Cardano ADA News Update – Strike Perps, Indigo v3, Charli3 & More (29 May 2026)

The majority of markets are red at the moment. This is when you look at the stock market in general and crypto, it’s not doing too well, but these Cardano native projects building on the Cardano ecosystem are doing well. They’re doing exceptionally well and absolutely pumping at the moment and people are very excited about it and people are wondering what on earth is going on here and Cardano projects are certainly getting the attention. So let’s have a look at what’s going on guys.

Hi everyone, my name’s Peter. If it’s your first time here, hit that like button down below, hit subscribe, notification bell. I’ll keep you updated with everything that is happening in the Cardano ecosystem and crypto in general. Now let’s have a look at what on earth is going on here.

You can see from these charts here, this is from TapTools, a really good platform to check all these stats and movements of various native assets on the Cardano ecosystem. You’ve got Atlas, Surf, Ascend, Strike, Surge, Bodega, Memecoin, Nike, Pulse and they’re all doing exceptionally well. Look at what Atlas and Surf have been doing recently. They’re absolutely surging over the last 30 days and it’s because they’re building and doing some really exciting stuff and I’ll go through all these protocols and you’ll see what they’re actually trying to deliver on the ecosystem or already have.

So that’s a really exciting bit here and we’ll start first with what is happening with Strike and they are a derivatives platform. They do perpetuals, if you haven’t heard, they’re doing really well. I got into the platform maybe about a year ago trying and playing around with the platform in general but they hit that 100 million market cap on their token and they’re doing so so well. Every week they’re releasing brand new features and it’s making everyone very excited about it and let me go through some of the stats and details so the v2 version 2 of their protocol brand new smart contracts has hit 30 million in volume and this is about maybe a month old so that’s doing really well.

We’re seeing 88 not 80 that’s where they want to get 80 million they’re at 8 million daily volume at the moment. This isn’t like anywhere near the same amount as Hyperliquid or any of the other really big perpetual platforms out there but it is getting there it is certainly getting their attention and this is the type of protocols that people are excited about at the moment. This is what’s gaining most of the retail attention so Strike is doing very well with their perpetuals platform. Now they have a recent treasury proposal that is being put on chain and they’re asking for a 7.5 million ADA deposit into their treasury to help fund the liquidity on their DeFi protocol.

The really cool thing about this is that if we go into the proposal itself a lot of this stuff is essentially a way to get the treasury to fund and boost their ecosystem but everything goes back to the treasury in the end. So let me go through the snapshot here to give you the overview so 7.5 million ADA duration 12 months it’s to structure productivity liquidity deployment treasury ownership treasury retains ownership throughout the deployment yield model estimate 1.35 ADA equivalent annually under conservative assumptions so that’s how much ADA is supposed to be retaining back in addition to the requested amount of ADA so midpoint distribution so your yield will be returned at the six month mark and obviously at the 12 month mark and final return full principal plus remaining yield return at end so this is a pretty good investment for the Cardano treasury so this is government controlled withdrawal authority plus public reporting so that’s the oversight side of things so essentially Strike Finance is asking for a 7.5 loan for treasury deployment from the Cardano treasury over to the Strike Finance treasury and that would earn the yield from the platform taking in all the fees and all that stuff and have an estimated return of 1.35 million which would be put back into the Cardano treasury so this serves two purposes one it will help spearhead and push Strike Finance further along because it has more liquidity on the platform it can facilitate all the trading and perpetuals and all that stuff that is happening on the platform then the second big impact is the yield that it gets back all the fees that it takes will go back into that deposit deposited ADA from the treasury and then be returned back to the Cardano treasury at the end of it so this is a win-win for the Cardano treasury and for the platform itself hopefully we see more of this in the future and we see more protocols leaning into this of course you need to have a good track record and show that there is a lot of activity and excitement and focus on the chain and that you’re delivering stuff so if you can show all that stuff then the treasury side of things is kind of a no-brainer and it’s more of and it’s less of a risk for a lot of the people that are interested in funding this type of stuff so overall i think this is a really good treasury proposal and hopefully we do see this one go through on chain now strike doesn’t stop there they’re also working with a company called unifold and i’ll talk about that in a moment but unifold allow for the onboarding of fiat directly onto the platform so using your credit card using apple pay google pay whatever it is that you’re linked and hooked up with having this makes it so much easier to use the platform so you’re on strike finance on the mobile side of things you’re using your phone you’re flicking through it and you go okay here’s a good trade opportunity you open up your mobile wallet you can then deposit in via apple pay your credit card and you have some extra fiat on there to make your long or short or whatever you’re doing on the platform so that is a really exciting aspect that they’re bringing into the platform and i’ve been talking to the unifold team about their solution and i’m pretty excited about it they’re actually a y combinator startup and they are making inroads into many of the ecosystems and especially cadano so i’ve been working with them not working with them but getting some advice from them for integrating in their credit card platform onto my own stuff so i’m building this bounty platform here i call it web3 bounties and this platform allows you to post up various bounties so tasks that you can get the cadano community to do as you put in the bounty you can actually choose how you want to fund this and i am trying to focus this bounty platform primarily on usd stable coins in the cadano ecosystem and if we have something like usdcx and then you can fund that via your credit card then we can see more liquidity come on chain fresh liquidity from different ecosystems whatever it might be but then being funded by our credit card payments through something like unifold so i’m trying to work with the team there to get this all integrated in so that fresh liquidity can come in and help facilitate on-chain activity within the ecosystem so this platform here bounties is in test phase at the moment i’ll put a link down below in the show notes so if you are interested in helping out testing you can i’ve got this little report and issue button down the bottom and this integrates with our github repo and you can put in the details if you find anything or you suggest improvements please do i’ve seen quite a few suggestions already and i have implemented quite a few of those if you can if you do have the time check out the bounties check out bounties.learncadano.io where you can find this at the moment on testnet connect up your testnet wallet or even hook in your google wallet which i have done here and then you could be able to try out the platform and give me some feedback so that would be absolutely awesome that if you can the unifold team here are doing some really cool stuff with on ramps and onboarding users onto web3 now surf is another project that i’d like to mention and they do defi loans and you can see here from the charts they are gaining a lot of attention as well they’re up quite a lot this week they’re one of many borrowing and lending protocols on the kadana ecosystem alongside fluid token and also liquid finance as well two ogs in the ecosystem that are also doing exceptionally well at the moment but surf is definitely the outlier here with the biggest gains this week now they have an announcement that they had and this is a treasury injection into their protocol so there is a initiative called the defi liquidity budget and these guys have formed a group where they have been allocated a large chunk of the kadana treasury and they’ll be using that to be deployed out to various different defi protocols and surf happens to be one of them so there’s another seven here and i can see that strike was one of them unfortunately c swap wasn’t and it seems that liquid finance is another one as well for liquid labs so they’re three of the protocols i don’t know what the other four are so it hasn’t been revealed yet or leaked on this thread but surf is definitely one of them so when they these protocols have more defi liquidity allocated to them they have more opportunities for people to borrow that that liquidity etc so it makes those protocols stronger and better to use so really cool stuff to see what is happening there with surf as well now looking into the stable coin side of things usdm is that that’s homegrown stable coin that is built in the kadana ecosystem and they have done a lot with very little funding and it goes to show how dedicated they are to building up the kadana ecosystem now this is a big update from them they have now integrated in pith network the a tier one oracle into their ecosystem and this is to have transparency of reserves so it’s a part of their aum transparency data and pith is now providing the oracle data on their platform itself so you can see the price feeds etc etc now this news article here is about usdm changing their oracle feed provider so previously they used to use charlie3 and i’ll talk about them in a moment but they now have upgraded to using pith so there’s two major projects that i know of now that are using pith and it seems like this critical integration that was done by the pentad seems to have a a big effect because projects are picking it up so the other project was indigo and i’ll talk about them in a moment too but this is an unfortunate changeover and i would have loved to seen charlie3 continue and operate but it seems that charlie3 is ceasing operations or slowly winding things up due to a lack of funds and being unprofitable but now they’re switching over to the pith side of things and hopefully we see more projects pick it up as well because more people and projects that use pith are more likely that they’ll stick around as well otherwise we’re going to lose some data feeds and we need oracles within the ecosystem now as i mentioned charlie3 is pausing operations at the moment and they’ve had a really good run 1306 days of uptime on the ada usd price feed and you know many projects have been using this it’s just that it’s costly to use and some of these other options that pith have make things a little bit cheaper especially if you’re calling and trying to pull data all the time so there’s different methods of doing this they have push and they also have pull oracles and a lot of the ecosystem is moving to pull oracles getting the data when you actually need it as opposed to constantly pulling the chain all the time so that is one of the main differences here and it makes a lot of cost optimizations now this is really unfortunate and you can see from the comments here what was a core reason of closure and failure and this came from one of the c node the charlie3 node operators and he said essentially it’s not financially sustainable as a c3 node operator i lost a bit of ada price feeds were aggregated on chain so the cost per transaction didn’t make sense over time we would pay on ada and get rewarded in c3 i still ran it to support the ecosystem but lost out and that’s really unfortunate a lot of these state port operators such as bbhmm are dedicated to the ecosystem and it’s unfortunate that didn’t turn out the way that it should have price of ada and everything else it just just makes things a little bit difficult anyway unfortunate to see charlie3 pause and most likely cease all operations if they can’t work out what to do next but it’s been a good run so far i’ll put up the full message to the kadano community in the show notes for you guys so if you want to check it out it’ll all be on my website learn now we talked about usdm and the potential of getting more usdc into the ecosystem thanks to the works of like unifold for example and what strike finance are doing but if we have a look at how much usdc is being minted on other ecosystems just this week 500 million minted on solana we we aren’t even seeing anywhere near that i saw a post a little bit early today and i’ll put up on screen if i can find it but it mentioned that another 7 million usdc x was minted on kadano that’s a tiny fraction tiny percentage of what’s being minted on other ecosystems 7 million is great for what kadano in in the grand scheme of things or how big kadana is but we need a lot more of that as more and more opportunities and more ways to onboard and more ways to get liquidity on is enabled we’re going to see more of it and hopefully the team at unifold can work their magic and do some better ux so that we can find more liquidity coming on chain so fingers crossed we do see something there or maybe they can start working with USDM and doing some cool things there as well.

And the next protocol I want to talk about is Liquid Finance, very similar to Surf and what Fluid Tokens are doing, or Borrowing and Lending, but they are moving to their next phase of transparency on their platform. And for a long time, their smart contracts have been closed source, but they’re moving to make them more transparent. So you can look at the code, see that’s Open DeFi, that’s what they’re going to call it, and then you can verify for yourself what that smart contract is doing. And it’s going up for a vote at the moment.

It’s a governance proposal on their platform, and I guess they didn’t want to just make the call and make it all public and then scare off all their holders and whatnot. So they put it on chain for vote. It’s got 147 votes, ends in about three hours from now, but I can see that it’s most likely will be going as a yes vote to make this open and transparent so everyone can have a look at it. Now, all the hardcore developers in the ecosystem will be grilling it and checking it themselves to make sure that everything is all in line, have all their ducks in order, and that the smart contract is in fact good and valid.

But this has all been on chain for quite a long time now. I don’t know when they actually released Liquid V2, but it’s been battle tested and millions of ADA and USD have been flowing through their platform and has been working very well. So we know it works. We now will be able to check and verify that it all works as well.

So really good stuff, Liquid. Really good move for the ecosystem too. Now, another project that just launched, it’s V3. So this is a big upgrade.

I talked about this early in the week and I kind of teased out, maybe we’ll see it by the end of the week. And we have. Indigo have been working their butts off to get V3 live. So this will open up a whole new market of synthetic assets on the Cardano ecosystem.

A lot of things that were holding them back was the opportunities for the people that were providing collateral on the platform. So to create a brand new synthetic asset, you need to provide ADA, you need to provide stable coins, whatever it might be. But what was the incentive there? And the incentive was the Indigo token.

And if they kept on opening up more and more different types of synthetic assets, that means more and more of the Indigo token, the Indy token would be released into the ecosystem and will drive the price of Indy down to essentially nothing. So now they’ve worked out a better way where whatever synthetic asset that you’re minting, such as maybe IAUD, Australian dollar, that will be the reward for it. So that way you’re not minting and diluting the Indy token, you’re rewarding the user in the token that they’re providing collateral for. And that kind of makes sense.

And this now opens up and unlocks a whole new opportunity, a whole new asset class market on the Cardano ecosystem. So Indigo is definitely something to watch. They’ve changed the protocol, they’ve changed the design, they’ve changed the reward system, and I see that the incentives really line up now. So let’s see what happens next and see if it actually attracts more users to the platform and opens up a whole new asset classes on the Cardano blockchain.

We’ll see iGold, iSilver, iOil, you know, all these different commodities on chain all backed through collateralized assets. So really cool stuff. Indigo, congratulations on this major milestone. Now Ascend Markets, they have their smart contracts on mainnet for midnight.

They’re the first ones to launch a smart contract on midnight from what I know. I believe that’s the case, but they have a closed beta for mainnet side of things. So you can sign up for this Google form here, or sign up with this Google form, apply to be one of the ones that are trying it out. You can see the contracts are on chain.

This is the 1AM Explorer. If you didn’t check out my 1AM dust generation tutorial, links down below as well. It’s at the time now where we do need to generate dust and use it as the transaction feed to actually do things on the midnight blockchain. So do check out that tutorial, but the smart contracts have been deployed.

You can see them on mainnet here, very exciting stuff. So congratulations to the Ascend Markets team for getting this far. But if you wanna be a beta tester and get on chain and start using on mainnet, fill in that form. Fill in that form and become one of the Ascend Markets testers.

For those that don’t know, they do a prediction market with perpetuals. So it’s combining two gambling aspects, predicting on an outcome and perpetuals going long and short on those outcomes too. So really, really interesting. And I think the privacy aspect behind it as well, being able to keep that all private, hide who’s doing what transactions, thanks to the privacy chain midnight is their big selling point here.

In comparison, just so you know, other prediction markets such as PolyMarket are absolutely massive. It’s unregulated at the moment and some countries are bringing on in some regulations behind it. But PolyMarket is absolutely huge, but it’s all public. You can see the wallets, you can see how much money people are making.

This privatizes all that. It hides it, it obscures it. And I think that’s really appealing for a lot of people. So keep an eye out on Ascend Markets.

All right, so they’re the major projects. I think I’ve covered over pretty much all of them. Yep, I didn’t talk about Atlas, but I’ve got an interview with them coming up next week. And I did a previous interview with them as well.

Talked about Surf, Ascend, Strike. Surge, I didn’t talk about, but they’re doing some upgrades at the moment. And Bidega, I didn’t really talk about as well, but their prediction market built on Cardano and they’re doing very well too. But the main ones that I have spoken about with a couple more with Indy and Liquid Finance and all that.

But if you wanna check them out, I’ll make sure I put links to all these other projects down below as well. But I wanna talk about some other things that is happening at the moment. And the first one here is also my documentation around setting up a Cardano node at home. So there’s a lot of benefits in setting up your own node.

One of them is that you can configure your wallets that you’re using the Cardano ecosystem to pass through your own node. So you’re not relying on third-party infrastructure. And that way you can ensure that your transactions are getting on-chain as fast as possible. And you’re avoiding congestion times.

So as the chain gets busier and busier, that third-party infrastructure may see some bottlenecks. And having your own infrastructure that bypasses those bottlenecks is really advantageous, especially if you wanna get your transaction on-chain as quickly as possible. So home node, awesome stuff. Now I run the home node because I’m a state pool operator.

So I’m reducing my state pool costs and having the node at home is a big benefit there. I also run some other additional pieces of software on it. I run BlockFrost Icebreaker. The Icebreaker, well, BlockFrost is a subscription service where you can, that you can use.

Essentially it’s a node, but you can use BlockFrost to submit transactions to, and that’s what all the wallets out there use. They use BlockFrost or Oios, and you can submit transactions to it. You can write transactions. You can delegate to state pools or through their API platform.

So if you’re a web 2 developer using the API, great, BlockFrost is fantastic. But I am a Icebreaker, which is essentially their decentralized network of nodes that they use, push out those transactions. And as a result, I get some ADA for doing that. So I run some software such as the Icebreaker to make my node profitable at home.

I also run Aquarium software. So Aquarium is a piece of decentralized code that is written for the Fluid Tokens ecosystem. And Fluid Tokens do borrowing and lending, and they do liquidations. And the Aquarium code there, they’ve gotten a special name for it, but Aquarium code allows you to batch those transactions and also run through the liquidations.

And there, I also receive some fees for doing that too. So I’ve made this as a income-making machine, running little bits of software to help decentralize the Codano platforms and protocols that I’m building. I also get a bit of return on my investment and time and running the software. So I’m running essentially three bits of software on there, the Codano node, the Icebreaker, and the Aquarium side of things, so I can earn some revenue.

So that’s why I run a home node, and it’s pretty cool. I have to say it is profitable, especially when you are running from home. This here is a full tutorial on how I have set one up at home. It goes through the, let me just load it up.

I’ve got to put the link. Keep on forgetting to put the links in. But it goes through the tutorial. It has the video here that I did a full year ago.

This is on my tutorials channel, Crypto Tutorials, Guides and Courses. So if you’re not subscribed to that one, please subscribe to that one as well. It’s got the full video. It’s got the audio and all the notes that I did, all the command prompts that I copied and pasted.

So you can step through this entire thing, follow it, and set up your own node at home as well. Okay, so hopefully you find that resource useful. Next shout out I want to do is one for the Discover Codano UK meetup. This is run by Dave, ValidUTXO is his username.

But he’s running this meetup, and I think it’s open to about 30 or so people, and they’re doing the event to talk about governance, what’s happening with an intersect and giving everyone a big update around all those different aspects. And it’s pretty good because learning about these things, connecting with people in person is far better than doing it on X or online. You build those connections, you learn a lot more, you can ask the questions that you need to ask. Now I’ll be chiming in as well with a live stream.

I’ll be talking to everyone here, mainly about the governance treasury proposal that’s part of the intersect budget about Codano content creators and helping fund us as well. So I’ve got this treasury proposal up. I’m working with some other brilliant Codano content creators in the ecosystem, namely myself, Linda, Big Pay, Codano Paul, Dave, and also La Petite. We are all working on this one here to try and get some funding to keep our content creation going.

So hopefully we do get it through. I’ll put a link to this proposal in the show notes as well so you can check it out. Now, I am a D rep. I have to vote on all these proposals.

A lot of these proposals I have conflicts of interest in. I’ll try and put that all online as well, but you may need to move your delegation, guys. You may need to move. If you want to support me here, I may not be able to vote on this one.

You may have to move somewhere else to someone that is voting for it. And I also have conflicts of interest across almost all of the proposals that are being put up. So something to keep in mind. Anyway, do check out these events and also check out my proposal there.

Now, another event. This is for the local Aussies, the Australians, especially the ones on the Gold Coast here. Mr. Baggy Pants, or Joyous T, the man that you see around various events around the Cardano ecosystem that wears this awesome homemade, not homemade, but custom-made space suit to all the events that he goes to.

Trying to find a better picture of him. But he flies around to various different crypto events. He’s a creator of a online metaverse called Cardastation. And he’s built that.

A lot of people have used it over the years. He’s built custom setups and virtual spaces in there for myself and other content creators and other projects within the Cardano ecosystem. So it’s kind of really cool to actually see that all in play. But the whole metaverse thing isn’t as popular as it used to be during the COVID times.

But really cool overall. And he’ll be coming out to Australia on a bit of a tour. Be hitting Perth, Sydney, Gold Coast, and Melbourne. So if you’re in any of those cities, you’ll be able to catch up with him because we’re doing little mini meetups everywhere.

But the Gold Coast one is in Broad Beach. We just can’t decide if we can have it at the Loose Moose or the Lucky Squire. I’m leaning towards the Lucky Squire. It’s a little bit more casual and it doesn’t have all these really expensive beers.

So probably the Lucky Squire, guys. We’ll see you there. It is on the 8th of June. It’s a Monday night.

It’s a school night, I know. But this guy coming over from the US. So please come along, meet him, and talk about what we’ve been building and general Cardano stuff. It’d be really good to see you all there.

Now the very, very last thing I wanna talk about, and I do have an interview with these guys coming up. I had a chat with Santi from TX Pipe and they’re building out this brand new protocol called TX3. And this is a machine-readable interface for UTXO blockchains protocols. And what does that mean?

Essentially, they’ve put in a standard for AI agents and any developers out there to actually build against. So when you go to any of these protocols, you go to Indigo, you go to Strike Finance, Wi-Fi, all these different platforms that are building on Cardano, you need to learn how to interact with their smart contracts. Every single smart contract is different. They have different inputs.

They have different outputs. They have different bits of information that needs to be included within that transaction. Not everyone builds exactly the same way. And because of that, it’s inconsistent.

And for any developer that’s coming in and wants to build a new bounty platform and then integrate it in with a borrowing or lending protocol, it’s really confusing because you don’t know where to start. What they are building is a standardized API, an application programming interface with a standard way to communicate with all of these platforms. So you have it all documented here. You have the set of instructions of how to do it.

It’s all written in the same way. It’s all semantic. You can understand what you’re looking at. You know what to put in and you know what you’ll get out.

So that way, a developer can come in and start building on top of these and start composing really cool and crazy things altogether. So this will be the general flow. You get your credit card, you buy some, have some fiat and you buy ADA. From ADA, you may want to get some USD and.

then you convert ADA to USD, USDM for example. In USDM, you will then use that as collateral to borrow STRIKE tokens. Then you get the STRIKE tokens, then stake it onto the STRIKE finance protocol. So that’s a five-step process and to do that would take a lot of time.

But here with the intent base and with the instruction set with an API, you can do that all in one step. You can use an AI agent and just say, I want to stake STRIKE tokens and leverage that as much as possible and here’s my credit card. And it’ll go through and do all that for you automatically. That’s the future here and that’s what TX3 here can do.

That’s crazy stuff. Anyway guys, let’s leave it there. That’s probably long enough. If you got something out of this, make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell.

I’ve got YouTube memberships down below. I have buy me a coffee, bing, link there as well. So love that support. If you can’t do that, totally cool.

Just hit that thumbs up on your way out. Stay optimistic guys. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye.