Cardano is quite a craze nowadays, we are continuously seeking a surge in price. The Alonzo Smart Contracts is launching on the 12th of September and is keeping up the price movement. However, do you know that along with the smart contract stimulus (which will usher in lots of new projects) there is another stimulus also which will make you hold on to your ADA?

Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO) is one such feature in Cardano that will prove to be hugely beneficial. I have spoken about ISPOs before, but this article is a deep dive into how you can participate. I will be showing you the same using the XRAY Tokens from Ray's wallet.

What is ISPO?

In Cardano, anybody can run a stake pool. There are Cardano Projects who run their stake pools. However, the smaller pools have a lesser probability to secure a block, thereby reducing the chance of getting ADA rewards in a block. So somebody came up with a novel idea! How if we can incentivize the delegators to delegate with the project’s pool by offering the project’s token for free.

Advantages:

1.    Users just need to change their staking pool to the project’s pool

2.    Users continue to get ADA Staking rewards + Tokens of the project for free

3.    There is extra value coming out of the small stake pools thereby changing the staking dynamics

4.    Your ADA remains safe in your custody.

5.    No ADA Lockup period

Disadvantage:

1.    ADA rewards are in the hands of the pools, so before delegation, check if they are giving you all the rewards

2.    You can only stake with one pool with one wallet, so if you are targeting multiple pools, then you will have to put your ADA in multiple wallets

ISPO with Ray Pool

Ray is an advanced DeFi ecosystem for  Cardano. It is not as popular as its competitors like ErgoDex, SundaeSwap, however, the project has a big vision and is working on the following solutions:

·       Staking

·       Wallet

·       Swap

·       Kickstart (Launchpad)

·       NFT Minting

·       GraphQL API provisioning

Ray has 3 pools

·       Ray

·       Ray 2

·       Ray 3

Pool Selection

While selecting a pool you have to select the one with a high Live Stake by still unsaturated (<100%). You can also see the Blocks Lifetime which is directly proportional to the rewards you get.

In the below example the pool Ray is still not 100% saturated and it is processing blocks much higher than RAY 2 and RAY 3.

Staking

You can use Ray Wallet, Daedalus, Yoroi, Adalite to delegate to Ray pools.

You can delegate using Ray Wallet from the following link. You will have to add your wallet using your private key.

In case you don’t trust Ray Wallet, let's use Yoroi, which is the official Cardano Wallet.

Add Yoroi as a Chrome extension

Open the wallet in your extension. Go to delegation List and search RAY.

You will find RAY in the list. You can click on the name of the pool to do much more research on the Pool.

Looks like the saturation number is 92% (hover your cursor around the saturation bar). For readers who will read this after this pool gets saturated, you can try RAY 2 and RAY 3.

Click on Delegate and go to Dashboard of Yoroi.

The dashboard will show you your current pool for the next 2 epochs and the Ray network from the 3rd Epoch. You will also see below that you are continuously getting ADA rewards. (My screenshot shows RAY in the current epoch too as I have already staked along the back)

Currently, in the RAY pool, the rewards are

·       XRAY Rate: 51.533126 ADA / 1 XRAY / Epoch

·       ADA ROI: ~ 5% / Year

You can occasionally check your XRAY Rewards by copying your address from the receive section of Yoroi (use an already used address)

Then paste it in the following link

It will show your XRAY Rewards. Note that you can not withdraw it yet. Withdrawal happens only after smart contracts are in place. For now, you will have to place your trust in them.

Anyways you are not losing anything, not your ADA, nor your ADA staking rewards. Very soon you will be able to do participate in ISPO with lots of other projects.

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ADA, the native currency of Cardano, formed a classic bearish ‘head and shoulders’ pattern weeks back (I explained that in this article). The cryptocurrency was really struggling to achieve a renewed rally as it was trading below the 50-day moving average and 99-day moving average. Many analysts predicted a bullish-to-bearish trend reversal for ADA which had outperformed BTC and ETH in this bull run so far. In the crypto market, the performance of altcoins is often dependent on BTC and this time BTC showed a new vigour and started to trade above its 200-day moving average. ADA also crossed its crucial 1.4 USD resistance quite swiftly. The cryptocurrency is currently trading above 2.1 USD and dethroned BNB from the number three rank as per market capitalization. What worked for ADA?

Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson, a few days back, announced that Cardano smart contracts were coming soon. Today, Nigel Hemsley, head of delivery at Cardano, revealed the release date of Cardano’s Alonzo Purple upgrade. Alonzo will bring the smart-contract capability to Cardano after a long testnet. This upgrade will be released on September 12 and Cardano will finally achieve much-anticipated capabilities. This will also ensure completion of the Goguen era of Cardano and should start Basho – the 4th era focused on interoperability and scalability. DeFi or decentralized finance applications will also run on the blockchain after the launch of the Alonzo mainnet.

Input Output (IOHK), a blockchain engineering company founded by Hoskinson and focused on the development of Cardano, launched ‘Project Catalyst Fund6’ with $4m worth of ADA today. It is an ambitious fund that will help build Cardano’s ecosystem and aims to fund 150 projects. The IOHK official blog post says that “funded proposals can also benefit from an invitation to join our successful Plutus Pioneer training program, where participants can learn how to implement Plutus smart contracts into their application.” Cardano has a vibrant community and the supporters are really excited about the developments.

Image Source – Cardano ecosystem 

While the launch of smart contracts is extremely bullish news for Cardano, another recent development must be noted.  The Cardano Foundation minted the world’s first Non-Fungible Tokens of Appreciation (NFTAs) recently and published a detailed blog post. These tokens are different from Ethereum tokens as there is no involvement of smart contracts and these are native tokens. The NFT standard is called CIP 721. The NFTAs were given to 10 key developers of Cardano as tokens of appreciation. The market buzz is that many NFT projects are coming up on this blockchain.

World Mobile, an Africa based proposed mobile network is building a hybrid public-private chain in partnership with Input Output Global (IOG). Cardano will be the public chain and World Mobile Chain will be the private sidechain. The value settlement will take place on Cardano by default. IOG will bank the unbanked and World Mobile will connect the unconnected. The partnership was announced in April 2021 but the launch of the smart contract capability on Cardano may give World Mobile the opportunity to become the killer DAPP of Cardano very soon.

Unlike other projects, Cardano relies upon academic research and so the development has been really slow. While new projects like Algorand, Solana and Avalanche displayed rapid execution with continuous raw experiments, Cardano focused on providing a scalable finished product and the team published so many research papers regarding the underlying technology. The approach of Cardano has been significantly different and most probably a certain investor class is very optimistic with the project due to this. The recent surge in interest can really fuel up the demand for ADA and take it to a new all-time high. Closely observe the daily candle closings for the next few days and DYOR before investing.

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ADA, the native currency of Cardano, is trading above 1.3 USD now. The all-time high of ADA was 2.45 USD on May 16, 2021. Just one year back, this cryptocurrency was trading at 0.13 USD. The phenomenal growth of ADA has really surprised the market analysts and the cryptocurrency has flipped DOT, XRP to grab the 5th rank with a market capitalization of 41B+ USD. 70% of ADA supply is currently staked and it also shows the investors' confidence in the project.

Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum, left the Ethereum project due to some disputes and started the Cardano project in 2015. The blockchain was launched in 2017 with much hype and it was one of the first blockchains with a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The project aims to develop a smart contract capable blockchain with a layered structure. Unlike other projects, Cardano relies upon academic research and wants to build the project through scientific philosophy.  The developmental speed of the project has been really slow due to its approach but that didn’t stop Cardano to grab investors’ eyeballs. Cardano is going to attain much anticipated smart-contract functionality through a major protocol update soon.

There are five eras in the Cardano development roadmap: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire. Currently, the Goguen era is ongoing and the project is poised at a critical juncture. The Goguen phase is divided into three stages - Allegra, Mary and Alonzo. Alonzo brings the smart-contract capability to Cardano but it was delayed. Presently, Alonzo is in the testnet stage and the team says that the developments are very much on track. Alonzo mainnet launch can be the watershed moment for the Cardano blockchain as DAPPs will be able to run on the blockchain. Polymarket, a prediction platform on Ethereum, has launched a prediction market where people are betting on whether Cardano will support smart contracts on Mainnet by October 1st, 2021 or not. Maximum people are paying higher prices for saying ‘No’ there!

Image Source - Polymarket

Cardano has a vibrant and supportive community. The crowd support has really helped the project to maintain upward price momentum and outperform other big cryptocurrencies in the recent bull run. Cardano Foundation also published an infographic some months back to suggest why greener ADA was more suitable for being part of the corporate balance sheet of Tesla. Will we see another price rally of ADA along with the major protocol update? Presently, the cryptocurrency is trading below the 50-day moving average and 99-day moving average. If the price doesn’t become stable above 1.4 USD, a renewed and sustainable rally can be really difficult.

ADA, already up 825% year-on-year, has formed a classic bearish ‘head and shoulders’ pattern. A ‘head and shoulders’ pattern is a popular signal to depict a bullish-to-bearish trend reversal and ADA has formed an inverse head and shoulders at present. The pattern clearly suggests that ADA can have big downside risks. It is important to note that the cryptocurrency market is often unpredictable and when Bitcoin is gaining a new vigour, altcoins can deny the outcome of any technical analysis. 

The high amount of staked ADA has really helped it to avoid market dumping but the investors are eagerly waiting for remarkable developments. If the expectation isn’t met, the price may plunge. ADA has grown in recent times due to the news of smart-contract capability launch but the effect may fade soon. Post-launch of the smart contracts, the blockchain will need innovative DAPPs to bring more users. Only environment friendliness can’t be the parameter to hold an investment for a long time. The competitors like Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Avalanche etc. are already having the smart-contract capability and a growing DAPP ecosystem. The road is going to be tough for Cardano. Everything depends on how the ADA price moves in the next few days. Only a stretch of daily closing candles above 1.4 USD can bring back the bullish momentum for ADA.

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I follow Cardano closely. A few months back as I was writing my previous articles on Cardano, I felt that it is important to follow the early-stage projects developing on Cardano. You don’t want to miss out on a new project that gets a grant from the Foundation. Such projects are usually thoroughly vetted by the community and the trust level and transparency are high. Cardano’s Catalyst voting is a rigorous process and the various steps involved in the process ensure that the decisions remain decentralized, simultaneously ensuring that the funding is based on strong fundamentals.

I covered the projects in Fund 2 and 4. It has been quite a journey. The earlier Funds were focused on fixing basics (Haskell/Plutus/Marlowe education, PoolTool platform upgrade, create a message-signing standard). In Fund 4, the Funding moved to a broader scale, the fund started rewarding Dapp projects which will contribute to the ecosystem. The tokens of such projects are not yet in the market and hence, as an investor, this is the right time to put your focus and pre-select the projects where you want to invest in the future. Add them to your Twitter and follow them, wait for the right news, and get your first-mover advantage.

With Fund 4 closed now, the Cardano projects are slowly evolving (still very early stage). Some of these projects were initially launched in Ethereum and promises to move to Cardano, eg. Cardstarter. Such projects do so to raise funds earlier, however, there are questions on whether they are a true adopter of the features that Cardano Blockchain provides. There are however projects who are building on Cardano. Such projects have introduced an entirely new concept of token distribution, the Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO).

These second type of Cardano projects will build their stake pools. The validators delegate their token with them, in return these projects distribute their token to the delegators at a pre-defined ratio. This is somewhat equivalent (not entirely similar) to the Parachain auctions in Kusama and Polkadot, where you need to lock your KSM or DOT to get the project’s token.

Positives of ISPO:

1. You get free tokens of the Cardano’s project by just Holding Cardano.

2. You continue to receive staking rewards (not possible in Kusama and Polkadot). Just check before the staking what %ge staking rewards is the Project retaining.

3. Your token is not locked, you can withdraw and redelegate any time. Just know that you will only start getting rewards from the 3rd epoch. Each epoch is approximately 5 days.

Negatives of ISPO:

1. Redistribution of Cardano to the Project’s pool might kill the smaller pools. There have been indications that projects have been creating multiple stake pools to accommodate new users. This might create a Whale Problem.

2. Once the delegators feel that they have gathered enough tokens of the project they might move to the next project. Loyalty is not essential.

Projects Doing ISPO

MELD

MELD is a lending and borrowing protocol to be launched in Cardano. MELD is controversial. However, it is revolutionary being the first project (probably) experimenting live with ISPO. The MELD ISPO started on July 1st. Unfortunately with MELD, you will not get any staking rewards. MELD retains all staking rewards and will reward delegators with MELD tokens. For each ADA you will get 0.065 MELD.

More details here.

RAY WALLET

RAY is also a Defi protocol in Cardano. It has a wallet, staking solution, Swap, Kickstart, NFT Marketplace, etc. By staking your ADA in the RAY Pool you will get 1 RAY as a reward for every 50 ADA staked. You will also get your usual staking rewards in ADA. The project UI still looks like a WIP, but there is no harm in participating in decentralized staking

SUNDAESWAP

This is my favorite. Sundaeswap is very popular. It has promised that it will initiate an ISPO. The dates have not been announced yet. Watch out for it.

I will keep on updating you about newer projects in the future.

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Written by Parag Bhattacharya

ADA, the native cryptocurrency of Cardano blockchain, is trading above $1.20 now. On 27th Feb 2021, ADA reached its all-time peak of $1.48. With a $40B+ market capitalization, ADA has flipped DOT, BNB and USDT and it is the third-largest cryptocurrency at present. Just one year back, ADA was trading below $0.05, so the growth has been really exponential.

The developmental work of Cardano started in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum. Charles left Ethereum after a dispute over keeping Ethereum non-profit and founded a company called IOHK, dedicated to Cardano. The blockchain was launched in 2017 with big buzz and reached the market cap of $10B by the end of 2017. Cardano was one of the first successful big blockchain projects to implement a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The project is a third-generation blockchain if we consider Bitcoin and Ethereum as the first and second-generation blockchains.

Ethereum has a scalability issue and the arbitrary gas fee is a big problem. Many popular DAPPs are moving away from Ethereum or exploring multi-chain options. Binance Smart Chain and Polkadot reaped good benefits from the situation but Cardano’s success is really astonishing considering that there is no popular DAPP running on this blockchain. Dubai based FD7 Ventures, a global crypto investment fund with $1B assets under management, announced recently that they would be selling $750M worth of their Bitcoin holdings over the next 30 days to increase their ADA and DOT positions. FD7 is supposed to complete its asset conversion by mid-to-end March. The news definitely worked in favour of ADA and it got pumped heavily. Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital currency asset manager, also announced that it was considering ADA for potential new product offerings.

‘Mary update’ of Cardano protocol will be activated in the first week of March 2021. The update will bring support for multiple assets. There are five eras in the Cardano development roadmap: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. This is the most significant update of the Goguen period of Cardano's development. The Goguen era mainly focuses on enabling the development of DAPPs. The proposed update will incorporate a multi-currency ledger and the users will be able to develop their own tokens through the token builder function. Mary update will be implemented through a hard fork. The update also means that the Goguen era has matured. It is important to note that the Goguen era is aimed to make Cardano accessible to wider audiences via Marlowe, a high-level and domain-specific language (DSL) for financial contracts built on Plutus, allowing a layman with no previous technical knowledge to create smart contracts.

Tokenization on Cardano will finally happen. The new tokens can be fungible or non-fungible tokens. There will be easier integration of DAPPs involving multiple currencies. With the recent developments, DeFi activity may blossom on Cardano very soon. Cardano has a TPS of 257 against Ethereum’s 15-20 TPS. Hydra is a proposed second-layer solution of Cardano and the whitepaper was released in 2020.  With help of Hydra, Cardano can be theoretically able to scale up to 1 million TPS and the finality of transactions will be very fast. On paper, Cardano looks strong enough.

Cardano is really an ambitious project. The team wants to make Cardano the alternative of fiat money and also wants to make it the preferred blockchain for developing applications. IOHK recently announced plans to bring the Glow programming language to Cardano blockchain. Glow will be launched initially on Cardano’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer network (devnet). The smart contract codes, written in Solidity (used in Ethereum), are already being deployed on Cardano for testing. The developers should be happy to use another option now. EVM compatible Glow can make the coding job easier and faster. Cardano’s main problem is its slow development speed and absence of a good developer ecosystem. The ‘Ethereum killer’ project has finally surpassed Ethereum as per transaction volumes very recently. Surpassing the transaction volume or transaction count of Ethereum has become a new performance metric to create hype nowadays but it is not clear who is using ADA to move such huge funds. Cardano definitely has potential but it needs to deliver a long list of promises first. The incredible price surge must be supported by the applications.

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Written by Ruma Dass

Cardano has not launched its smart contract capability yet. However considering the recent NFT hype, NFTs on Cardano have already started selling. This is because tokens on Cardano are native. Let’s look into what's really happening.

Charles Hoskinson in a recent interview focused on NFTs. Native capabilities have been built into Cardano from Catalyst to metadata standard. This will resolve a lot of problems about metadata, identity, authentication, governance. In long term, Cardano can become one of the leading platforms to issue, curate, and transfer an NFT from one party to another party. Cardano might also examine trusted hardware. The users can get proofs of a guaranteed eraser, where NFT could be transferred from one place to another and the prior representation of it can be destroyed to have uniqueness.

Cardano does not really have a proper wallet to show NFTs held in a particular account. However, this is not stopping projects from launching NFTs. Many of them are based on trust. CardanoKidz was the first to create NFTs in Cardano. There are a number of projects which followed. Some of these projects are already quite popular.

NFT Dao

NFT Dao is building the NFT Standard for Cardano. It is building a rapid NFT marketplace generation DApp on Cardano. Anyone will be able to launch their own niche NFT marketplace. They are gathering specs and assembling open standards can be employed by all Cardano projects.

Cardano Kidz

The Cardano Kidz NFTs celebrate the heroes of Cardano. They do not have any real utilities yet, but still, all are sold out, mainly because they are the first. The sales are currently in Pre-Order. The buyer needs to send Ada and mention the transaction ID and address. The NFTs will later be delivered to the same address. The project is waiting for the Cardano Token standard to launch before minting starts. In the future people will be able to sell or exchange the NFTs in a marketplace.

Professor Cardano

Professor Cardano project is working with the soon-to-be-launched NFT marketplace, cnft.io. It is based on the Periodic Table of Elements. The First Batch was Oganesson where 118 tokens were minted. Each token was sold for 150 Ada. This is purely based on trust as no smart contract is involved. Transactions are communicated over emails. NFTs will later be shared once minted. The next batches will be Tennessine (117), Livermorium (116), Moscovium (115), Flerovium (114), etc.

LoveAda

LoveAda is a digital art marketplace. It is currently not live but in the process of onboarding new creators. The selection process is curated by the team members to ensure that the original artists of the artworks are onboarded.

Somint

Somint is an art marketplace. It is yet to launch. It is backed by James Duneith, Founding Educator at Gimbalabs, winner of Fund 1 & Fund 2 of Cardano’s project catalyst.

Somint is built on NFT Dao.

CNFT

CNFT (Cardano NFT) is a digital marketplace created by Cardano Buzz, a popular Cardano staking pool.

The NFT sales platform is scheduled to launch on Q2 - Q3 2021

Spacebudz

Similar to the concept of CryptoPunks, Spacebudz has 10,000 tokens, each with different characteristics. The Pre-Sale was quite popular and is now completed. The marketplace is scheduled to launch soon.

The purpose of this article is to put forward a picture of the NFT Ecosystem which is currently getting created in Cardano. Most of these projects are still in the early phases and are highly risky to invest in. Any form of investment needs to be carefully done. In my opinion, you should invest in only those NFTs where you see the actual value and have proper utilities.

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Written by Ruma Dass

Cardano is slowly implementing its final solution phases, the latest being the launch of native tokens on Cardano. This is considered to be the most important step after the Shelley Launch. Cardano’s native token architecture promises to give it a considerable edge over its competitors.

The Cardano Hard Fork combinator event was initiated on the 1st of March. This enhanced Cardano's capability to issue native tokens on the blockchain. This is one step towards full Goguen release, leading up to smart contracts on Cardano. This means that Cardano has moved from a single asset system to a multi-asset system.

Everybody in the Cardano community will be able to mint their own native assets on Cardano.

• These assets/tokens will have all the key functionalities similar to Cardano's native currency, ADA, such as the same level of safety and security as ADA itself.

• The most astonishing development is that people do not need to use or write smart contracts or custom code to create these tokens. The logic is based on the Cardano ledger, rather than smart contracts.

The current Ethereum tokenization process requires custom codes, that add to the complexity and security concerns. The tokens which are created using Smart contracts are non-native tokens. The underlying ledger does not support these tokens. Smart contracts are susceptible to bugs and thus security risks. Mary Hardfork and the Cardano native token architecture create a zero barrier for Ethereum tokens to migrate to Cardano.

• There are no smart contract fees required to talk to the blockchain, hence the total cost of a transaction is low.

• When it comes to sending and receiving, any wallet address can be used to send and receive both ADA and native tokens. Also, you can send multiple tokens in a single transaction, this further lowers the transaction cost incurred from multiple transaction fees.

There are, however, 2 distinct differences between the native tokens and ADA.

1. Unlike ADA, native tokens can be created and destroyed.

2. Service fees, rewards, and deposits will be paid using ADA only.

The Cardano ledger supports both Fungible and Non Fungible tokens without specialized contracts. It can store a mix of both types in a single output.

The core principles which drive the native token framework are:

1. Lightweight: Cardano's multi-asset ledger structure is built around native bundles (values). A token bundle is a mix of ADA and other tokens. The tokens have Asset IDs, that include a hash of the minting policy, as that is the part that is not stored in the ledger and is customizable. The token bundle has a 2 level map structure which enables Fungible and non Fungible tokens to be represented uniformly.

2. Affordability: The transfer of assets in the ecosystem does not carry any execution free, which makes it cheaper.

3. Security: On Cardano, all native token transfer logic is coded in the ledger. This ensures the predictable and uniform behavior of the system. The native tokens share the same security as ADA itself.

4. Unified Processes: Considering the common logic coding in the ledger, all tokens will be handled in the same way, creating a unified process. This will lead to fast development and better decision-making.

In Daedelus Flight, just under the Ada balance, you will see a new 'Tokens' button. As of today, both fungible and non-fungible tokens can be minted using the CLI interface. This requires some amount of technical knowledge. In the coming days, a user-friendly interface will be available which will make it easier for anyone to mint their Fungible Tokens. NFTs will be made available in the UI after that.

The next Hard Fork is Alonso. Over time with Babel transactions and programmability which is coming with the third hard fork, Cardano will become a good platform for stablecoins and security tokens. There are groups that have already started minting NFTs on Cardano. These will be considered one of the firsts in the Cardano Blockchain.

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Written by Ruma Dass

Project Catalyst is a series of experiments that seeks to generate the highest levels of community innovation. Catalyst is bringing on-chain governance to the Cardano blockchain by allowing the community to self-determine priorities for growth. It also lets participants deploy funding to proposals that tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities that arise in the life cycle of Cardano.

Fund 4 focuses on incentivizing solutions that make it easier for developers to build on top of Cardano. To achieve this, the guiding questions for the voters when they vote will be

• Identify the tools to be prioritized

• Attract developers for outside the existing community

• Enabling the developers with the necessary support required

• What would attract the interest of the developers to go through Cardano docs and code

• Building for enterprise development managers, either internal or commercial?

The fundamental pillars of Fund 4 are classified as below:

• Developer ecosystem challenge: Create a positive app developer experience. Allocation - 400k in ADA

• DApps and integrations challenge: Ways to help the app developers drive the adoption of Cardano in 2021. Allocation - 200k in ADA

• Distributed decision-making challenge: Develop better-distributed decision-making in the next 2 Catalyst rounds. Allocation - 50k in ADA

• Proposer outreach: Encourage entrepreneurs from outside the Cardano ecosystem to submit proposals to Catalyst in the next two funds. Allocation - $50k in ADA

• Catalyst value onboarding: Encourage community members to participate in Project Catalyst in the next two funds. Allocation - $50k in ADA

• Local community centers: Mobilize the community to solve local problems using Cardano. A Local Community Center model. Allocation - $50k in ADA

These will be tracked via:

• Reporting by funded proposals every two weeks

• On-chain annotations

• New user survey

• Growth metrics

Campaign Timeline

• Insight Sharing: View all the insights shared by community members at the start of the challenge. Valid till 25/Feb/21

• Submit Proposals: After successful submission of proposals, the community starts to give feedback. Valid till 04/Mar/21

• Refine: In this stage, Community members give proposals feedback and help proposals evolve. Valid till 11/Mar/21

• Finalize: In this stage, idea teams are called on to provide additional details about their ideas. The teams answer the questions, provide insights on the ideas, and refine them into proposals for implementation. Valid till 18/Mar/21

• Assess: In this stage, ideas are assessed by experts from your community. Assessors rate ideas based on a specified set of criteria to help uncover the ideas with the most potential. Valid till 25/Mar/21

• Assess QA: View proposals in the voting app. Discussion is now about which proposals should be funded, and Q&A with proposers, rather than how to improve them further. Valid till 01/Apr/21

• Governance Phase: In this stage, voters discuss the merits of proposals and pose questions to the proposers.

• Archive: Where inactive proposals are stored

• Insight Sharing Reserve: View all the insights community members had to share at the start of the challenge Valid till 25/Feb/21

Note that in Fund 4 people will be able to vote using their mobile app (Catalyst Voting, not Yoroi). The Yoroi chrome version has been charged up with voting capabilities which can be synced up with the catalyst app for voting. I will write a separate guide about it later.

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Written by Ruma Dass

In my previous article, I talked about 5 Cardano projects which have received Fund-2 grants. The aim of Fund-2 is to fund those projects which will further develop the adoption of the platform. Such projects mainly include protocol improvements, documentation along with the occasional additions of a few dApps. Here are the remaining 6 projects.

6. IoT Utility Dapp - Sign Tx Arduino: This project will work as an immediate fix before Goguen (Cardano’s Smart Contract) is launched. There is no simple method to sign embedded Cardano transactions in C. The project aims to build an Arduino IDE compatible C library to sign local Cardano transactions. Arduino enables fast hardware and software prototyping and deployment.

A use case of this feature is to integrate transaction signing into individual embedded IoT devices. IoT devices can purchase upgrades and sign IoT data payloads using the embedded private key.

The project promises to deliver within 2-3 months following receipt of funding.

7. Pet Registry DApp with ₳Pay: This project has been positioned as a demonstration of the ₳Pay solution with the help of a Pet Registry Dapp.

• ₳Pay API toolkit: An open-source ₳Pay API toolkit will be created on GitHub and support all websites built on Cold Fusion, Lucee, and Railo application servers.

• Pet Registry dApp: This will be a virtually free, non-profit use case. In a study covering 22 countries, 56% of households have at least one dog or cat. The existing Microchipping technology has a > 50% failure rate in reuniting pets with their owners. 40% of pets are not even microchipped. The app will enable pet owners to easily update registry information which will trigger the rescue process.

8. Haskell/Plutus/Marlowe education: This project is quite similar to the Lovelace Academy project, however, the approach is different. Currently, there is little educational content for Haskell, Plutus, or Marlowe. In 2019, Haskell had just 0.39% of all active users code on GitHub. The project aims to create beginner-friendly Haskell, Plutus, and Marlowe materials. These will be 45-minute videos accompanied by written content.

Initial live workshops proposed at the moment includes:

• Introduction to Haskell

• Introduction to Plutus

• Introduction to Marlowe

9. Ouroboros over RINA: With increasing transactions in the Cardano network, every node will face a heavy load to relay messages utilizing the current TCP/IP architecture. This project wants to deploy a proof of concept stake pool and relay solution of Ouroboros over RINA using Ethernet/WDM at two sites in Tokyo, Japan. The project is also sponsored by an innovative Japanese communications service provider, GLBBJapan.

10. PoolTool platform upgrade: Currently Cardano staking is a one-way interaction. The delegators delegate to Stake Pools by looking at their infrastructure. There is no proper medium of communication the other way round (from Stake Pools to delegators). As a result, there is a chance that powerful operators will dominate the network, reducing infrastructure diversity. This will in the long run move the network to a handful of operators. The PoolTool project offers to resolve this by letting the stake pools offer differentiated services to their stakeholders.

The PoolTool platform will provide tools to:

• Conduct marketing promotions

• Provide additional services exclusively to the stakeholders

• Interactive chats among stakeholders

• Display an array of stakeholder metrics such as stakeholder loyalty score etc.

11. Japan Cardano Governance Association: This proposal aims to strengthen the Japanese community. It is proposed that online/offline meetups are held for at least 1 month, Governance podcasts for at least 1 week, and daily governance meets.

Though 11 ideas have been funded in Fund-2, there are lots of other approved projects which did not make it through due to low vote or high charges (not meeting budget). These projects are able to participate in future funding rounds. The winners will receive the amount in ADA (@ $0.10) by the end of January. The projects are guided by strong KPIs and measurement criteria. However, it is yet to be seen how the project responds to missing timelines, delivery delays, and poor quality.

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Written by Ruma Dass

In my previous article (Cardano Part 1: Project Catalyst - The Future of Decentralized Voting) I spoke about Project Catalyst and how it has been instrumental in developing a decentralized voting system for Cardano. IOHK, the research arm of Cardano started experimenting with decentralized voting with Project Catalyst Fund 0 and then Fund 1. It had then rolled out Fund 2 with $250k worth of Ada allocated for the winning projects. There were 11 winning projects. It is important to understand these projects as all of these projects will play an important role in building the right bridges for the adoption of Cardano.

The below list is arranged by the number of votes (in ADA) received by each project in descending order.

1. Create a message-signing standard: This proposal was put forward by a Yoroi Team member. The proposal aims to create a message-signing standard to prove balances, identity, and stake pool delegation. The project will create a library that any company can use through Desktop & mobile. This specification will also be implemented inside the Yoroi Extension. 

2. Liqwid: Liqwid is a Defi project by the Proof of Africa Stakepool Team. It will be one of Cardano’s first decentralized lending markets that consist of a liquidity protocol to earn interest on deposits and also borrow assets on Cardano. Note that as the project is based out of Africa, it is also aligned with Cardano’s Africa theme. The project includes 30+ years of combined Haskell and JavaScript experience.

3. Cardano for mobile DApp developers: Once the Cardano Platform is smart-contract-ready with Guogen, projects will start onboarding and launch Dapps. Though we have crypto mobile wallets, mobile dapps are rare due to the scarcity of developer tools. This project aims to create mobile SDKs, mobile-first DApp experience, and app store compatibility. The team has experience in building dapps since 2017. They had previously built Tesseract (human-compatible dApps platform) in 2018.

4. GimbaLabs: GimbaLabs provides free and open-source APIs, lessons, and project-based learning resources. These will provide infrastructure for the initial setup and testing of ideas. The Cardano Starter Kits (CSKs) consists of a smart contract code, voting apparatus, guided learning materials, and implementation tips. CSKs will produce real-world outcomes and also help users learn Cardano at the same time. The modules will have varied complexities, from beginners to experts. Just like the previous project, this one will also ease adoption by removing the high entry barrier for community members. The project team consists of three people, a developer, an educator, and a marketing professional. To summarize the 3 areas of the project are

• Free, Open Source Community Resources

• Cardano Business Educational Marketing

• Apply PBL to support Institutions with Blockchain Adoption

Some Minimum Viable products include

• Cardano APIs as a Community Service

• Cardano Starter Kits

5. Lovelace Academy for Marlowe and Plutus: Cardano is built on a relatively lesser-known language, Marlowe and Plutus. Now that the fundamentals are built, it is important for developers to adapt to these languages. The academy aims to attract, inspire and educate individuals and companies to create applications on Cardano's smart contract and native assets platform.

The 3-member team consists of a popular YouTuber and two developers. The program plans to deliver 25 episodes in 6 months, with 1 episode per week.

The content will include

• Smarter Contracts Series: 30-60 minutes each which included GitHub Tutorials and Repositories

• Making Sense of Cardano Series: 10-30 minutes each. Guest interviews, news, and updates centered around real-world use cases of Cardano.

In the next article, we will go through the remaining 6 projects which have received the Fund-2 grant. It is interesting to see how these different pieces come together. Even after the foundational development, the next step of a project is not to jump directly into the dApps but build the necessary bridges for adoption. It's good to see that the Cardano grant program has acknowledged that as the first priority. The decentralized voting system actually works.

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Written by Ruma Dass

Cardano is widely considered as one of the major competitors (along with Polkadot) to Ethereum. Project catalyst is Cardano's brave attempt to strengthen decentralized decision-making. Cardano has already been successful in securely launching its decentralized network through Shelley. With Shelley, anyone holding Ada can delegate to Pools, unstake and withdrawals are instantaneous. Cardano is now expanding towards a decentralized governance and voting mechanism through Project Catalyst.

Project Catalyst is releasing funds in a phased-wise manner to projects which will build on the existing Cardano framework and thereby develop the ecosystem. The public funds are the foundations of on-chain governance, treasury, and community innovation for Cardano.

The public fund started with Fund 0. It was a trial fund consisting of a focussed group made up of IOG ( Research and Development) team members.

After a successful trial of Fund 0, Cardano launched Fund 1. Through Fund 1, the Cardano community was able to participate in Project Catalyst for the first time. 50 volunteers developed the platform and processes. Though the community was involved, this was still a trial in terms of incentivization. The voting cycle still did not incorporate ADA funding. The community members helped to test and refine the processes. They also created detailed documentation and guidelines. IOHK, the research arm of Cardano were able to design alternative avenues where the community can discuss “meta” proposals. Writing a clean and impactful proposal for receiving funding is of utmost importance. A voting platform (Catalyst) is as good as the ideas that are presented in it. The trials help IOHK understand what will be an impactful proposal. IOHK also decided to support people to write a fair proposal. All these culminated towards the launch of Fund 2.

Fund 2 was open to all. Anybody put forward their idea by creating a proposal. IOHK ensured that they keep a strong Governance. Instead of launching popular dapps directly, the focus was kept tight. The challenge statement was, “How can we encourage developers and entrepreneurs to build Dapps and businesses on top of Cardano in the next 6 months?”

The types of idea contribution were however not limited. The community was encouraged to bring in ideas in the areas of marketing initiatives and infrastructure development, to business planning and content creation. It is to be noted that the voting process was not available in Yoroi (mobile wallet) but was limited to Daedelus (Desktop wallet). The voting process was divided into multiple stages.

• Community members were requested to provide their ideas and perspective. This is the idea-exploration phase. 

• IOHK has developed an innovative platform for voting. As a next step, the participants uploaded their ideas on the innovation platform to collaborate and discuss. Discussions were also encouraged via a dedicated Telegram chat channel.

• Once the ideas became concrete, the proposals were put forward for voting. The mobile application is under development. Any Ada holder can review the proposals on the platform and judge their merit. Voting is linked to the voter's Ada holding. Voters will earn Ada rewards for their voting activity. It is to be noted that this activity has no conflict with the staking rewards. Voters will continue to earn staking rewards. Voting will perform as a transaction. Voters need to indicate ‘yes,’ or ‘no.’

Fund 2 had $250k worth of Ada allocated. The voting process resulted in 11 winners. All of these will be important and one of the first projects in Cardano. I will discuss them in my next article. Note that recently Cardano has also launched Fund 3 which involves newer proposals.

Project catalyst paved the way towards Cardano's Voltaire era. This era will bring in a democratic and sustainable governance system. Unlike many other projects, every Ada holder will be able to get involved to make decisions. They will decide the future of the platform, in a decentralized way.

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