Cardano Rumor Rundown APR 27 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go....

Newly covered today:

1. Binance Smart Chain has already laid out a very compelling argument that we’re going to CRUSH Ethereum. https://twitter.com/TheADAApe/status/1386583952668958720
2. Charles does a big interview with Forbes and points out the huge differences between a bonded staking system (ETH) and a liquid staking system (Cardano). This is highly overlooked. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2021/04/26/cardano-and-ethereum-founder-analyzes-the-newest-evolutions-in-crypto-and--blockchain-technology/?sh=6acb258e3e52
3. Charles also covers his projections about interoperability and the future converging on a “wifi moment” when an interoperable “internet of blockchains” emerges. In this future, it will be a race to the bottom and the systems that are too expensive to operate will simply be priced out of the game.
4. New Africa Special Trailer dropped. The narrator: “We are partnering with African governments…” That was PLURAL governments, guys! This is getting exciting. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1386772333902319618

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. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. Today is D-Day, d=0, complete decentralization of block production as covered in preceding days. Enjoy it guys!!!
7. The Daedalus wallet now supports native tokens! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1376936748715020288
8. 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
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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
12. Cardano hits 400k delegators! https://twitter.com/RichardMcCrackn/status/1377732956194766850
13. 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
14. The Project Catalyst Fund 3 winners have been announced! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X6BnuFBvNO8yF2DeUgBqA3yyYSvqeKvg/view
15. Occam.fi is creating a defi launchpad on Cardano that will be called OccamRazer. Cointelegraph OccamRazer Article
16. Orion Protocol is aiming to be the first liquidity aggregator on Cardano. https://coinmarketcap.com/el/headlines/news/orion-protocol-and-cardano/
17. 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
18. 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
19. Cardano NFTs get some coverage on CoinTelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/wild-west-as-developers-macgyver-highly-popular-nfts-on-cardano/amp
20. Emurgo Academy for blockchain education? Has anyone heard of this? https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1378346801598754816
21. Onyx Stake Pool announces Cardano’s first Quantum block! https://twitter.com/onyxstakepool/status/1378848216578412547
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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
25. ...AND STILL....CARDANO=THE KING OF GITHUB COMMITS! https://twitter.com/wiSource/status/1379142670686294017
26. 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
27. 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
28. Tomorrow we’ll hit the items from the roadmap video that Charles just did.
29. 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/
30. The latest roadmap video from Charles covered a lot of ground. We’ll tackle it piece by piece. https://youtu.be/WRYRjmMvkJM
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. Today will be Part II of the coverage of the lates Roadmap vid from Charles. https://youtu.be/WRYRjmMvkJM
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. “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.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. Coinbase now has a Cardano Explainer. https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/what-is-cardano
42. “Smart people end up in Cardano one way or another.” https://twitter.com/Adavanz1/status/1378405038608031746
43. 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/
44. 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
45. 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
46. The Cardano native token space continues to flourish. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1380600524853108738
47. 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
48. 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
49. There is now a website that will mint Cardano NFTs for you. Thanks to Cardano subreddit user Padierfind. https://www.nft-maker.io/
50. Yesterday was “Get ADA Day” with the end of Epoch 258. I hope everyone did well in their staking.
51. Here’s a great way to visualize token minting and other on-chain activities thanks to Smaug Stake Pool. https://pool.pm/
52. 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.
53. 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
54. 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
55. 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
56. Charles did a quick but very interesting interview with Alessandro Konrad, co-founder of SpaceBudz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxlL3RA3UyI
57. Emurgo Traceability Solution being used to track coffee from Indonesia to China. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1381617916018319363
58. New IOHK blog post on Plutus from Lars. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/04/13/plutus-what-you-need-to-know/
59. 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
60. 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
61. 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
62. 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
63. 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).
64. The Cardano Foundation drops the Native Token Registry! https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1382700374755323916
65. 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
66. Occam replied with an open letter. https://twitter.com/OccamFi/status/1382432862654369798
67. 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
68. Santo Staking Pool will be launching “Skullys” NFTs on Cardano. https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/santo-blockchain-labs-mints-50-134500914.html
69. Yesterday was “Get ADA DAY” with the end of Epoch 259. I hope everyone straight killed it on staking rewards!
70. Now there is an app that will show you all of your Cardano NFTs. https://twitter.com/nft_craze/status/1383196757622878208
71. As always, we are the github champions this week. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1383087802305380359
72. 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
73. Here’s the Cardano Development Status Update for last week. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-16/
74. A Cardano stake pool is actually helping people avoid scorpions, spiders, & snakes in Africa?!? https://twitter.com/DenicioBernier/status/1383497821026807818
75. 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
76. There are even Ouroboros Omega tattoos now! https://twitter.com/Coinfera1/status/1383560914
77. We just experienced a big flash crash in price. A prime suspect is the drop in hash rate in BTC due to the Blackouts in China. Is the crypto space ready to accept that Nakamoto style consensus on PoW leads directly to unacceptable levels of centralization? This has been the dirty secret of PoW crypto and its decentralization loving enthusiasts for years. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-drops-as-blackouts-instituted-in-china
78. Charles posted a somewhat cryptic tweet that read “Omega + Hydra + Mithral = GG”. The Ourobors Omega, Ouroboros Hydra, & Mithral parts we’ve covered before. Omega is a capstone rollup of Praos (2017), Genesis (2018), + Redux, +Chronos, +Ledger Combiners, +some other things from the rest of the space. Hydra is layer two. Mithral is trustless light wallets via zk-SNARKs. Guesses as to the “GG” ranged from “Good Game” (as in game over for competitors) to “Goguen”. See today’s video at the link above for more discussion on this. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1383792375860924424
79. Danger Will Cardanoson: we’ve got fake rare NFTs being minted in Cardano now. Always check the Policy ID. https://twitter.com/pool_pm/status/1383892319896621059
80. Today is Get ADA Day with the end of Epoch 260! I hope you crushed it! https://adapools.org/epochs
81. Hard wallet Catalyst voting is on the horizon! https://twitter.com/ATADA_Stakepool/status/1384204498009157635
82. IOHK is hiring something like 80 people. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1384116617588535303
83. Biden Administration in early stages of regulating crypto. But, the news outlet here is reporting chatter among securities lawyers that Gary Genseler (new SEC Head) will approve a crypto ETF as a means of throwing a bone to conservative law makers. https://twitter.com/HukAleksandra/status/1384261829463924744
84. Africa special going down April 29th, 16:30 UTC!!!!!!! That’s 9:30amPacific; 10:30am Mountain; 12:30pm Eastern, 5:30pm Dublin; 7:30pm Addis Ababa; 11:30pm Bangkok. https://africa.cardano.org/ https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1384587491190222849 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1384582745116987393
85. Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI (the first recipient of a Cardano CFund investment), says he just finished recording his segment in the Africa special which he mentioned was airing at the end of April prior to the IOHK announcement of April 29th. He also said: 1) ADA Pay may be ready in early May or maybe even late April; 2) there will be a big launch for ADA Pay and once the Africa Special airs “everything will connect”; 3) “people are probably not getting how big this is….but you will down the line”; 4) COTI integration with a major exchange is happening, progress is not as quick as they would like, but it’s progressing; 5) last week they released the possible designs for debit cards, they are even considering some designs submitted by the community; 6) and iOS and Android integration is coming along nicely and well on the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EorsiQfEV7o
86. For a little more background on the work going on between COTI and Cardano, check out these links. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJbMUHXmeOg https://news.bitcoin.com/cardanos-cfund-first-capital-goes-to-israeli-fintech-startup-coti/
87. It looks like Yellow Card and Payway are listed on the Africa Special website. Given their business models, it is easy to guess that they could be valuable in the Pan Africa Strategy. https://payway.et/ https://yellowcard.io/
88. Partnership with World Mobile in Tanzania. Credit to Reddit user /u/ricklepicklemydickle for finding this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6TeNLvMTXI&t=2242s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX3Fnb_l4zA https://worldmobile.io/
89. Recap from yesterday: the Africa Special Announcements revealed some additional puzzle pieces 1) COTI’s AdaPay is possibly the larger payments infrastructure puzzle piece, 2) payway.et is possibly the local payments puzzle piece, 3) yellowcard.io is possibly the local coin exchange puzzle piece, and 4) World Mobile (not mentioned at africa.cardano.org AFAIK) may be the network connectivity puzzle piece. I think they are going to connect a lot of disparate pieces for us on the 29th.
90. Once again we are the champions! Not just of github commits this time, but also of total staked asset value. https://www.stakingrewards.com/
91. Rick interviewed CardStarter which is a Cardano accelerator. The interesting items are 1) it appears they are purporting to somehow insure their community backers against certain financial losses with caveats, 2) they plan to fund projects prior to token launch through token vouchers, and 3) it sounds like they are building a DEX called Card Swap. Notice that the “insurance” comes with caveats. They were very transparent on that point and people should take notice. Is CardStarter good? Is it bad? I have no idea. Watch the interview and form your own opinion. https://youtu.be/nIklWKtr_aY https://cardstarter.io/
92. The Cardano Foundation has adjusted its delegation strategy. This brings up a question: where does the balance lie between allowing Adam Smith’s hidden hand to work its free market magic and trying to help small pools? https://forum.cardano.org/t/the-cardano-foundation-s-delegation-methodology-is-changing/58465
93. More details on what the COTI/Cardano partnership will actually look like. Also COTI’s Trust Chain runs on a DAG. It’s probably high time we all understand WTF a DAG is. https://cotinetwork.medium.com/how-the-cardano-deal-can-grow-the-coti-ecosystem-some-personal-thoughts-8a6b495e3e3d https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
94. We’ve had really good reporting from the community on World Mobile developments with Cardano. I just want to take a second to thank you guys. Reddit user /u/ricklepicklemydickle first alerted us to the World Mobile developments and then youtube user Whiskey 1234 (love both usernames btw) let us know that he attended a conference where he encountered World Mobile and “asked them if they knew about Cardano blockchain and the reply was they were announcing partners at the end of this month.” Thank you very much for this intel guys.This is what Army of Spies is all about. Many thanks for your contributions, gentlemen.
95. Alko Sumatra Kopi is going to export 100 tonnes of coffee from Sumatra to China and track it all farm to cup using Emurgo Trace! We reported previously on the engagement of Emurgo Trace here and now it’s being put into action. https://emurgo.io/blog/emurgo-client-alko-is-the-first-enterprise-to-utilize-blockchain-for-coffee-traceability-in-southeast-asia
96. In Charles’s recent AMA, he mentioned that the Africa Special will be a Pan African event and they WILL talk about various deals they have in multiple countries. So, this tells us they do have multiple deals in multiple countries. That was a little unclear previously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP0JSgf9CU
97. IOHK’s Development Update for this week includes news that end-to-end tests of the ERC-20 Converter are commencing along with a mention of some oracle work under the Goguen update section. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-23/
98. The number of defi projects that have announced plans to be on Cardano just keeps climbing with Yayswap.io joining the list of Liqwid, Occam, and CardSwap/CardStarter.
99. Kraken publishes a “What is Cardano?” article. Says “...Cardano may not promise new ground-breaking features..” Oh yeah? What about native tokens that don’t require smart contracts? What about the EUTXO model allowing predictable and accurate local calculation of transaction fees in your wallet before you execute? What about a consensus algorithm that’s so good, another top 10 coin made their system derivative of it? That’s all standard these days? https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/1386038990864793607
100. There’s a new stake pool explorer on the block. Check out the geographic map and the epoch calendar. https://poolpeek.com/epochcalendar
101. First reactions from the “Ocean” are looking good! https://twitter.com/Saifadin/status/1386305951293075456
102. I hope everyone enjoyed their sweet, savory, and delicious staking rewards yesterday! https://adapools.org/epochs
103. In today’s video ,we’re also going to go much deeper on how the COTI DAG works. But, don’t worry at all you’ll totally understand it when we’re done.

~Army of Spies

STC Tokens from the Launchpad will be released soon! ‼️

STC Tokens from the Launchpad will be released soon! ‼️

Student Coin holders that purchased STC Tokens during the STC Launchpad will be able to withdraw their tokens on 9th May 2021. Soon, we will publish a detailed plan for May 2021 with exchange listings, promotional events, and all the important dates. ✅

We also invite you to vote in the Bonus STC Release Scheme and decide about the STC Affiliate withdrawal timeline. 🔥📅

https://app.studentcoin.org/voting

#BTC #ETH #STC #StudentCoin #DEFI #NFT #Bitcoin #Exchange

Citizens finance project

I like the 'citizens finance' teams that take part in various events, keep up tha good work and tel us the about your latest

#citizen_finance #blockchain #nft4ART #nft4FPS #bitcoin #nft4XR #crypto #ethereum #cryptocurrencies #fintech #defi #bsc

https://citizenfinance.io/

Miami Crypto Expo After Action Report

I attended the Miami Crypto Expo at the Intercontinental Hotel in Downtown Miami last Thursday and Friday which had a great mix of workshops covering three main topics: decentralized finance; bitcoin/crypto generally; NFTs.

I attended both days and went to many workshops. I had a great time, but as a nerd it's easy for me to get carried away in such a setting. As a resident of the county and long time tourist in the bitcoin space I saw this as an early opportunity to get my ear to the ground and start to pick out the interesting future trends which may have their nascence here in South Florida due to the very open stance the Mayor and some commissioners have taken.

Some of you may already know about a large conference happening early June, which I expect to be a landmark event.

I wanted to throw this up for anyone who went talk about their own experiences, or for people who didn't know about the event to ask any questions they may have about what happened.

Oh no! The entire market moves together! It must be a scam!

Bitcoin is the main powerhouse if the crypto world that drags everything else with it. If Bitcoin goes up, the market goes up. If Bitcoin crashes, then everything crashes. This is pretty much common knowledge, but I have encountered quite a few people lately that are new to crypto and did not know this and occasionally they even wonder how is that even possible that the entire market suddenly drops, all at the same time, following the exact same curve? It must be a scam and all manipulated because no way this is a “natural” occurrence. But actually, it is.

The below is a rough explanation of one of the reasons, amongst many, why this happens. There are other reasons too, some may affect it more some may affect it less, but this one gives a good idea about why it is a logical consequence of Bitcoin pulling the market so that it is not caused by some unknown Great Manipulator in the shadows, but it is a natural phenomenon.

It is all basically happening because there is a trading pair (BTC/USDT) that have both its coins traded with most other coins, like when there is a new coin added to exchanges it is very likely it will be set up as trading pairs with Bitcoin and USDT so by now, there are trading pairs on most exchanges between any coins and Bitcoin (BTC) and any coins and Tether (USDT). This means you can trade your coins for Bitcoin and for USDT amongst others. So if there is a sharp move on the BTC/USDT pair, it imbalances the price of other coins that also trade between both coins, generating a pressure to follow.

So first, let’s assume we have 1 Bitcoin (BTC), 1 Tether (USDT) and 1 Tabby Cat Token (TCT). They all have trading pairs with each other, so there are BTC/USDT, BTC/TCT and also USDT/TCT pairs.

For simplicity, let’s assume 1BTC=1USDT=1TCT meaning you can buy 1 Bitcoin for 1 USDT or 1USDT for 1TCT or 1 Bitcoin for 1TCT. This is the balance state.

If Bitcoin drops to half of its value against USDT because someone sells a large amount of it for USDT pushing down the price, it is easy to see that suddenly the TCT/BTC and TCT/USDT price will become imbalanced. Before the deal it was 1TCT=1BTC and 1TCT=1USDT but when Bitcoin dropped to half its price against USDT it created a market price pressure on TCT since at that point 1TCT did worth 1USDT but also did worth 1BTC directly but 2BTC indirectly through USDT. So indirectly TCT went up against Bitcoin resulting in sell orders driving the price of TCT down too following the price of Bitcoin.

Since the above happens quickly, pretty much in real time, all we can see is that when Bitcoin moves, most of the market also moves with it.

Of course, this is just one of the reasons, probably not even explained very well or accurately, but I find it simple enough to make some sense in the “everything moves together” events so some people may sleep better when they understand that it is just a logical consequence of the aligned stars (Bitcoin and USDT) and not an elaborate market manipulation of some major scammer.

New York Blockchain meetup

Calling on our New York community!

RSK Co-Founder u/gabrielkurman and u/sovrynBTC will be with New York Blockchain Meetup discussing all things #Bitcoin #DeFi with #RSK!

TOMORROW, 8pm ET
Register to participate: meetup.com/es-ES/BlockchainNYC/events/277428131/

[Canada] Taxing Times

BMO

Douglas Porter, CFA

April 23rd, 2021

​

• Textbook economics tell us that a looser fiscal policy combined with a tighter monetary policy usually leads to a stronger currency. Apparently, the textbooks are still sometimes correct. The Canadian dollar forged above 80 cents(US), firming on net in a week that saw a pair of heavyweight events. While the broad strokes of the Federal budget and the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report were no big surprise, both landed on the very far end of the expectations spectrum. After an earlier pledge to spend an extra $70 bln-to-$100 bln over the next three years to support the economy, the budget in fact offered up $101 bln, with almost half front-end loaded into the current fiscal year (i.e., an extra 2% of GDP this year alone). Two days later, the currency really got a charge when the Bank tapered QE purchases from $4 bln to $3 bln per week, as widely expected, but piled on with at least four surprisingly hawkish signals for good measure. Briefly:

1. The tapering was bluntly billed as a response to economic progress, and not as a technical measure. In fact, the Bank didn’t even attempt to soften the blow by suggesting any change in the maturity of bond purchases.
2. The Bank now sees economic slack as being absorbed by the second half of 2022, much earlier than the previous “some time in 2023”.
3. The Bank projected inflation to be above 2% out in 2023 (in fact, 2.4% Q4/Q4), clearly setting the stage for a potential justification of rate hikes well before then. The CPI report earlier that day already revealed a March pop in headline trends to 2.2%, and above 2% for two of the BoC’s core measures.
4. As if to add an exclamation point, the Bank’s GDP growth forecastsuddenly jumped to the top of the class, calling for 6.5% this year, up from 4.0% just three months earlier, and well above even what the budget was premised on just two days earlier (5.8%, according to the private sector consensus).

• Effectively, in one stroke, the Bank has gone from being among the most cautious forecasters on the Canadian growth outlook this year to the most optimistic. True, we had also been calling for a strong 6.5% advance this year, but we trimmed our projection to 6.0% this week (while simultaneously lifting next year a similar amount to 4.5%). Even with the spending blast from the budget, the wave of renewed and deepening restrictions across much of the country has prompted us to rein in our estimate of Q2 GDP to nil. While we do expect a hearty rebound as things reopen, the fact is that some activity will be lost for good by these latest lockdowns. The Bank did allow that the third wave is a new challenge for the economy, and readily noted that the forecasts still carry great uncertainty. But it is quite the statement that the Bank chose to take its growth call to the very high end of consensus.
• The Bank may also be more willing to build in a fiscal multiplier from the heavy-duty federal spending than most others. The direct contribution from government outlays is expected to alone boost GDP by 1.5 percentage points this year. Its forecast assumed a middle ground of $85 bln of additional spending, so the budgetary measures may even give some upside risk to their view.
• Sidebar: One of the more notable moments of the press conference was when Governor Macklem was asked about the discrepancy between the assumption on extra government spending and the $101 bln reality. He essentially brushed off the $16 bln difference. In days of yore—like 16 months ago—that amount of money would have made a big difference for forecasts, weighing in at 0.7% of current GDP. Such is life in days of triple-digit budget deficits.
• There was much less market reaction to the budget, despite the heavy-duty build-up to the event. Clocking in well above 700 pages and containing—by our count—276 separate new initiatives, perhaps the document simply overwhelmed. And, while there’s always some mystery around new measures and the big figures on the deficit, there were no shocks on either front. The showpiece child care plan was well telegraphed, and still requires negotiations with the provinces. On the deficit, the current year did come in higher than many expected (not us) at $155 bln (or 6.4% of GDP), and the prior year’s record shortfall was equally chopped to $354 bln (16.1%). And, next year’s gap is still expected to narrow sharply to just below $60 bln (a manageable 2.3% of GDP).
• The one significant market response was a sell-off at the long end of the yield curve, as Ottawa tilted this year’s borrowing plan heavily to the long end. After the dust settled, Canada’s 30-year bond yield finished the week about 5 bps higher at just above 2%, in a week when long-term Treasuries dipped 3 bps to just below 2.25%—a large relative move. The short end of Canada’s curve eventually also saw yields move higher on the blatantly hawkish BoC message.
• One small mercy in the wide-ranging budget was the absence of broad tax hikes. No doubt, there were some targeted measures, including a tax on luxury goods, digital services, a limit on corporate interest deductions, and a 1% levy on vacant homes owned by non-residents. The latter was a mild effort to tame the raging housing market, which flashed yet more signs of wildness this week. New home prices ratcheted higher again last month, but the real eye-popper was the blow-out 335,000 housing starts in March—the highest monthly tally recorded in 30 years of data. (The all-time annual apex was set in 1976 at 273,203 units.)
• Sidebar II and a not-so-modest proposal: In some sense, it’s passing strange that we are even talking about tax hikes at all. After all, isn’t Ottawa attempting to stimulate, or “jumpstart” (in its words), the economy? Pray tell, why then is all the fiscal room taken up by the spending side, and not at least some space for lower taxes to help support the economy’s competitiveness? We would assert that trimming marginal income tax rates could, in one fell swoop: a) help housing affordability by providing more after-tax income; b) help defray child care expenses; c) incent more to join the labour force by reducing the cost of work; and, d) boost spending power and stimulate consumption. If Ottawa is perfectly fine with running deficits as far as the eye can see, in good times or very bad, then why can’t some of the gap be aimed at fundamentally lower taxes rather than permanently higher spending?
• While Ottawa’s budget didn’t talk about large tax increases—yet—the topic is now very much on the U.S. table. First, President Biden’s huge infrastructure proposal is expected to be at least partly funded by a hike in corporate taxes. Second, and the new news this week, was the proposal to lift capital gains taxes sharply for those earning more than $1 mln annually. This is expected to help pay for the next leg of the President’s domestic agenda, including a child care plan. Normally, we may be tempted to step in with the same comment as above; i.e., if deficits suddenly don’t matter… but, the starting point for U.S. finances is weaker, and the wave of stimulus programs have already been much more overwhelming in recent months than anything seen from Ottawa. While the latter’s deficit is expected to moderate to around 1% of GDP within a few years, there is no such prospect of anything in that time zone from Washington.
• Financial markets suffered a one-day hit from news of the U.S. capital gains tax plan. However, the damage didn’t prove lasting, as the reality of its challenging approval process meant cooler heads prevailed. U.S. equities dipped only slightly on the week, finding support from generally solid earnings. It was an otherwise quiet week for U.S. economic releases and for markets—aside from Bitcoin, which suddenly finds itself in a bear market, falling more than 20% in a week, perhaps crowded out by Dogecoin. And there is no truth, none whatsoever, that Bitcoin stands for Bigger Idiot Theory Coin…none. Zero.
• Next week, the U.S. economic calendar gathers some serious momentum, with the highlight reel events the FOMC meeting on Wednesday and Q1 GDP the next day. We are expecting a crackling 7% annualized advance for the latter, driven by some reopening and the two-stage fiscal stimulus packages in the quarter. Also keep an eye on Friday’s income and spending figures for March, which are likely to be ginormous amid the $1,400 payments. That same day will also bring Canada’s monthly GDP figures for February, and a flash estimate for March. Not unlike the U.S., we anticipate a whopping March advance as the economy opened a touch last month. Sadly, it’s almost a certainty that April will bring a big reversal, as shutdowns have since swept across the country, even to places like Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which had previously avoided the worst of the pandemic. However, we fundamentally believe that the flashes of strength we shall see for March simply provide a hint of what lies ahead when the economy can more fully and safely reopen.