Cardano360 - November 2021

[Music] it's the last thursday of the month so it can only mean one thing time for cardano 360. welcome to another edition and a special hello to all our friends in the us happy thanksgiving to you all now remember to like subscribe and hit the bell to get all the freshest cardano updates from the team here at iog coming up our monthly project catalyst update from door and eric we'll have more partnership news we'll have the latest on the agix erc20 converter that we're soon launching with singularitynet we'll meet a few more of the projects building cardano and fresh from the team's recent tour across africa john o'connor will be here to tell us more about that epic trip and the new africa fund plus nfts marlow and much much more but first up let's get a quick development update [Music] so gentlemen thank you very much for joining us on cardano 360. nigel let's maybe start with you we've had a lot of conversations recently around the pluto's application back end what's the latest status there well we continue to make great progress again it's all about the end game you know increasing the utilization of canaanite network and getting our adapts out getting our businesses there right so what comes first well the key components and that is still still the same it's our pab release that's integrated into the wallet um as a reminder i we've got the pab released into the cadano test net at the moment and that is integrated into our wallet back end the kidano wallet so that we get the round trip from signing transactions and balancing and coin selection transaction fees and collateral so we need all of that to make sure that we've got the round trip through through the wallet our partners then are integrating their adapts into that and they're testing it and they're revolving it to basically get their applications and their businesses ready what happens next well as we move forwards we're working together with our partners to you know give them what they need from both plutus and the pab but also working with our partners through some of their own evolution so we are working with mlabs on their nft marketplace and they've been helping us a hell of a lot because as they've integrated in the pav they've been able to help us solve different problems to make it work and also spotting other things that we may not have thought about that actually is going to help not only themselves but other dapp developers so within the next short space of time we are going to be seeing that on the test net from from mlabs this is in addition to nft marketplaces that are already out there um we've got a great nft marketplace from space buds and from uh cnft2 around the other partners well we've got a lot more work going on there tremendous amount of work and some of the the ones that are close we've got d quadrants nft marketplace they're doing an artist nft marketplace which is really exciting and also sunday swap who we're working with um on their decks they're all creating their own versions of this delivery using our different components and building out whatever it is that they need something else we've seen recently nigel is is the work around the sip 30 the wallet connector perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about that and what's happening there the zip30 is one of our community proposals that's now been merged it gives us an api to be able to connect to a variety of different wallets so we're working once again at the moment with with mlabs and i'm sure we'll be doing this with other partners too very shortly we are using that api in order to be able to connect to the nami wallet um which is exciting and so you know the nft marketplace that will be delivered with mlas will be a whole you know working solution that is then connected to the nami wallet moves back through connects to the wallet back end and then into pab and ultimately onto our ledger and kodano network how about deadlifts what's happening there we want to be able to integrate deadlifts into our whole pluses and smart contract ecosystem so likewise we're building a connector between deadlifts and arcana wallet so that it can handle the variety of different smart contracts it's the same basis so signing balancing uh transaction fees and coin selection is is the same things that we've got to make sure is running through deadlifts we'll also be considering the the sip 30 as well and actually what that relationship should be for dallas too john thanks for joining us on car dyno 360. many people enjoyed your contribution to the midpoint update so we thought we'd get you back for those people who didn't see that perhaps you can just give us a little reminder of some of the principles of network optimization around things like parameters that you shared with us last time thanks tim well let me give you maybe a 30 second synopsis of what i spoke about last week um at the heart of the cardinal blockchain is oroborus and the current iteration of auroboris is called auroborus prayos oroborus is really an essential part of the cardinal stack it's the algorithm that keeps our our blockchain in sync across all of the different decentralized nodes so super important it's really the magic at the heart of the cardinal platform with orobora's preos whenever a block producer produces a block a freshly minted block it has to be um distributed across the network within five seconds and this is a hard security rule and it's part of the network and it's part of the the protocol and it's part of the of the overall rules for the for the entire platform and if we don't make uh a block managed to propagate across the network within five seconds then we're not meeting the goals of our boris press so really as i spoke about last week i'd think of these five seconds that we have to propagate the block as budget we can spend on various improvements um that we can make to cardano in general and i spoke last week and i was talking about hey you know well if we make the blocks bigger okay so they're just literally take up more data in bytes and megabytes then it they take a little bit longer to propagate across the network because it's more data just like when you're downloading a big movie it takes a little longer at home to download than a than a movie that's uh that's shorter and so what we're looking at is we're looking at these five this five second window we have of which we've only used about two seconds so far and we're looking at ways that we can spend more of it with the goal of improving the performance of the network so last week i focused really on on block size increases but there are many other things we can do too such as taking plutoscripts for example so plutus of course is our scripting language that sits on top of cardano and allows for all of the d5 apps that we have out there and we could for example enable more sophisticated implementations of plutus or higher higher limits on on the network for executing more sophisticated pluto scripts so lots of different levels we can pull really and i believe we are actually very soon going to pull the first of those levers aren't we we're going to be making some changes i believe to the to the network perhaps you can talk us through that sure yeah um kevin myself and the rest of the engineering team have been working uh this week in fact um to set up the uh the proposals to basically make the first changes and in fact we're making two changes at once in mainnet so um things are really starting to happen it's not just uh not just speaking about it but actually doing it so what are we gonna do um one we're increasing the block size in one go um by twelve and a half percent so that's a relatively large increase in block size and indeed we are increasing the memory limits for pluto scripts on a per transaction basis by 12 and a half percent too so that means that we can now fit 12 and a half percent more stuff in a block and it means that you can effectively write a pluto script which is 12 and a half percent more sophisticated so limits on on what you can do are starting to be raised and so this is very exciting of course with this as i mentioned we have to be careful so we don't want to make changes that have any kind of risk of affecting the security of the network which is really our one of our primary concerns okay so how do we make sure that this doesn't cause any issues we're making these changes in mainnet we're making them though uh in in reasonably uh moderate sizes okay 12.5 is reasonably big but it's but it's not too big and we're going to be making slow and steady changes and increasing these limits until we hit our maximum throughput and also to say we have a number of tools that we're going to be watching and using in order to make sure that we don't blow through this five second budget i spoke about earlier so we have not only have our own metrics built into the node we have metrics from the spos and we have third-party metrics as well that we're going to be watching meticulously to make sure that uh there are no issues on the network so that's the plan team and of course these changes will will impact the user experience and the usability of the earliest steps that are going to be launched on the network making that uh a little bit more capacity absolutely that that is the entire reason we're doing it we want the experience for the end user both the end users who's sending some ada between between peers friends family and indeed customers who are who are using the cardinal network to execute you know uh swaps and trades we want the experience for both of these classes of users to be great now of course this is the first change on the network and probably the first of a good number over the months ahead there is going to be a period of experimentation isn't there as as demand increases yes absolutely i mean we're coming into a period where we have some major decentralized exchanges going to be launching on the platform we have more and more community uh built projects that are going to be launching and we have tokens coins nfts it's really a very busy time and it's coming from all different angles right it's coming from the community it's coming from enterprise it's coming from big business it's coming from many many different kind of users and i think you know cardano is on its you know voyage its first maiden voyage into this live decentralized markets on mainnet so what we need to do is we need to basically feel how the network is behaving and performing and make the appropriate tweaks over the coming months we're very confident that what we've built is a rock solid foundation for building out decentralized apps on mainnet um but we're going to make sure that if there's something that needs to be changed we're going to try our best to make sure that we meet at the requirement as needed so in a nutshell over the coming months we're going to be tweaking and fine-tuning the network parameters to really eke out absolute best performance on mainnet but on top of that we're going to be monitoring very very carefully to ensure that if something goes awry that we can deal with it um quickly so yeah it's a i guess it is a period of experimentation um with an exciting one kevin let's uh come over to you obviously one of the other things as well as some of these uh adjustments and improvements to the layer one uh well there's gonna be some work on the plutus language isn't there in terms of scripting some other optimizations perhaps you can just give us a little bit of an overview of some of that work that's also going to be going on yeah there's a there's a lot going on in the places of no teams tent so we're looking uh obviously at improving the performance of the bluetooth interpreter we've got some cool improvements coming out for the node that will smooth out the behavior across the total block production cycle i know that the spos have been particularly looking forward to that uh but it's also incredibly important to meet the boundary that john has been talking about so what we need is to have a consistent very very smooth uh behavior across the entire uh life cycle of an epoch and then we can start to push back on the boundaries and start to roll out the parameter changes john's been talking about so that's one that's one thing we're also looking uh long-term at things like maybe doing some more sharing so put a script onto the blockchain for example that we can then refer back to that's not going to be a short-term solution it's going to take us time to implement that uh but that will uh greatly help uh reduce the size of a transaction and therefore mean you can have more scripts being run uh through a single block and that's going to dramatically improve the capacity and then there are other things too we can look at for example uh block level compression and looking even further out uh we've got some cool tricks in the research pipeline that i don't think we've spoken very much about that going to completely transform are the input throughput and capabilities so there's a lot coming up just from the parameter tuning john said okay 12 and a half percent mean improvement in the memory limit means more sophisticated scripts we know this is one of the core things that a lot of the developers have been asking us for it's not just about writing more complicated scripts it's also about putting more data through as well so the budget also allows us to provide more data maybe process more swaps at a single time increase the concurrency so moving this parameter is going to really really help uh with the plus script throughput and that's going to start now and it's going to continue to increase over the coming months we'll be monitoring that very very carefully with benchmarking and system level monitoring tools so nigel just to wrap things up obviously we're heading into december and the christmas period but things aren't slowing down uh no not at all in fact the complete opposite we're seeing an increasing uh activity to be able to get onto our network and to be building businesses from all sorts of different partners so as you know we we've for the past six months we have been working with a you know close set of uh seven or eight partners they'll be bringing out everything from nft marketplace to an oracle to dexa's to all sorts of different things in addition to that we are talking and keeping up to date with our the rest of the community there are 70 or 80 different businesses now that are listed and interested to launch in our network and i'm sure we'll see a few of those before christmas but a lot more into the new year gentlemen thank you very much for the update today and we'll see you all again on the mid-month update in december since early this year we've been working with singularitynet on a converter to bring their erc20 tokens over to cardano it's been a much anticipated part of a wider strategic collaboration we've been building with ben gertzel's groundbreaking ai project let's hear more about that we're joined today by janet adams from singularitynet and by joaquin from the core team here at iog to hear the very latest thank you both very much for joining us now joaquin for people who haven't been following the show regularly perhaps you can give us a little bit of a back story what is the erc20 converter and and how did it come about so the team has been working very hard on a solution for singularity net to help them in their migration process and so we built a tool that will allow them to migrate their token the agix token from ethereum where it currently resides to cardano so janet thank you very much also for joining us on the show we've met ben and we've met a number of other of your colleagues but it's it's great to have you here today oh it's amazing to be here tim to finally meet you at last in person as well i've been a fan for so long thank you for inviting me i'd also like to say a very big warm thank you to wekan and the whole team reni and for all the hard work that they've been doing on this converter it's been a huge pleasure and a privilege to work with watkin and the team and we're really really loving working together as always singularity nursing cardano and look you know we we have got quite a close collaboration as businesses perhaps you can just tell us a little bit about the choice to work with cardano and why it's such a good match so i've been with singularitynet for seven months but i have been watching and a fan of singularitynet since they were formed or since early 2018 and and i saw the relationship and the announcement of the cardano and uh singularitynet partnership and i just thought it made perfect sense to me ben and charles are the two finest technologists on the planet today charles has built the world's most advanced most mathematically proven academically researched blockchain ben is the father of artificial general intelligence and an outstanding a.i leader and together cardano and singularitynet we have shared common purpose and values we both want to have positive impact on humanity we want to bring about revolutionary planetary scale technological change that decentralizes fundamentally society and puts democratizes access to wealth and to identities and and so together through the ai revolution the blockchain revolution over the next decade we're really going to transform the world so it just makes perfect sense the partnership is a match made in heaven from my perspective so let's uh zoom back in joaquin obviously people will be dying to know where are we in the process we're getting pretty close now yes very close so some weeks ago we successfully deployed a stable version into a working and stable environment the internal testing environment and so we could do all the testing and the security auditing together with singularitynet and after all that testing and auditing we discovered some issues and some cases that we need to address before releasing to the public but today we are happy to say that we have a final version that we can deploy onto the domain that singularity net facilitator so after some more testing and once we confirm that everything is working properly we will announce the release of the testnet so everybody can come and try it and give us their feedback now now to be clear this is a custodial bridge isn't it it's uh it's a slightly different thing to a permissionless bridge perhaps you can just tell us the difference there exactly so this is the first bridge that we ever built to connect two different blockchains like ethereum and cardano and the way it works is that you will lock your tokens in the ethereum side and then mint the tokens on the cardano side and if you want to migrate back to ethereum you will have to burn those tokens on cardano to then unlock the tokens endothelium site that makes our tool a centralized solution because there's only one central authority which it needs to have the custody of those locked tokens on ethereum and it's a central authority that the users need to trust but the process is completely transparent and users can verify on chain that their locked tokens are there they haven't moved so janet the singularity net community has also been eagerly awaiting this this converter what's your message to them now well come along and test it on test net you don't need to use your agi x you don't even need agi x and you won't pay gas please but you know this is this is really unlocking the power and the potential of our phase two for our community we'll be able to bring much higher staking rewards we'll be unlocking loyalty rewards for the community and for our ai developer community it will be so much more of a feasible so much more of an attractive proposition to use the ai platform on cardano with much much lower usage phase with homomorphic encryption and we very much envisage this port to cardano as opening the floodgates for exponential expansion of the use of ais on the platform so come and get involved and of course we're really happy to help anyone who'd like to understand how better to work with ai on our platform i think we're going to be doing a workshop with cardano sometime next year on this we hope so we hope so now of course we'll drop a blog post as soon as the test net is ready for you to get involved but joaquin what what will people do once they can what can they try out on that test net and and how can we best capture that feedback yeah everybody can get some test net tokens from the faucets so they can try the application they can migrate their tokens from ethereum to cardano and the main core functionality that this tool allows is to convert an erc20 standard to a cardano native asset so users can only benefit from the advantages of having the gardano multi-asset ledger with cheaper and faster transactions but they can also migrate back to ethereum so they can decide where they want their tokens to live no so it's now a cross chain asset that is compatible with both protocols now joaquin is always difficult being pressed on timings as we know perhaps just give us a bit more of an indication of the kind of time frame we're talking about from testnet to mainnet if all goes well okay so if all goes well we still need to do some more testing before we release the test net environment but once that is confirmed that everything is working properly and then we will announce that everybody can come and try it and give us their feedback no and then if everything goes well we are expecting at least one or two sprints and to catch up with all the issues and all the bugs that the users report so we have some time to to implement the the fixes and yeah after at least one of two sprints i think we will be in good shape for releasing the main net if we don't find anything critical anything that it's more complex and to finish off janet just before we let you go we always love hearing more about what's going on in the singularitynet ecosystem obviously the focus at the moment is the rc-20 converter with you but what other things have we got to look forward to well in respect to the converter at first because that's the core topic for today obviously we're very excited getting ready for our deep funding call um launch so deep funding under deep funding we have 30 of our tokens available for uh startups and for projects which will be building on the singularity net platform so that's that's really exciting for us at the moment and we're also exploring the possibility of using hydra to make a custom cardano side chain but outside of the converter there's so much going on in the community we have a singularity there releasing dynasty new nets span off last week our decentralized computing platform and and the token sales sold out in 90 seconds so huge thanks to everyone in the community who supported that our rejuve longevity app is is very close to being finished and released we've got a world-class team working of our artistic and creative directors working on our sofia verse our metaverse and that's in in design stage and we're really super excited about that we're accelerating our agi and hyper on um projects with definition of we're working with with our new programming language for hyper on called meta and uh programming design there we have got of course our beautiful robot grace who is now available in demo preview um preview version who had her first public appearance at the cardano blockchain stampede in wyoming with charles which is which is super exciting and we are currently right now massively stoked to be working with the cardano community and thank you so much for the fun seven for catalyst from seven for collaborations with singularitynet so i'm sure i've known some things we've so much going on in our in our vibrant ecosystem but it's it's it's such a pleasure to be here with you and always continually strengthening and expanding our beautiful partnership with cardano and the great great benefits that that brings to the singularity net ecosystem the singularity community and the cardinal community thank you janet indeed thank you and jackie and thanks also for joining us today thank you for having me [Music] next up community first off we asked the unstoppable dual garbage for the latest on project catalyst plus matt from the community team has been catching up with just a few of the dozens of projects building on cardano now there's a longer video you can deep dive into later but we'll show a few highlights here on the show we're joined again by dork garbosh the man who is leading the way into decentralized governance with project catalyst and many other things welcome back door eric nice to be here so it has been another month of projects being voted on projects being perfected and projects being made what can you tell us about what's been happening with project catalyst well we launched fund seven and that happened in early november we had a record amount of viewing for the launch event with more than 12 000 people uh tuning in into like uh into a broadcast that was like uh maybe two hour long so that's like a lot of engagement people are extremely excited we're launching an 8 million dollar fund and total of 25 different challenges and it's all starting now and by the time you're doing this recording submissions for funding has already been open so you can head over to a descale view the challenges and submit the proposal so dorr it has been quite a few funds since fund one and what kind of uh themes are you seeing emerge now that we're on fund seven yeah i think you know a lot a massive scaling up okay there's more and more people we have more more than 40 000 people on a on the id skill platform with 25 challenges and so much money being funded generally the community has been stepping up to us to assume leadership over over what's going on so you have a you know we just this the first category circle uh retired a new circle was elected we have amazing representatives as part of the circle and the whole new infrastructure of the administrators and facilitators and secretary and treasurer and you know our game is way more you know way more tight and more organized you know part of being part of the first circle you know i'm really happy that we left this kind of infrastructure uh we have launched a new a new complete new role in catalyst called challenge teams so these are these are uh i think last time i checked there was like around 100 people who who participated in it and so these are people who kind of like own the challenge on the problems in the challenges they they come to the town halls they present the challenge they give proposers uh both early going and also after after the receiving funding with guidance and direction and knowledge and information about the problems that's getting solved and also forming their own perspective and and kind of our eyes and ears okay of the community telling us like are we actually addressing these challenges effectively right are we heading in the right direction so this is like a really really important new role really exciting with a lot of momentum going there i would say these are the main things i think on the sides like there's like so much happening in addition you know so many new community tools getting created new portals new activities like like the after town halls or the swarm sessions and the catalyst school is training hundreds if not thousands of people to become a to fulfill the roles in catalyst you know i would say basically we're you know moving from just an experiment into there's like a level of professionalism that's being added right now that's being filled in so now that we've got this level of professionalism it's no longer an experiment it has the catalyst circle where you're adding a layer of expertise and governance on top of it looking back now what advice do you have for people who have been with the community for a while i would say first of all you know maybe maybe the last time you checked in about catalyst it was like in earlier funds i would invite you to come back again and see how how much things have changed okay all the new communication channels all the new facilitations all the new bodies of representatives you know we are now starting to ramp up uh from basically the scope of catalyst focusing on treasury proposals and now we're starting to introduce aspects of voltaire in it okay so more preparation of the layer of experts and the layer of representatives that are going to direct the future of the network so if you if you care a lot about about cardano and you think you have something to contribute and now is a great time to to join and start to learn and and and kind of ramp up your understanding and and skill sets because very soon in the next the next couple of funds you know we we're going to have a whole new layer of representatives and roles that have some decision making power and of course those who are you know those who come prepared are really set up for success for these kind of roles so dorr you have mentioned uh challenge teams and i wonder if you can give us an example of of what that actually looks like uh when when people are responding to the challenges or even inventing new challenges yeah definitely in the first two weeks of the fund 7 town hall we had dozens of teams present the challenges cool so can you tell us a little bit about what that was for people who don't quite know the context this is people in the community that are getting paid by the treasury to steward these challenges okay so we have 25 challenges each one has its own metrics its own kpis its own definition of success its own related resources and knowledge that is needed to address it and basically different proposing teams that are involved in it okay and now we have these people who are uh helping coordinate uh to make sure that we address the challenges in the most impactful way possible and how does one get involved with the challenge team specifically the best way is to actually propose a challenge okay so now uh proposing challenges is open there's also a dedicated telegram channel for challenge teams that you're welcome to join i encourage you just basically like get involved express your interest contact people that are maybe running existing challenges that you're interested in and you want to contribute and be in touch with them so remember everybody we are still early days with catalyst please get involved if you've got an idea or if you just want to be a part of making on-chain governance for cardano i've got one more question i just kind of want to hear your response to this um uh so we spoke with john o'connor about uh how innovation in africa is moving forward and he mentioned that project catalyst is definitely a part of taking projects that are at their pre-seed round and moving them into the future how does catalyst see all of the opportunities in africa well i think first of all it's it's up to you right up to you the community member to define the define the priorities define with challenges we're funding defining what types of proposals that are getting funded uh we definitely have a in catalyst as part of our cohort system like all the proposals after funding you know we have a dedicated accelerator just for african-based projects we're definitely trying to to promote a decentralized identity there's like a very large italic prism challenge in the current fund there's a lot of these challenges about community hubs okay so ways to waste for people on the ground for local communities to start on board people and introduce them to cardano yeah and i i would say it's it's big synergy you know and there's like definitely a large prominent group of community members who are really in the weeds about everything we're doing on the ground in africa and are there and so yeah a lot of energy okay so if you have an idea go over to project catalyst start making it a reality thank you dora thank you eric hi guys and girls it's ben o'hanlon i've been busy hiring people into the community team it's been a tremendous month a lot of activity i've got with me matthew who's been working with me shoulder to shoulder can you give us a quick overview of what you've been working on matthew so the two main things that have been uh in my crosshairs recently been the atolla prison pioneers course uh launching that with the tall prison team and the education team it's been really amazing to see all of the collaboration and the excitement around um centralized digital identity and the atoll prism product that the atal team has been working on so hard for so long so uh it's really amazing to see that come to fruition in this sort of open source course style that we've had with the buddhist pioneers seeing that move over into a tall prism in addition to that we've also been focused on connecting with and understanding all of the amazing dap projects in the ecosystem that have been exploding that you guys have been adding to the essential cordano list um and that have you know really been just making their own place for themselves in the ecosystem it's been really amazing to see so we've been connecting with those guys you know i've had cause of people like cadano cube who gave me some great insight into like what people are searching for um like matthew says you know the excellent work that neve started with essential cadano is now a repository that you can submit um your project or projects that you think that we should be aware of too and then the background context that matthew touched on is all of these calls are happening between these dap projects and our team to try and sort of line up resources and and um you know discussions where they're needed on top of that you know i'm in cause of iog um explaining what the feedback is around those damps so it's really really really a busy environment right now yes yes exactly uh and i i wanted to touch also on you know this has been a theme recently that uh that cardano is you know the protocol of the stakeholders it's not uh just input outputs um you know product here it's this the community owns it the ecosystem owns it and so this um you know makes it really important for us to cultivate closely those relationships and so uh one thing that i wanted to do is connect with the some of the key dab projects that we've been talking with who we see as really um strengthening the future of cardano who are excited to launch um fully on mainnet so i caught up with some of them let's head over [Music] we've got a cross section here of the many many dab projects that we've been working with over the past weeks and months and we're really excited to give you guys some insight into their process as they bring their amazing dot projects to market on cardona so with that said let's jump in so what is your project's mission and how is it different from other depth projects in this category in the market our project is our donna and our mission really is to build a decentralized stable coin ecosystem within cardano and that's really to focus on stable value through stable coins but actually also providing the infrastructure for stable coins to be exchanged between each other in a highly capital efficient manner we will be providing a stable coin um which is backed by on-chain cardano native assets and that would be ada itself so this stable coin um isn't backed by fiat dollars in a centralized authority um or custodial account it's actually backed by ada in smart contracts in a decentralized permission this way and then the other side of the stablecoin ecosystem is the decentralized exchange which is a special purpose exchange it's a stable swap exchange so this would be the most highly capital efficient way to swap between stable coins or stable assets which are trading at the same price against each other yeah so um i'm one of the co-founders there's three of us at aida handle um and a to handle the entire mission of it is to make cardinal addresses easy for users so we were like hey let's create simple custom addresses and so the idea being that you just type in you know if it's available for instance it would be similar to like a twitter username so that's kind of the mission is to simplify and reduce the barrier to entry uh for the cardinal space i think ada handle is a little bit different than so there's you know if we look at ethereum there's uh ens for instance that's the ethereum naming service that's probably the closest sibling in terms of product products in the space and i think eta handle separates itself in that we we emphasize simplicity over complexity um we go we go down to like the very base level of like we're literally custom names uh for an address that tied to a wallet so you can you can look at that as like identity it could be identity um it could be a lot of other things like just a payment address what happens in ethereum is that it's all in a smart contract so you have to go through like several steps in order to actually obtain this and set up the routing and all that type of stuff and ada handle specifically we were like let's make this as simple as possible so ada handle is literally just an nft it has some metadata because of the you know technical workings of cardano it can be queried instantly in terms of like its location because it's a native asset so liquid finance is our d5 lending protocol being built on cardinal blockchain right now i think the mission is to create capital efficient lending products and solutions that any user can access from anywhere around the globe at any time we're not just a fork of a you know another protocol that exists on a different blockchain we really have built ground up a utxo vending marketplace for all users we're in oracle and our name is charlie three that's a kind of play on charles's name as well as we have three founders we're in oracle service which means we're taking off chain data and being able to have it readable by the cardano chain because we are built specifically for cardano which means haskell code so you ask why and how we're different um that's our main differences we are the only as far as i know or at least one of um third-party oracles in the system that are built completely haskell native uh ready to serve the cardano ecosystem fully directly we're okamex we're decentralized exchange built for the cardano ecosystem we're backed by iohk through the sea fund and emergo and our mission is to bring a vast amount of liquidity to new projects building on cardano in terms of how we're different from other dexes like i said there we have some official links with official cardano entities um and also we're one of the first uh dexter's that have you know sort of really put some efforts into solving the concurrency issue on cardano we're now exploring some of the issues around block size limits we're hoping to go public with a public beta very soon let me start by sharing a small personal story so my background is in traditional finance and i used to build sophisticated trading tools for latch players every day when i went to work it was killing me i was spending my days building investment was unavailable to the wealthy elite the bet i did my job the fair day i centralized the wealth into your hands so this is how the idea for maladex was born and the maladex mission is to bring sophisticated investment tools only available to the financial lead to everyone enabling people to have the same investment benefits what are the advantages of building on cardano in particular building on something where it's its foundations are strong right from the consensus mechanism itself all the way up to the smart contract language plutas being based in haskell a functional programming language just gives developers and us a lot more assurances in terms of security and correctness that you wouldn't get on the chain so we really do think this is going to pay dividends in the long run for cardano when people can have those assurances when they build on this chain but it's going to do exactly what it's meant to do and they'll have those same assurances with the applications building on top of cardano and having a strong community backing and underpinning that through the projects the community members and the state pool operators as well it's a vibrant ecosystem and it's underpinned by strong technology so it made sense for us to build where the strongest technology is and where the strongest community is there's two things that make an ecosystem preferable to a different ecosystem one of that is social so the community around that ecosystem and that's this is particularly super important with open source software and then the other one is like the actual technical underpinnings of how does it make it easier to develop on or does it have certain security guarantees or whatever it might be um cardano is an obvious one from a community standpoint it it has such a strong community actually like my background actually comes from wordpress which is one of the largest open source projects on the internet power's like i think it's right now it's over 40 of the web and what made wordpress ingrained in the web was the super strong community partially because it was built around blogs right like community and when i came to cardano this was like a very obvious similarity in terms of what cardano gives us it's it's more than just deterministic and secure low-cost transactions it's even more than just the corpus of state pools that we built out and that technical base of being able to be true service providers in the cardinal ecosystem it's the cardano community right that's really what the core of all this comes down to it's the people who wake up every single day and build nfts defy different dapps in identity space on top of the cardano blockchain and they do it with joy and passion well for an oracle service such as charlie 3 i think it's a really unique position for us to be in in that we can be there at the start of the commun the kind of cardinal community and the entire ecosystem here that allows us to to really be there customize our solutions specifically for the projects in the community and also for the the code base we also like the the the way the the community is overall it's very innovative uh which i think is kind of something that comes out of the way cardano is i think that the key advantage of building for cardano is definitely and and this is for d5 as well for the whole d5 ecosystem encoder is the cost efficiency of transactions and if we're going to make d5 truly decentralized and truly inclusive um we need to be fully aware that not every user can spend like a couple of hundred dollars on gas if we're going to involve people in emerging economies we need it to be as cheap as possible as seamless as possible and in my eyes cardano is one of the only blockchains that can actually do that amazing what a great set of projects i for one am really excited to see all of them launch in the next few months uh thank you all for joining us um at the cardona 360 show and good luck [Music] now that was just a taster of a longer video you can watch featuring just a few of the projects building on cardano so thanks to matt and to everyone involved make sure you check out the link below to watch the full video now last week i was in london with the pluto somalo teams and a few of our development partners to look at the road map and talk about how we evolve the languages and increasingly involve the developer community over the months ahead so while i was there i thought i'd sneak in dom with his camera get him to point it at a few of the key people and give you an exclusive update for cardano 360. it's great to be in london we're here with the marlow team and the pluto's team and the pluto's apps team getting together for the first time face-to-face for 18 months marlo is a suite of products built for finance each product serving a different function and set of users namely developers end users and enterprises and marlo really inspires me because i think it's a piece of the d5 real five puzzle that will enable a whole new set of p2p financial instruments it's been a long time since we've been able to see all our colleagues and that makes this a really exciting opportunity for us both to actually get to know each other as people but also to do some of that stuff that's really difficult to do remotely there are many things going right now with marlo and i think the most visible one is that marlow run demo is now available and you can connect marlo run demo from two different computers and interact with the same contract and it's all working on top of a mock chain but it's using the actual pavs so even though it's not a real chain uh part of the architecture is the same that's that we are going to be using for for the real for when marlo random is running in cardano other things that the marlow team is working on are they are making sure that marlow they are exploring the integration with the wallets and the real chain the um we are working in implementing more financial contracts from the actual standard and testing them and there is also collaboration with universities for um possible potential extensions to marlow and then for extending the application of formal verification so on one hand we have the plutus core team the bluetooth core team is looking at the code as it runs on the ledger as part of the validation of transactions and blocks and the production of blocks so think about code that goes onto the chain code that's validated during block production and all the tooling around that including for example the compiler toolchain to compile the high level contract code into the code as it's committed to chain and then the second group is the bluetooth apps team the plutus apps team is in particular looking at a piece of software the pab the pluto's application backend and that's let's say the software environment which facilitates running the off chain code so the part of the smart contracts which doesn't lift on the chain but which is feeding the on-chain code with transactions and then the third group is the malu group and the milo group if you like uses all these components to develop the marlow language for financial contracts and that's the highest level product component in so far as it's usable also to non-developers we have now the capabilities in the ledger so in the foundation of the cardano blockchain to execute arbitrary smart contracts but what's interesting now is what are we going to build on top of that and that involves work as well from us from io as well as the broader community which after all is what makes this whole project tick we've actually got some of the some of the users of our software so we have sunday swap and mlabs are here and we've been having some great conversations with them they are bursting with ideas which is um always fun for us and again also more fun to hack that out over a pint of beer rather than in github issues you know sunday swap and mlabs are great examples of how useful it is to have people really getting to grips with the software and then they write tooling they help us find where the tooling needs to improve and that's how we get to something that's really a world-class ecosystem what we have to do is think about how we support a growing community who are wanting to build smart contracts and dapps the documentation is maybe not perfect yet and users have to figure out a lot of things by themselves developers have to get their head around a new development model about and around the new leisure model but over time these things will just be normal and people will develop strategies for what's the optimal way to develop applications on the platform we need the feedback to what does the community want to do with cardano that that's the most important thing but also we know in our community a lot of clever minds technical minds who who are part of this journey of developing many iterations of the software together with us this time last year we were just beginning to think about what will it mean for somebody to run a milo contract as an end user and we at the start of 2021 we built went through a design process to build the marlo run app and we've built that we've now got it running on a simulated simulated node with the real pab and what we're hoping to do by the end of the year is have that running on test net with either a light wallet or deadlifts we'll see quite where we go with that so having mono run from nothing to a product on test net in a year we're really pleased it started as a small group and we threw all these wild ideas around and now to sit here and see that this has turned into a living breathing product is super exciting and especially to see people interacting with it and we are a very innovative project that was always at the basis of what we are doing so sometimes then that generates a price because things are maybe a little different than you're used to and that creates a little bit of friction but i think that's part of the game at the end of the day people very often i see this also on twitter and social media that um a lot of people after a while they they they get it they they see what the idea behind it is and and why we've done what we've done and and that's awesome to see that's it's just so good and i think we have a a fantastic foundation now and now together with the community we have to build on it and i'm really excited to see where that will lead us i think next year we've got to think about the whole marlow suite of products so we've got marlo run we've got the playground which has been around for a while we want to revamp that but also you know where are people going to get marlowe contracts from we're thinking about the marlow market which will be an app store for milo contracts in particular where people can go and choose contracts they can simulate them they can analyze them and so on safely so that they know when they download a contract it will do what it should do it's definitely always the case that interaction with users is it's part of the process um of course you have to start somewhere you have to develop an idea you have to have this critical innovation build it kind of slowly grow it but then you expose it to the rest of the world and that always changes the story because you see what people want to do with this new thing um it's always a lot broader than what you could have imagined yourself and and that's the beauty of it so at the end of the day it's actually much more than the original vision and and this really only arises through the interaction with users so yeah it's i i think this is really one of the most um engaging and interesting parts of the journey actually [Music] so as michael mentioned also joining us for the workshop in london with some of the team from mlabs i spoke to ben hart to hear more about the work they've been doing their experience of plutus and haskell and also their perspectives on the emergent developer ecosystem [Music] so mlabs is now pushing 70 developers were primarily a haskell and rust consultancy we got into blockchain research and and working initially with liquid and quite quickly with many other protocols sunday swap in part working to establish governance and reward systems for the jira wallet working with cardstarter who does launchpad and they're also building some bridge technology that we're working with we work with iog now as pluta's partner we're also a little bit more deeply involved with iog as we take on more and more ways of supporting and growing the community and then work to help everyone find a path forward to delivering especially defy apps and we're really working across the entire spectrum and then the we've been working closely with the pad team as well and we've been building a proof of concept in a nft marketplace which is modeled not quite on cardano native tokens but actually something similar to ethereum for a number of reasons namely so that we can enforce artist royalties in a firm way this is really important across a number of verticals photography music art in a way where an artist can publish their work and really be assured that at every transaction that involves their work they're going to get royalties uh so this is uh now been branded cbug so look for c bugs soon we've been involved quite a bit with the pad team because although a few solutions have come out with their own pab alternatives to get up and live we're really committed to a path forward for people who are doing things in the exact way that iog has prescribed and right now the key next step is pab support in the browser we have found that plutus can be very successful at a small scale and we're finding patterns and techniques to make it successful in these more complex situations for d5 i've kind of held from the beginning that the solution to scaling on cardano is really about bespoke engineering as we start to find a path to delivery but we want to be able to share that i'm gonna draw a contrast with solidity um before i learned haskell i worked in solidity and i think solidity may have driven me to haskell what i will say about solidity it's very easy to get something up and running but it's very hard to get something that is correct and efficient um and in fact you might look at all this massive state and things that cause huge fees on ethereum and the contention issue that is rumored on cardano these are really two sides of the same coin it's how do you manage state in an efficient way we're getting more and more into places where we can pick our battles and as we road test these solutions we'd really like to roll them out to the public really this workshop has been a great opportunity for us to share with iog what we've been looking at and get feedback and to collaborate with other teams as well we we wanted to find what the right ways are to improve cardano developer productivity when talking about the utxo model and especially with functional programming on top of it you're really talking about a new way of not just designing smart contracts but programming haskell itself has been around but the community has been quite small but when i think about functional programming first off i really think about getting to the core of what programming should be it's about maximizing code reuse it's about allowing you to perform abstractions and it's about really trying to have like simple building blocks that compose together it's very much code lego there's certainly a lot going on really at this point we're bringing our first heavy duty apps across the line and getting them into production that's really coming through the end of q4 and into q1 of next year and that's our primary focus we really want to start getting apps out into the ecosystem and start getting teams using them what goes on past that is really interesting because we're going to start to see the first layer of d5 kind of getting laid down you'll get liquid out there which is really the whole lending platform you'll you'll get dexes out if it's sunday and then suddenly you can have interactions between the two and at this point the world opens up in terms of financial products that can be built [Music] so thanks to everyone for that and good luck to mlabs with the launch of cbug their smart contract enabled nft marketplace and talking of nfts we asked josh who heads up the nft commercial business io to send us a dispatch on what he's been up to including forging a new partnership which we'll hear more about today all right guys uh josh miller here with uh iog i'm the uh commercial nft business lead and i've been heading up things internally uh when it comes to cardano and nfts and uh getting to know the cnfc community it's been a lot of fun things going on out there uh watching everybody grow get their systems up and running amazing projects out there uh you know just some of the highlight is nft maker they've made well over a hundred thousand nfts they've done batches uh they've helped me personally with the gogan coin uh nfts and they've been just all over the place uh cnft uh just recently celebrated a hundred thousand registrations a hundred thousand in the cardona community that's amazing uh token has been up and running doing amazing things uh you know they've gotten great projects involved we've seen communities get together on discord and we've seen everybody uh work together through the hardships of doing a drop i can tell you it's not easy you know nfts as a whole we've seen over what 1.7 million minted uh what over 1.5 million ada traded uh again those are probably low numbers uh we're seeing a lot of tech come online we've seen uh uh space buds barry nanny uh doing great things with smart contracts upgrading their platform uh we've seen more and more uh projects coming up that are uh you know exploring new and interesting ways whereas 3d vr ar you know so we're seeing explosive growth in the cnft community uh just this last week my team and i went out to nft nyc where we ran into crypto pets and some others uh the cnft community and they were standing in times square handing out t-shirts to everybody uh you know it was great to see that you know something fun that i noticed there was that it wasn't really about the blockchain sure you had ethereum fans a lot of fans etc etc but everybody on stage preaching the message uh and most conversations that i were in uh were about the technology behind nfts and what you can do with them uh instead of uh something that's on top of a blockchain or what blockchain does what and all this so cardano is a very welcome part of the conversation um you know we talk about what can cardano do uh we talk about what has cardano done and the growing ecosystem has got a lot of people curious so it's definitely welcomed out there to be out there in times square uh attending all these events um you know for anybody who doesn't know nftnyc is a lot of talks it's not like your normal uh crypto conference that you would think that you think of when you think of uh uh you know um you know and it was great uh to get in there and shake hands with other businesses creators and people just exploring it and what they want to do it's very very uh uh fun to see the cardano foundation and mergo and iog uh you know getting into um uh cnfts and nfts all around and seeing what we can do there because you know we've all got goals of what we want to do business wise but also we want to help the community as you all know for the cardano summit we did an image drop uh with everybody that collected images in a virtual world that we put together uh chair virtually got it done those guys are amazing i know it took a while but guys they they put a lot of heart into that a lot of work uh because you know those images aren't just static on their page uh you guys are being able to use it in their uh ar environments or vr environments their their uh you know man cave dens and all the other stuff that they use that's great so what's the next step with these images on terra virtual well as you know tara virtue is a partner of iog cardano and all so we're getting them integrated okay that's what we want to do we want to get them on cardano get them up and running give people access their technology access their platform access their fan base okay the fan base and everybody over at uh chair virtual that's already been there have been incredibly supportive you guys have been rowdy they've been rowdy it's been great to see i love seeing their synergy uh you know and that's what we should aim for so we're working on getting them integrate now what that means is that when their integration is done we've got cardano up and running they've got a beautiful user experience you know ada payments are ready to go through wallets are attached yada yada we're gonna run a contest with tara virtua okay and that contest is gonna call for a thousand winners who are gonna have their collections minted okay and as you've probably already noticed a lot of them are already numbered okay so they're going to have that rarity they're going to have a special uh attribute to them all right then from there we can hold follow contest because no matter how you look at it there's only a finite number of these images that were claimed okay i think it was something like 116 000 of all seven okay so no matter what if we decided to follow up contests in the future or however we want to do that and then more and more there's still a finite cap that's still maintaining that rarity pretty fun stuff uh you'll be able to catch an interview with their cto jawad ashraf and uh our cto romaine and that's gonna be exciting stuff getting them together and talking about the technology the metaverse especially romaine's over here and he's hard at work working on that cool crypto license game uh you know jawad and gary and everybody having the vision the metaverse and how far they've come and the lessons they've learned i also recently caught up with our other partners bondly who are working on an nft bridge we call it the 1155 bridge and this bridge is going to have the ability to convert nfts over from ethereum to cardano and back again now the really exciting part of that is being able to capture a lot of the market cap but here we are talking to bondly and i'll let them tell you more about this bridge [Music] i'm here today to talk to rob tran chief operating officer of bondley rob how are you doing today great josh great to see you again and thanks for having me on uh we've had bonley join us on 360 before uh but for the benefit of newer viewers uh tell us more about you and your company what are you guys doing yeah so fondly we're one of the very first end-to-end nft platforms we work with creators and helping them create nfts uh we do minting we stand up branded storefronts for for creators uh we have the marketplace and we also work on the other end of the solution we do nft distribution and distribution of utilities we've done a number of firsts in the nft space we're the first to do a celebrity nft with influencer logan paul we did the very first music album as an nft with musician pelican we did the first um drop of unreleased music by a platinum artist as an nft and that was with tory lanez and in that case um we actually dropped three songs as nfts one day and then the very next day they were released on itunes and spotify and then more recently we did nft is a ticketed event it was an intimate live event with louis capaldi we're also involved in the gaming and collectibles space we have our own successful multi-million dollar antique collection called bccg which acts as an access pass to our entity launch pad we have our bond swap product which is one of the first nft nft swaps and cross chain bridge for polygon and binac smartchain and we have our soon to be released marketplace which will be offering cross-chain nfts that's great stuff so rob anamoca brands recently purchased a majority share in bondley uh can you tell us how that's going to benefit uh not only uh bondly but the community around it as well yeah the opportunities with animals are multifaceted and hugely exciting first and foremost our partnership is a marriage and vision and values that will fundamentally change the game in the nft space bringing rich experiences to audiences to the power of blockchain we also have direct access to a wide network of industry-leading projects and partnerships for collaborations such as sandbox and rav and others which we want to introduce to the to the cardinal ecosystem we're also working with animo on several different fronts including becoming a launch pad for animo for paralegal companies as well as leading music initiatives and exploring other opportunities in the medivh space that's great it seems uh every mft event or anything i've looked into you can't go to anything without seeing animoka involved in some way or fashion like i was just at nftnyc you know i'm going to miami at the end of the month for decentral con uh and seems like a powerful player to me i can't wait to meet him so recently you know iohk and bondly announced uh that we're working together on a project uh and that this is a great undertaking it's had a lot of positive vibes i just wanted to uh you know say can you go over exactly what we're doing uh and some of the value points that it brings to the ecosystem around the excitement that has been building with everybody since we first talked about it sure sure yeah we're pleased analysis that we're doing this yhk we're building cross chain bridge between ethan cardone um for nfts and this is going to be a two-way bridge we're expecting our ndp to be ready by january and then our our beta product will be coming out in q1 and you know i just as you know josh you know we have other projects as well planned with ioshk and we're really excited about doing some of these things including you know a dedicated nft series and one of the the perks of this series is actually going to be related to the bridge product you know i'm excited for that uh personally when i think of how projects go and get funding for things are how they bootstrap different things they want to do uh you know nfts is a great outlet for that something that hasn't really been utilized in the past as where you can bootstrap a collection uh you know you can give it a roadmap uh you know you can put something behind it yeah then we actually have a ton of experience in that space you know through our launch pad we've we've actually helped 15 different projects get off the ground uh we incubated and helped them launch and you know our other pets project we brought on 21 different projects and actually gave them their their first initial sales through amputees for us we have project catalysts that people go through for funding and all but it'll be great to start seeing dedicated sources uh that these nfp projects can go to get off the ground and through innovative means and especially the experience that you guys bring and be able to tap into that it'll be great for sure so rob the uh the energy requirements needed to generate nfts has been a hot topic in the news uh can you talk a bit more about how the bridge cardano is addressing this issue so we work with a lot of major entertainment brands and mitigating the environmental impact of the blockchain is literally the number one issue they're considering when deciding on a blockchain as you know one transaction on ethereum literally uses as much power as the conventional hospital uses in a day and a half right it's simply just not sustainable so the bridge has the potential literally to divert a significant portion of these transactions that are happening underneath onto the cardone watching and that's massive i always ask companies uh and projects who decide to migrate to cardano having reviewed all the available platforms what makes cardano stand out as a core partner for bonley's tech stack oh sure josh yeah there's really two reasons environmental concerns and the speed of transactions we feel will be key drivers in onboarding major consumer brands in the future and the other one is you know our view as a company but the future of blockchain is interoperability now bondling has been built as an interoperable transparent portable swap protocol and we feel that this is this is the future of nfts and cordano is you know literally the most anticipated smart contract platform uh in blockchain space and we want to be part of it and we just can't wait to see where this will take us thanks so much for joining us today uh rob you know we look forward to really getting down there and uh working with you guys on this drop on this bridge can't wait to bring it out uh and you know we will have plenty of more things to follow up as the time goes by thank you josh thank you for this opportunity appreciate it today we're joined by the director of africa operations john o'connor who is fresh off a tour of africa john start off with uh what were some of the key highlights what were some of the key takeaways of the work that you guys all did hi eric and thanks for having me here today um look it was an entire month so i could probably talk for about two hours and that would still be a brief practice but maybe we can start off with just some context about where we went so first of all this was an entire month trip across six countries so we started off in south africa in cape town the focus of cape town was to speak to private businesses to meet with a lot of the large companies which often base themselves in south africa uh so we also expected central banks there we spoke to stock exchanges um we spoke to some of the mobile browsers and uh from that leg of the trip um we've got a probably two or three very exciting deals uh which could bring maybe 100 to 140 million users uh using our solutions alone after south africa we went off to tanzania to zanzibar to meet up with and spend time with world mobile world mobile is one of the first projects to list a native asset on cardano they completed a successful raise to be able to build decentralized mobile mesh networking across the continent their launch site is in zanzibar so we got to go and see some of the initial infrastructure which they've laid down there i think charles uh climbed one of their mobile telephony polls um and get to see a project which has actually already started and that's one of the highlights for me actually on this trip uh in blockchain we're always selling the future and it's a relentless march onto what can we do next quarter what can we do next year so actually starting to see implementation of something uh was really exciting for us after zanzibar we went off to burundi burundi was a great trip we met with the president there received a full state visit and spoke at a very high level to four or five different ministries about implementing our digital identity solutions across the entire government in burundi they start doing the census next year of uh voter registration for the election so we're looking to engage with the burundian government to see whether we can start integrating the atala prism identity during the census period uh so that we can start registration for a national identity program so that was a great part of the trip after that um we moved on to ethiopia it was ethiopian next uh in ethiopia we got to spend time with the ministry of education with the team and the staff members that we've hired there over the last couple of years got to present to the new minister of education about extending the program past the initial 5 million that program by the way is about to launch over the next month and also look at some additional opportunities uh in the country uh around digital identity after ethiopia we went off to kenya and kenya was really exciting to me because kenya's gonna be the first place that we start really delivering on these real fire solutions so doing real lending to real businesses smes who are struggling to access capital in kenya but have great opportunities low default rates um so i'm sure we can talk a little bit more about that later and then after kenya we finally went to egypt and egypt was a little bit of r r after five countries and four weeks charles's birthday was there uh so we got to hang out with the team before everyone left and went back home so obviously a whirlwind tour over a month um many different countries many different partnerships and and i kind of wanted to highlight that specifically so we are not going alone into all of these countries we're working with corporate partners private partners governmental even non-governmental partners and a blend of everything together obviously world mobile chain is super exciting um can you talk about some of the partnerships that are really leading the way for us in africa yeah so as i say it was a long trip i think across the four weeks we probably did 80 meetings so we were averaging between two and three meetings a day uh so it's sort of difficult to struggle when there's so much activity and actually the last uh week and this week for me are really just starting to get on top of all of that activity that we've driven what i will say in answer to your question is that we're starting to shift away from a model where we work specifically with the government to deliver a single project towards really thinking more as a product company so as we develop these pieces of technology like atala prism what products would exist and work on a continent-wide scale where it's less focused on a specific country but what value can you create from doing this at a larger level and some of those things include remittance businesses you know if you have digital stable coins in the country identity to do the kyc aml and compliance and you can do that in three or four different countries then you can build these remittance corridors uh leveraging hydra to be able to offer that sort of 10x better cheaper faster remittance experience so this is some of the ways in which we're shifting our thinking and uh we're talking with companies that have large amounts of distribution across the continent you know 30 to 150 million customers to get them on board as our partners who can deliver our technology through the existing customer bases that they already have so um whilst i won't be specific with names that's sort of the model um and you know we're progressing through the cycle of mou's statement to work um commercial pricing and contracts with a number of these partners uh to sort of get us over the line yeah so so maybe you can also give us a little bit of uh of an understanding of what the specific needs you're seeing in the african continent are how are they different from the rest of the world yeah so maybe it's easier to go through a specific example so there's a company called possessor in kenya who we're working with they do loans for smes so they have distribution partnerships with companies let's say like coca-cola you need to distribute their goods across kenya so they work with local news agents and distribution partnerships to offer financing to businesses that needs to stop coca-cola and then they sell it across the next month so these are very stable businesses which have large histories of repayment uh when we look through the loan book uh of of possession they're dealing with like a two percent default rate for the lending activity that they're dealing with so this is very low risk lending activity that has very predictable returns nonetheless um with some of the companies out there in the kenyan market who were doing this lending they're charging 40 a month for this incredibly low risk lending opportunities and the reason is of course that you have very low access to capital in uh in kenya people can't understand the risk so as a result these very successful businesses are being charged in arm and leg so this is a specific challenge that you often see in the african continent one of the promises of cardano and of crypto is that we can start leveraging the 70 80 billion dollars of liquidity on cardano to enable people who are holding ada to lend in to these loan origination opportunities at very attractive interest rates let's say it was 30 over the year which would still be a fraction of what these businesses are being charged in kenya so these are some of the asymmetries which we hope to address with our identity solutions um with the d5 rails that we're building um though this is what we sort of call realfly and trying to open up these opportunities to cardano and ada holders so at the moment io is lending itself to better understand the market and then we're going to be shifting towards creating these uh opportunities for our ada holders so you could imagine with a light wallet experience you can click on a button which says um uh lend your ada and then there would be like a dap which sits there saying you know possession it would have the loan terms historical performance and you can just sort of click on this to get exposure to lending to kenyan smes doing something good and earning a fair rate of return so that's where we're going with this and this is a hugely exciting use case uh which is aimed at not the next 10 years but really the next hundred years but part of dealing with uh with country scale investment like this and investing in business for the next century uh are large fluctuations and sometimes even crises um so what's what's our point of view how do we how do we deal with geopolitical fluctuations as they come up in in africa it's a really good question and um you know there's been a lot in the news recently about challengers in ethiopia um with tdf versus the national governments um in sudan recently we we had a military coup of the transitional hamduck government so these sort of things do come up i always try to keep things on a simple set of principles one is uh don't get political we're trying to build technology which promotes and improves the lives of ordinary people and all of the contracts which we take are uh ones which are focused around that you know there's many companies like palantir who are very happy to do projects on threat assessment and all of that kind of jazz um but that's not who we are and it's not what we're interested in so the first step is make sure we're building products which are for good and don't step into a contested space which can create risk for the company and for the ecosystem the second principle which we abide by is of course making sure that we look after the safety of our staff duty of care is something that we take very very seriously and it's something that we monitor on a daily basis whenever challenges arrive um so at the moment i'm comfortable about that that duty of care portion uh and we evaluate situations on an ongoing basis um and then the third principle is that you know you can't uh you can't get uh too caught up in uh always dealing with the latest press cycle um so as long as we're doing these top two principles then we we're gonna carry on building great technology that we believe can deliver impact for millions of people so that's it um you know it's obviously a qualitative judgment that you always have to keep in mind but at the moment i'm feeling comfortable about our allocations and about our duty of care as well as the amazing products that we're building so john any final thoughts on where we're heading in africa after this long trip so um one of the exciting things which was an outcome of the trip was potentially expanding the size of our africa fund so uh you know we've committed six million dollars towards an africa pre-seed tech model which is meant to further support companies that are coming out of catalyst with injections of capital um on an equity basis so you could imagine you've applied on catalyst you've got some community due diligence and verification that your idea is good you've taken in catalyst funding and now you want to expand so this is where the africa vc uh fund was meant to sit so that was a six million dollar fund which after this trip um we're potentially going to be able to expand um to a much bigger fund size uh over ten times the size so this could be an amazing vehicle for african companies to be able to really take themselves not through just a precede uh series but actually potentially towards series a and series b what excites me about this is it's a real holistic model you'll have catalyst and then funding support all the way through the various different stages that you need to grow to be a unicorn and that's actually the goal of of this entity and of this fund is to instigate the next african unicorn to come from the crypto and blockchain space and of course the the cardano space so with this we should see new entities coming up across countries all across the continent and really achieve a scale which um which uh is gonna surprise everyone uh you know companies in sort of 20 30 40 countries are all on the table so with that being said um you know we have a lot of people who are are watching right now that are on the african continent and who may feel like they might be that next african unicorn how do they get involved with uh with this and or how do they how do they put themselves in the right position to uh to receive funding so we have a cut on our africa website to bring in all of this new content and opportunities the first step as ever is going to be catalyst you know we're trying to create these vehicles to have uh an off ramp after you've succeeded in catalyst so get on the idea scale start putting your idea up on that and then follow the news follow the cardano africa website uh so you can start to learn more about these subsequent funding vehicles great so everybody watching out there make sure to keep your eye on the cardano africa website and of course our normal traditional channels um and get involved become the next african unicorn [Music] so thank you eric and john for that update and uh exciting opportunities indeed you'll find the links you need below so that's about it for this edition make sure you take a look at the iohk blog where this month we've offered a deeper dive into cardano network optimization and more in africa including a new education program in ghana kicking off in early 2022. you can also find out more about catalyst natives and there's an update on the utxo alliance with elephium and digibyte being the latest utxo based blockchain projects to join us in our collaboration pushing innovation and interoperability across the whole ecosystem so that's it for our november edition now we'll have a different format show for you at the end of december with a look back at the year just gone and a look forward into 2022 so make sure you subscribe and hit that bell to get alerted just as soon as it lands shortly after christmas i'll see you again in mid december with one more technical development update for 2021 and as always don't forget to follow us on twitter for all of the latest from this expanding cardano universe happy thanksgiving america and thanks to everyone everywhere for joining [Music] you

Channel: IOHK

Views: 37,346

Keywords:

Id: eHgNyc_8H34

Length: 87min 57sec (5277 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

• NEWBIES GUIDE Start here
• PROJECT CATALYST Propose and vote on projects
• ⚠️ PSA - SCAMS Be wary of common scams!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Dark_Pandemonium23]

Watching now. :)

[u/Monkeyfacemoney]

Any news on PAB release yet?

[u/OwnTalk2014]

Is cardano and cardano 360 the same?

[u/BlackFlower9]

What’s the time span for a sprint? 1 Month? Is there a calendar which sprints we have scheduled per year?

[u/anaskon1]

Anything interesting?