Cardano DeFi Just Got Its Biggest Push Yet

Hi everyone, I’ve got a big Cardano news update for you all. We’ve got news around the Orion Fund, the VCs that are coming into the Cardano ecosystem to try and build up all these protocols that are building. But then also news about Alpha Growth and what their plans are with Cardano Prime to elevate the DeFi ecosystem as is. We’ve got a whole bunch of news updates in general as well, so let’s get into it.

Hi everyone, my name’s Peter. If it’s your first time here, make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I’ll keep you up to date with everything that is happening in the Cardano ecosystem right now, and there is definitely a lot happening. So let’s go into these news updates, and the first one here I just have to mention, and this is around some weird behavior that we’re seeing with SecondFi.

What used to be the Yoroi wallet, we’re now seeing a few users having their wallets drained, and there isn’t a specific pattern behind all this other than these users using these wallets through the SecondFi app. I believe it’s on their mobile. So this is just a public service announcement. We don’t know what’s going on at the moment with these particular wallets, but we do know that something is happening, and just be cautious in regards to what you do and how you interact with various DeFi protocols.

We can see quite a lot of USDC being bought up with these wallet balances. So the hacker or the scammer is essentially just liquidating everything in the user’s wallets and turning it into USDC, and you can see a lot here. We saw a massive spike and price fluctuations with USDC as well, and it’s because of these interactions here that we’ve seen. So just a public service announcement for you guys.

We don’t have anything confirmed or concrete in regards to it, but something just to be aware of. This next news story I want to bring up is IOG’s brand new media strategy. Their push into creating content for the Kadana ecosystem, and this is through, I think it was called B54, B50, yeah 45, Block 45, got that name totally wrong. But you can check out the full episode that they’ve just posted up.

It is with Lily and Paul, so two OGs in the Kadana ecosystem. But let me just play this clip for you guys, so you have a little bit of a sample of what they’re producing here. You cannot reach the 2030 vision without Layer. Simply the current protocol is not capable of giving you the 27 million transactions a month that the vision demands.

If we want to achieve that goal, we need Layer. We need this solution, and well, there’s another aspect of it, which is the economic aspect. The reserves are depleting. So if you want the network to be sustainable in the long run, you need a system to live on transaction fees.

And for that, for SPOs to be profitable on transaction fees, you need Layer. Okay, that’s pretty good. So it’s not too overly technical, which is probably the really good thing here. It talks about the delivery and strategy of getting to Kadano 2030.

So all the things that we need to do to bring us up to enough transactions to keep the ecosystem sustainable. So there’s a lot of work that’s happening around that space at the moment. A lot of projects are pushing for it. So good, awesome, brand new episode and focus.

You may have noticed Kadano 360, the regular media that comes out every month from IOG, hasn’t been coming out recently, and it’s because they’re transitioning to something new. Kadano 360 has been going on for years, and it used to be a staple for a lot of people. But you know, times change. You need to mix things up, have to try new things, and Block 45 is probably a good move to see how we can mix these things up, get more interest, and get more people watching Kadano-related content.

So awesome stuff. I’d like to see where this one goes. So this next news story I wanted to bring up is Draper Dragons Venture Studio, Commentor Labs. And these guys are being brought into the Kadano ecosystem to work alongside projects that are building in Kadano, to try and propel them, push them forward in DeFi, crypto in general.

And they’ve introduced the team now. I haven’t listened to this X space yet, but if you want to come on board and check out what they’re talking about, play this recording here. I’ll put it in the links in the show notes for you guys, but I will listen over this one as well. Pull out some highlights for you.

So it’s going to be interesting to see who they have brought in here, so they can start elevating some of the protocols that are building within the Kadano ecosystem. They have access to this 80 million dollar fund with the Orion Fund. So this was funded by the Kadano treasury early this year, but they have access to 80 million dollars for the Orion Fund to look for the next big projects that are building within the Kadano ecosystem, and then propel them forward within the DeFi space. So this is a really big venture that is hopefully going to really push Kadano to the next level.

Now, if you are building something within the Kadano space, you can check out this post here where they talk about the Orion Fund, but they’re looking for their first few cohorts to sign up to this program here. So, Stratford University slash Kadano Programs. You can check out the website here. They have two cohorts that are coming in at the moment.

They have the Genesis Hacker House and the Apex Growth Accelerator. So it’s for different tiers and different types of projects. So the Genesis is if you haven’t started yet, you’ve got a brand new idea, and the Growth Accelerator is for something that already is existing on Kadano but just needs that massive push. So they are providing venture capital here as well.

So it’s going to be interesting to see who gets in on this type of program early. So if you are building something, the dates, the application dates are still open. So applications due for Hacker House on the 10th of July, and for the Growth Acceleration applications due on the 1st of September. So still plenty of time to sign up for this and be a part of the program.

So I highly recommend that you do if you are building something in the Kadano space. Or if you are building somewhere else and you’re interested in building on Kadano and putting in the time and effort, there are opportunities here as well to get funding and to get your name in front of the Kadano ecosystem too. Now the other really big story that’s come out is Alpha Growth. And these guys I’ve never really heard of.

I’ve got snippets of information about this particular partnership and what might be happening here. But they are a DeFi protocol advisor. I think that’s the best way to describe it. But they’ve been working with a lot of DeFi protocols in the past to bring in liquidity and to make it attractive and then make it sticky.

So that’s the idea of what Alpha Growth have done in the past. And Phil here does a really good write-up post about what they’re actually trying to do. So let me just read this out for you guys, for the audio listeners on the podcast. We reached out to all the top firms in the space who went down the roster of the DeFi specialists used by every DeFi protocol in the top 30 on DeFi Llama.

Alpha Growth had the most impressive results, relevant campaigns, experience and demonstrated success taking protocols from square zero to real market success. It was important to me that they come into the ecosystem unbiased and that they are solely in the driver’s seat. The whole point for me was to bring DeFi experts not based on credentials but based on actual market success. Real concrete evidence of making protocols competitive in the DeFi space.

To do this successfully it’s important that there are no external influences, proposals on what is working here, what isn’t. So the relationship is explicitly structured such that neither ourselves or nor others in the ecosystem can propose anything to them. So an independent DeFi specialist coming in to look at what the Cardano DeFi ecosystem needs and supply them and provide them with the right concrete answers. So that’s what Alpha Growth are planning to do and today they put out this x-thread here to try and introduce what they’re after.

So they’re introducing this program called Cardano Prime and it is big. The main thing here that you want to get out of it is their credentials, their previous on-chain activity that they’ve driven for a lot of the other protocols. But then how they’re actually going to execute this on Cardano and it is through a treasury proposal. And here they’ve got this website called Alpha Growth Cardano Prime.

You can check this one out here. I’ll put links to it down below. But here they’ve got the treasury request. It’s not cheap.

It’s $120 million ADA or $19.2 million at 16 cents to do this DeFi protocol upgrade. So it’s a phenomenally large amount of ADA and it doesn’t help that the price of ADA is at 16 cents at the moment. But this essentially, from what I understand, and I do have an interview coming up with these guys, but it’s essentially from what I understand, looking into everything that’s not working on the Cardano ecosystem, changing what needs to be changed, upgrading what needs to be upgraded to then attract that liquidity in and make it stay for a long time. So they’ve done this with other protocols.

They’ve done this on other chains. And the idea here is that it’s going to happen on the Cardano side of things in a completely independent way without any influence from the existing Cardano ecosystem or bodies there. So what do you think of this one, guys? This one’s pretty bold.

The current net change limit or the amount of ADA that can be withdrawn out of the Cardano ecosystem for this period is essentially almost maxed out. And now we have an extra $120 million coming in to try and improve Cardano’s DeFi. But, you know, if we don’t improve Cardano’s DeFi layer now and increase the amount of transactions on-chain, come bull run, we’re going to be really far behind. And we’ve got all these other things and aspects.

We’ve got Laos coming. You know, we saw this dedicated video on Laos. We have Laos coming. We have Paris, which should increase the blockchain finality with layer zero for the cross-chain connectivity, Pith for the Oracle side of things, June Analytics to actually monitor and see all this happening on-chain as well.

And we also have Fireblocks coming onto the chain as well. So these are like foundational blocks that we need to have DeFi like this to have what Alpha Growth are proposing here. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Alpha Growth went, you know, look, guys, before we can even approach and look at your DeFi ecosystem, we need to be able to bring liquidity in. We need Pith.

We need layer zero. We need all these things to actually happen so that we can actually grow the DeFi ecosystem. And without it, we can’t bring liquidity in. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the actual case.

And that’s why we ended up with all those particular protocols and Firebase coming in as well. So I’ll find out later tonight when I interview the guys and find out exactly what’s going on here. But this is a very bold, very, very bold proposal here. And I am very interested to see where this one goes.

Let me know in the comments down below what you guys think. It’s quite interesting. Anyway, next news item. So now I’ve got some Cadana specific news.

And this one here is from Dano Finance. And this is around their global order book. I like what these guys are doing because they’re looking at defragmenting the liquidity on the Cadana ecosystem. So let me try and explain that here.

So let me read through this post. Maybe that will explain it for you guys. Cadana does not have a fragmented stablecoin problem. Swapping 10k USDM or 10k USDA or 10k USDCX to ADA gives you almost the same result on Dano V2.

Swapping USDM to ADA will effectively choose multiple order routes, including USDM, USDA on Dano, and then USDA to ADA on Minswap. Similar with USDC or USDA. So there will not be a stablecoin monopoly on Cadana anymore. So what this essentially does, what their platform does, is just picks and chooses whatever liquidity is available to get you the end result.

So instead of saying, okay, we can only use USDM, because that’s what the user is, you know, depicting there. Instead, we can use all of the liquidity that’s available to us on the protocols, on all the protocols out there to achieve the most efficient swap possible. And that’s what they’re trying to do here with the global order book. So all the liquidity pools, you got some liquidity over here on SundaeSwap, over here on Minswap.

We have some locked up on a borrowing lending protocol or a stablecoin swap. And we’re just tapping into all of those, composing them all together to construct the best transaction possible for the end user. And that’s what Dano is doing. Now, I did do a interview with the guys back, I think in February, but the video is still in production.

I haven’t had a chance to finish editing that one yet. But if you’re interested, hit that like, subscribe notification bell. And as soon as it comes out, you’ll be the first ones to know that Dano Finance is doing some amazing stuff there. Some of you may already know that TapTools, the premier analytics dashboards for the Cadana ecosystem, if you’re looking at the price of various tokens, has closed down.

They couldn’t afford their burn rate, and I believe their salaries and infrastructure costs to keep the platform running. So they had to close it down. But there are a lot of other platforms that are stepping up to replace them. And one of them is Hoskies Fetch.

So this is the platform that Cadana with Paul and Patty, and I think a few other members as well, are behind. But they primarily were a DEX aggregator, and they They had their swaps in their platform, but because TapTools is closed down, they’ve slowly upgraded their platform to show more data. And more data that TapTools had is now appearing within Fetch. And if you haven’t used it yet, I highly recommend that you at least have a look so you can see what the replacements are now that TapTools is out of the picture.

Now, I tried to spec up and design a version of TapTools as well and run it in low-cost infrastructure, so a serverless infrastructure. That makes it really, really cheap, so you only pay for what you use. And on Cloudflare, bandwidth is actually free. So there’s a lot of really low-cost options here.

And I mocked one up, and I believe I could get up to 100,000 impressions or something on the mocked-up site without costing me much at all. I think it was like $5 a month. So infrastructure costs and using AI to build a platform like TapTools was definitely on the cards. And I could have done that as well, but these teams have already got the base for it.

There was no point of building another platform to compete against them. But it was a good experiment for me to just have a look at what was possible using Cloud Code to build something out. And it was definitely very, very easy to do at a minimal cost. So there’ll be replacements for sure.

TapTools is tapping out, but there are other platforms now stepping up, such as Fetch. There are others as well, and I will mention them in a future video. But for now, check out Fetch and what they’re doing there. The team from Surge have been working hard.

Now, I’ve had a chat to them in the past, and they said their platform wasn’t quite ready yet. But now with Surge V2 on board, they are now able to do automated arbitrage trades through their platform. And now they’re connected with four DEXs. They got Splash, they got Minswap, SundaeSwap, WingRiders, and Splash all integrated in.

So what you can do on their platform is load it up with a lot of assets, such as USDM or ADA or whatever their platform is asking for, and then arbitrage trade between different trading pairs on cross all those different DEXs. Because what you’d find when you visit these platforms is the price of a particular asset might be slightly higher or slightly lower on one or the other. And what you can do is trade from one to the other and make a little bit of a profit. So if ADA was trading at 16 cents on one, but then trading at 18 cents on another, that two cent difference is enough to make an arbitrage trade and make a profit off.

So you can buy on the lower price DEX and then sell it on the higher one and make a profit from it. And what Surge does, it automates that process. So you put in some rules and say, hey, each trade needs to be this profitable. You can trade against these particular protocols and these trading pairs.

And we’ll just go out there and find those trades for you and do those trades. So this is the automation side of things, the bot trading side of things, but it helps stabilizes those prices. And in reality, there are a lot of arbitrage bots out there that just do this anyway. That’s why you see all the prices of various assets pretty much stabilized within the Kadana ecosystem.

But this here allows anyone with liquidity to be able to do that and makes it a lot easier. So I will be doing a video on this as well so I can learn how to do it myself. And I can teach you guys exactly how to do arbitrage trading on Kadano DeFi. And I think it’s a pretty cool thing to have now.

I know a lot of the other ecosystems have it. They have things like this, but we don’t. But now, thanks to Surge, we do. Now I mentioned Pith a little bit earlier, but Pith is that Oracle layer that is introduced into the Kadana ecosystem.

And they are now providing their Pith Pro price feeds free for a year. So DeFi protocols that are interested in building something really cool using the Pith data from their Oracle can now do so for free. So this gives you an opportunity to build something of interest and expand into the Kadano space, but on a very low cost budget. For example, I am building some various platforms and I have to pay for the APIs.

I have to pay for the application programming interfaces and the data that I’m using to be able to run the platforms. And it’s a bit of a cost, especially when you’re not making any money yet and you’re developing and you’re trying to build, you’re trying to gain traction, but you have these overheads. Reducing the overhead here that you would normally get with signing up to something like Pith Pro would mean that it makes it easier for you to start operating, building something, and then start marketing. Because marketing is a hard part.

Once you’ve built something and it works and you’re happy with that, you need to then get people to use whatever you’ve built. And that could take a bit of time, especially if the market’s not doing too well, but reducing your costs is the big thing here. Like tap tools, they probably had to reduce their operating costs, their staff costs or whatever by quite a lot to be able to keep that platform going and monetize it in the long run. But here we go.

We now have the Pith side of things for free. So hopefully we do see more of this type of stuff made available for the Kadana ecosystem for free. We’ve got Firebase as well, which is a enterprise kind of cost, costs a lot of money. So hopefully we do get free usage of that as well so that enterprise can start building on there into the Kadana ecosystem for a very low cost too.

So awesome stuff to see that Pith Pro is now free. Now my last news story here is the Van Rossum hard fork. Now this particular hard fork was named after Max Van Rossum who sadly passed away last year, October, 2025. It was a part of the Kadana ecosystem, part of the community, did a lot of work within the governance side of things as well and had been a really good voice in the space.

Unfortunately he passed away and this hard fork is named after him in his memory. So it’s a bit of a tradition now. We do lose some people from time to time and these hard forks are now being named after the longstanding contributors to the Kadana ecosystem. Now this is a intra-era hard fork and it introduces some of the groundwork that’s needed for the next major era, which is Dijastra.

And this is what is needed to bring in Laos. And that’s scaling for the Kadana ecosystem. So it’s a needed hard fork, the first step into approaching a super size scaling for the Kadana ecosystem. So we’ll see some exciting developments later this year and of course another hard fork.

So really good stuff. Now, if your SPO, your state pool operator hasn’t upgraded to the latest version of the Kadana node, 11.1, get them to upgrade, get them to upgrade. This website here, pooltool.io, will let you know what protocol, what version of the node each pool is running as the blocks are being minted. So every pool needs to be on protocol V11, version 11.

If I scroll down this list here, I can see most of these, pretty much all of these are now on version 11. And that kind of signals that the network is ready to be upgraded to the latest version for this particular hard fork. And I can see the last 10 here, they’re all on the correct version, which is really good to see. Now, if we go to network health here, we’ll be able to see at a glance here what the percentage is.

And we can see here the node reporting version, 11.0.1, so not 11.1, 11.0.1, is at 68%. And that’s pretty much the majority of the pools out there. So what you’re really interested in is the blocks produced by which protocol. And that’s this particular pie graph here.

So we can see that 86% of the blocks being produced on the Kadana ecosystem are of that latest version, which is really good. So if we get that up to 90% or 95%, it’s pretty much all the major blocks out there. Now, if a pool isn’t upgraded to the latest version and is minting blocks on an older node version, they won’t be included. And I believe they won’t get rewards for it either.

So it’s important that your pool, that wherever you are, whatever pool you’re delegated to is minting the correct versions. Otherwise, after this hard fork, they’ll be left out of the network. Now, my pool here, AdaOz, is upgraded. We are minting the right blocks.

Propagation delays, we’ll show it here. You can see the latest protocol version, version 11 there. So you can see what protocol your pool that you’re delegated to is minting on. Just go to Pool Explorer on the left-hand side here, type in the pool that you are looking for, click on Next, the details there, and you’ll be able to see under Blocks, Propagation Delays, which version they’re minting at.

So do check that one out. If you can contact your state pool operator, and if they haven’t upgraded yet, get them to upgrade, and they’ll be able to participate after the hard fork as well. All right, so that’s it for this particular news update. A lot of interesting news updates around the Orion Fund and what Alpha Growth are doing.

And if you want to be kept up to date with all that kind of stuff, make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe on your way out. YouTube membership’s down below. I’ve got a Buy Me A Coffee, link’s down there as well. Great way to support the channel.

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Like always, guys, stay positive. I’ll see you in the next video.