1/Cardano has a vibrant ecosystem but some news goes unreported In #LatestOnCardano, I highlight news, minor and major. L1+L2 upgrades, stats, dapps, SPO, NFT, governance, community and more All things Cardano. Irregular but hopefully frequent. Here’s #5 in the series. Pls DYOR

2/Vasil is coming tomorrow. IOG summarised what to expect here iohk.io/en/blog/posts/… Improved collateral UX, reference scripts/inputs and inline datums are some of the big ones So is diffusion pipelining (faster block propagation and enabling scalability), already active

3/@tangocrypto - Cardano API and NFT platform provides Cardano APIs and added 4 new endpoints relating to scripts, collaterals mints and UTxOs

4/LiqwidX renamed to @XplorerDAO💫, building “on a vision to innovate in Cardano’s stablecoin and structured DeFi products space” They intend to offer interest-free liquidity. Borrow XPUSD against ADA at 0% interest. One of many stable coins coming to Cardano

5/The team at @Maladex have a big announcement coming in a few days. Looks like a rebrand, and quite a big one at that Pls have a look at a thread I did about them previously if you’re curious about what they’ll bring to Cardano: twitter.com/cardano_whale/…

6/@Indigo | Synthetic Assets on Cardano published their August tech update, see docs.google.com/document/d/1Rd… Few points: - Ran benchmarks against Vasil integration with great results - Integrated CIP30 (Eternl, Flint, Nami, and GeroWallet - ADA handle integration - Work on Governance Vote Sharding

7/Looks like @NMKR - formerly NFT-MAKER.IO is expanding into gaming (probably was always part of the plan, excuse my ignorance) A Web 3 Sci-Fi MMORPG coming to Cardano, very cool

8/@FluidTokens (Token Very Soon) tweeted about Lucid by @Alessandro | BERRY, highlighting a code reduction of 70% and easier asset selection See Lucid’s Github for more: github.com/spacebudz/lucid By the way, @Ada Pulse also wrote about them: adapulse.io/analyzing-luci…

9/Notable news as the open source team at CF seems to be expanding, keep an eye on this

10/@Aada launched succesfully. They kept working hard, yesterday added new tokens as collateral TVL is off to a slow start (creeping up to 1m ADA), but that’s to be expected Impact on CNT markets is already visible, have seen a few small shorts & short squeezes play out

11/We saw the launch of @Mercury Chat, a wallet to wallet chat app and some subsequent updates It’s all early days, but this type of functionality in combination with @$handle on a truly decentralised network like Cardano excites me a lot

12/@Genius X official - Multi-Token ISPO is LIVE! launched its multi token ISPO. You can delegate to one of their pools and earn $SMART, $LTY, $HYN, $REACH and $DG

13/Cardano’s NFT space is hyped up rn as a few influencers from other ecosystems are passing through and giving it some well-deserved attention To understand the space better though, beyond the back & forth noise of shills and grifters, here’s a great thread by @$goofycrisp

14/I enjoyed this teaser by @Book.io from their latest regular email. A big investor coming to their platform, and therefore by extension to Cardano They also have the publication of NY Times best selling author @Joe Nassise’s new book The Heretic soon twitter.com/jnassise/statu…

15/@TapTools is going from strength to strength. What an awesome platform this team is creating Pretty much a must for anyone investing their money anywhere in the ecosystem

16/One of the best wallets in the ecosystem @Typhon Wallet kept improving

17/Lack of and/or weak developer tooling has been one of the pain points in Cardano, but it’s improving fast For anyone looking to build anything here, would suggest that you make this one of your first stops: developers.cardano.org/tools/

18/The Cardano Foundation partnered with the Georgian National Wine Agency As many as 100,000 bottles of Georgian wine bottled in 2022/23 will carry a QR code that allows you to check authenticity / learn about history of the wine

19/Another dapp that’s coming close to fruition (“very soon” - @zygomeb) is @Optim Finance They wrote a great piece about transaction chaining (also implemented by @Typhon Wallet & @Liqwid Labs💧) By chaining UTxOs and ordering them virtually in “FIFO” manner, batching can be avoided

20/@Sebastien Guillemot tweets about another new bit of functionality added to the wider Cardano ecosystem via @Milkomeda (there is no token): multisig wallets. Funded by Catalyst

21/@guchi.io made a splash with an upcoming dapp that allows you to short Cardano NFTs “guchi is about expanding financial opportunities in Cardano. We believe in long-term, market and price are a reflection of truth: you can outrun it short-term, but eventually it catches up”

22/@MuesliSwap was the first DEX on Cardano, maintains their streak of being included in each of these threads The beta of their new layout (much cleaner!) went live @ beta.muesliswap.com/swap They’re becoming a hybrid DEX, will further enhance yield opportunities on Cardano

23/Every now and then I glance at our TVL at @DefiLlama.com, around $100m We’re in a bear mkt, haven’t grown TVL as much as I hoped, but huge protocols are now lining up for launch and things could progress fast All in all, contours of Cardano DeFi ecosystem are becoming clearer

24/In some areas Cardano DeFi is fighting an uphill battle (replicating account based structures on an UTxO chain) That of course gets a lot of attention. But in others there will be innovation not possible elsewhere. Deserves attention too!

25/It’s clear to all that @Liqwid Labs💧 is going to be a cornerstone of Cardano Given that we can supply liquidity and earn yield above our regular (risk-free) staking rewards I imagine it’ll see strong TVL growth pretty quickly Add 4 more yield streams on top of that? Big