter.com/Dr_shwetaPHD/status/1398783893638103040
74. The Cardano subreddit is at 487k users. Half a million isn’t far away. https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
75. Epoch 268 is a wrap as of yesterday with 22.83 billion ADA staked. https://adapools.org/epochs
76. Check out the telegram AMA tomorrow with the CEO of World Mobile! https://twitter.com/ZwijBerg/status/1399377659105320962
77. A very interesting stat on Cardano user growth. https://twitter.com/cex_io/status/1398959088684445699
78. Don’t forget, the Marlowe webinar is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1399444331556225027
79. More and more people in the youtube sphere are jumping on the Cardano train. https://twitter.com/techleadhd/status/1399398373384351744
80. Reuters reports on an EU digital identity wallet project. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-step-up-digital-push-with-digital-identity-wallet-2021-06-01/?taid=60b6e171efd84f0001b64ae1&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
81. The U.S. Currently has Issued Sanctions on Ethiopia, but they are not all-encompassing economic sanctions as with rogue nations, they have just barred entry into the U.S. for certain government personnel. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/africa/ethiopia-us-sanctions-tigray.html
82. Vitalik is saying it’s highly unlikely we see ETH 2.0 before late 2022. I’m guessing that means mid 2023 which will be after two years of Cardano slaughtering the entire ETH user base. Things are looking so bad that Vitalik says he doesn’t even like using the ETH 2.0 label anymore since he knows the changes will be more incremental. This is what early capitulation sounds like guys. https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-vitalik-buterin-is-surprised-at-just-how-long-eth2-is-taking
83. Cardano-Nervos cross-chain bridge to be built. This would be at least the second cross-chain bridge after the Cardano-AGI bridge. https://www.coindesk.com/cardano-nervos-force-bridge-network-first
84. Sundaeswap ISO delayed due to regulatory concerns. This brings up interesting questions for the whole space about requesting regulatory permission vs. possibly being forced to ask for forgiveness. https://www.sundaeswap.finance/posts/iso-update
85. Tim Harrison has announced that the transition to Alonzo Blue was successful. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1400481879883649034
86. Finally, 500k users in the Cardano Subreddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
87. We got a nice update on the first week of Alonzo Blue. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1400876181122174977
88. And….still! Kings of the github! https://twitter.com/CryptoDiffer/status/1400744567956180993
89. Epoch 269 is in the bag with active stake of 22.77 Billion. Hope everyone made lots of delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
90. Binance has 63 stakepools charging 6%. Please stop paying so much for the right to stake your ADA. You don’t have to pay that much. You have a huge number of better options. You are literally giving away your ADA rewards to a large corporation. It’s easy: just download the Yoroi Chrome extension, send your ADA there, and pick from the 2k+ available stakepools right inside Yoroi. https://twitter.com/BraveHeartStak3/status/1401204563189940231 https://adapools.org/groups/binance-20 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emurgo&hl=en_US&gl=US
91. Nigeria Bans Twitter after Twitter censors Tweet from Nigerian President. This emphasizes the need for decentralized social media. A decentralized solution running on Cardano could fix this. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/africa/nigeria-suspends-twitter-operations-intl/index.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JilEb42q-CI
92. A Really Big Deal: El Salvador is on the verge of making Bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGOfqN2y9k
93. This could have huge ramifications for bank and accounting treatment of Bitcoin potentially including that banks might suddenly be allowed to handle Bitcoin as a foreign currency. Today it was BTC. But, wait until they find out what Cardano can do. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1401334421773504517
94. Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, also clarified that there will be no capital gains taxes on Bitcoin since it is a “legal currency” and crypto entrepreneurs will be given instant permanent residence. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1401622548396314631
95. Bitcoin enthusiasm seems to be off to a great start among other Latin American politicians after the fervor around the El Salvador announcement. This will serve as a great gateway drug that only leads to Gen 3 projects and Cardano. https://twitter.com/gilson__marques https://twitter.com/carlitosrejala https://twitter.com/gabrielsilva8_7/status/1401965129051389958 https://twitter.com/FabioOstermann
96. We are always the Github Kings. It’s amazing. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1402011593995603975
97. Charles basically just laid out what 4th Gen Cryptos are going to be all about in his video yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkr1EKQrVeQ
98. Here’s a good Emurgo blog article on the use of Emurgo Trace in the Oil and gas industry. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1402339278097502210
99. IOHK gives us a closer look at everything being upgraded for Alonzo. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/08/a-close-look-at-the-software-running-cardano/
100. We’re currently at 71.52% of ADA staked. This is a pretty incredible ratio and shows the strength of the Cardano community. https://twitter.com/CardanoPoolPeek/status/1402378400803794950
101. SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce warns about the regulatory impulse being displayed by her colleagues toward crypto and the impact it could have on the stifling of innovation. https://www.ft.com/content/ae0d40a1-8a4a-4885-a6a7-b157e27b3311
102. El Salvador passes the statute to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1402827595339681794
103. Cardano gets more positive coverage on the Nasdaq website with a second article following the one from April 7 earlier this year. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/be-part-of-a-historic-crypto-moment-with-cardano-2021-06-08
104. Prof. Aggelos Kiayias releases an article on a tri-coin system called Stablefees that could fix the problem of appreciating transaction fees in crypto. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/10/stablefees-and-the-decentralized-reserve-system/
105. There’s very interesting speculation circulating out there about how El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption might impact relationships with the U.S. and the IMF. https://twitter.com/cardano_whale/status/1403136968456765443
106. Elizabeth Warren is now talking about the U.S. needs to regulate crypto. https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/1402749016845262851
107. The mid-month Alonzo development update from IOHK is out. Alonzo blue is in full swing and they are working on “hello world round trips” going from the node to the ledger and back. Plutus Partners (third party functional dev firms) are working on different use cases ahead of the Alonzo launch. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1403314932968574981
108. Miniswap gives us the dev perspective on why Cardano’s Plutus is such an improvement over Ethereum’s Solidity. https://twitter.com/MinswapDEX/status/1403411522110427137
109. Here’s a great ETH vs. Cardano DeFi project comparison infographic. https://twitter.com/Coin98Analytics/status/1403397242707320835
110. Charles recorded for the Lex Fridman Podcast. It went over five hours. This is a big deal given that Lex has 1.12 million subscribers and it’s closer to mainstream than a crypto audience. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1403498549300584448 https://www.youtube.com/user/lexfridman
111. The Marlowe Webinar with Shruti is now available on youtube. Very interesting discussion of DeFi in general and also specific topics like “deep interoperability” in DeFi. Cardano is obviously already doing the very involved thinking about the future of DeFi. https://youtu.be/vzsUSG5CSj0
112. John O’Connor recently tweeted about a day where he “wrote a letter to a president” and “found a million users to bring into Cardano”. Sounds like the Cardano train is rolling along as smoothly as ever in Africa. https://twitter.com/jjtoconnor/status/1402565547716399104
113. Zach Guzman and Mike Novogratz get an opportunity to prove once again how extremely threatened they are by the fact that they can’t frontrun Cardano at this point. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1404100510525841408
114. John O’Connor appeared on the Disrupt Network Podcast. bit.ly/3znqyB7
115. President of Tanzania calls on the central bank to prepare for the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. I wonder what crypto ecosystem already has experience working with an African government on a big crypto project and has partnered with a mobile company that is already bringing connectivity to rural Tanzania? https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1404126444863766533
116. Hedgefund Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones tells the world to buy crypto and certain other assets if the Fed doesn’t address inflation in their policy meeting that concludes on Wednesday. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon concurs that the current inflation is very likely not transitory. This could be tremendously good timing for Cardano given our top five status and the impending mainnet launch of smart contracts. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/14/paul-tudor-jones-says-bet-heavily-on-every-inflation-trade-if-fed-keeps-ignoring-higher-prices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/14/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-is-hoarding-cash-because-very-good-chance-inflation-here-to-stay.html
117. With exploits like this one being all too common in the legacy smart contract networks, we’re not even going to have sell the Cardano use case for DeFi. The competitor networks have already made the case that something better must be on the way. https://twitter.com/zapper_fi/status/1404429179794362369
118. World Mobile CEO tweets out a tantalizing response to the Tanzanian President’s call for her nation’s central bank to prepare for crypto. https://twitter.com/MrTelecoms/status/1404375153191141377
119. If you are new to Cardano and you would like to get a handle on the terminology involved in the ecosystem, you may want to check out these Cardano flashcards produced by Coconut Pool. https://twitter.com/coconut_pool/status/1403442954434269185
120. While renewable energy is certainly a wonderful thing, there may be a problem with your technology when your path to compete on clean energy consumption involves you talking about harnessing the power of a whole series of volcanoes. Maybe just use fewer volcano’s and more proof-of-stake? https://twitter.com/_eLaPs_/status/1404125569093029889 https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1402718041557725184
121. The Charles/Lex Fridman podcast has dropped. This is a big deal. This is a fairly mainstream podcast with over 1 million subscribers. https://youtu.be/FKh8hjJNhWc
122. Politicians in the legislative branches of Panama and Paraguay have now announced intentions to introduce crypto-related bills into their respective legislative assemblies. https://twitter.com/gabrielsilva8_7/status/1401965129051389958

~Army of Spies