Cardano Goes to Silicon Valley, ADA News Update 2nd April
Episode by Peter Bui on April 2nd, 2025
In this update, we see various projects to Silicon Valley after being accepted into Draper U.
We also have some great updates from Book.io with their second round of investment funding, development work from Nucast around Gasless transactions, and the upcoming possibility of liquidity moving into stablecoins from the Cardano treasury to help boost the DeFi ecosystem.
Congrats to Draper U Finalists
Always a Drama, Cardano Foundation Picking Winners
Book.io / Stuff.io Secures Second Round of Funding
Turn Protocol to Bring Tornado Cash to Cardano
Foreon Network, Prediction Market Predicted to Launch in 2 weeks
Best Hardware Wallet, Keystone: Gets a Firmware Upgrade
If you want a Keystone hardware wallet, consider ordering via our affiliate link! It supports the work I do in the Cardano community.
Nuvola Roadmap Update & Boost Anniversary Rewards
Nucast Delivers Gasless Tx Library
A full project overview of the Idea Scale is available from their Catalyst proposal.
Thread on Begin Wallet
Let’s Get Cardano to Token 2049 Singapore
Charli3 Launches Synapes API for Cardano Data
Check out the platform and join the pre-launch waiting list.
Stablecoins to Get Liquidity Injection
Read the update proposal on the Cardano forums.
Building on CardanoPress, Create a Cardano DApp with WordPress in Minutes
Get top-tier WordPress hosting with WordPress.com (Affiliate link)
Text Transcript
00:00
bunch of Cardano projects are heading to Silicon Valley. This is absolutely awesome. It’s a big deal for these projects and also a big deal for Cardano. There’s always been mentions on crypto Twitter where VCs will say, I’ve never heard of anyone building on Cardano. This is definitely going to change that. It’s going to put these 10 projects right in front of the VCs where they can showcase how and what Cardano is capable of. I’ve got
00:27
all the projects that I have found so far that are part of this new Draper U initiative, this accelerated program and also a whole bunch of other news updates. So let’s get right into it. Hey everyone, I’m Peter Buie. If it’s first time here, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe on your way in. Let’s get into all these news updates. This very first one here, this is the Draper U stuff. This was the Draper U founder residency program. I have spoken about this before.
00:55
They receive a 42k ADA grant, five week residency in Silicon Valley, flights over their demo day to network with VCs. That’s the big deal there. Technical growth sessions, fundraising strategies and pitch deck refinements. Everything they need to get in front of VCs and attract more funding, et cetera, et cetera. Now I try to find as many projects as I could, but I’ve only found 10. There may be more. So forgive me if I’ve missed out on anyone.
01:25
The Clay Nation, Clay Nation, they’re going on that future of storytelling and this is a brilliant project. They’ve been around since the very beginning of the Cardano days. They did a massive NFT collection with Claymation, Claymate animation. So really cool stuff. We’ve got Clarity Protocol. They’re building dowels on Cardano and a lot of people use their platform at the moment. We also have Gero Dashboard. So these guys are always.
01:53
working really hard to make the wallet experience even better in the ecosystem. We are curate. This was a new one that I hadn’t heard of and it seems quite interesting. I’ll put more information about this particular project and see how they are going within this accelerator program. We have Ada Handel making wallet addresses and everything else easier within the ecosystem. We’ve got Vespa wallet as well. Congratulations Vespa. We have
02:23
Delta DeFi. Now these guys have been on the podcast before as well. So if you want to find out anything else about what they’re doing, links down below. We also have Sheldon Hunt with Sundial. Now this one I haven’t dug into much yet, but Sundial is looking really interesting. It’s another L2 that is building on Kidano, built on Midgard. So this is going to be quite interesting.
02:49
TX pipe, they’re building infrastructure for Cardano projects out there. think almost everyone touches some of their stuff that they have. And the last one here that I found is, of course, fluid tokens. Fluid tokens, one of my favourite projects that building on Cardano and of course now over on the Bitcoin ecosystem. And they’ve been accepted in for the Draper U University. So I’ll keep an eye on this over the next five weeks. I don’t know exactly when it starts and when they all fly over to the US for this particular program.
03:18
But I’ll keep an eye on this. I’ll see exactly what they’re doing and what they’re up to. And hopefully we see some fundraising and VCs interested in some of these projects here to take them to the next level and see them expand to different ecosystems, whatever it might be. So what have these VCs have in mind? You know, they’ll steer the direction of these particular companies and help direct them and get more funding. So overall, really exciting.
03:47
Really cool to see all these projects be elevated in Silicon Valley and taken to the next level and hopefully elevates rest of the Cardano ecosystem with them. Now, of course, this didn’t all go without some sort of some level drama. And it mainly was because this this all came about because it was a catalyst proposal and it was for millions of ADA. I can’t remember the exact number. I’ll try and find it. I’ll put a link down below in the show notes.
04:14
But people were criticising the Kedona Foundation for voting for these particular proposals because essentially anything they voted for made it through to the end and got their funding. And I don’t know, it kind of seems like a good thing because these particular proposals here, these three main ones that made it in Fund 13, the Techstars one, the Draper U and CV Labs, they’re all startup accelerator stuff. This is.
04:43
or really, really desired in the Cardano space. We’ve got projects that are building and have been building in a bear market with almost no funds. And they’re finding it really hard to get it in front of VCs and get that type of funding that they need to really accelerate and expand and build and explode across all of web three. And, you know, there’s criticism about, you know, the Cardano foundation voting for those particular projects, but I think
05:12
It was really needed and I think without the support of the Kandano Foundation voting they may not have made it through so I really think this was a good thing and we’ll see by the end of this year let’s have a look at the impact that Techstars Drapery and CV Labs has had on the Kandano ecosystem and that alone I think is going to show that it was definitely a good choice.
05:39
Whether or not Cardano Foundation should dictate or essentially say who gets the funding or not, that’s another issue in general, but I think it was a good choice overall for at least these three to have made it through. All right. I’ll leave you guys with that. I’ll put links, show notes and everything about this particular DraperU stuff down below if you want to find out a little bit more and watch along the sidelines as these projects go through that Accelerate program.
06:07
But let’s get into some more news updates for you guys.
06:35
and it’s just a price of a cup of coffee. So it’s, I’ve kept it as low as possible. So if you can, if you do have the means, if you do want to support, you can do so that way. And it keeps me going, keeps me motivated and keeps me producing these videos for you guys. If you can’t afford that, that’s totally fine. You don’t need to, don’t feel guilty that you can’t, but if you can at least hit that like and subscribe button. It helps with the algorithm and helps me get these videos out there for the community.
07:05
Now with that out of the way, let’s get back to it. Now this one here was really exciting to see. Book.io absolutely loved the project. They’re taking online publishing for books, audio books, everything that you can think around. Essentially Amazon for Web3, where you actually own the books that you purchase. And they’re taking it to the next level now because Ingram Content, their investor within the platform, has decided to do a second round of funding.
07:34
So that’s a big stamp approval, a big vote of confidence from the initial investor there to say, hey, we love what we’re doing. You have proven yourselves in and show that you’re capable of doing this. Let’s give you guys some more money and future proof our own company. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. So book IO, congratulations for getting that second round of funding. And hopefully we’ll see more and more exciting stuff from the book or stuff.io ecosystem.
08:03
And this I have to say was one of my really favourite things that I’ve seen recently and they’ve gone through and they’re allowing now prints of the various books that you can get within their ecosystem. So these were NFTs that you could purchase. So you could purchase the Frankenstein NFT. You get the ebook and you can read it online, but now you can also get the print version. So Mr Carter here said.
08:32
Got my first print from book IO from the OG Gutenberg Mint to now Mint plus print super proud of book IO stuff IO team. So this is really cool stuff. It’s a big milestone for the project to see that you can now print whatever you purchase from book IO. Awesome stuff guys. Now this is a new project that came on my radar. This is turn privacy. They’re doing ZK Snarks, another open source.
09:00
Privacy mixer on a Cardano so we also have. N coins which is another privacy mixing solution on the ecosystem and these guys are using a popular Bitcoin mixer doing a doing the same way that the Bitcoin ecosystem does coin jar is the platform that they’re copying I haven’t heard of this one here myself but the apparently has done over 10 billion in volume so a lot of people are definitely using that one there.
09:29
And they’re almost at the point of launching, which is really exciting. I’ll put a link to this particular video here where they demo their solution and you can see how it all works. But they will build a tornado cache on Cardano using ZKSnarks. Now, I’m not too sure if it’s a good idea to build tornado cache. There was that big legal case in the US with the Ethereum version of tornado cache where they arrested the developers of the platform.
09:58
Not the users using it, the developers. was an easy, low hanging fruit within the whole sphere of tornado cash. And they went for the developer. So maybe not a good idea, but maybe with this new government administration, the Trump administration, there might be more lenient on this type of stuff. Don’t know. Still kind of like money laundering. Not too sure. It’s a bit of a gray area, but turn protocol.
10:26
Good to see that these guys are building on Cardano. I will do a deep dive on this one once I see it all launched live. Now we have two prediction markets on Cardano. We have Bodega markets which launched earlier this year and we also have Foren which have been building for a while. They’ve changed owners and now they’re gone off and almost launched their platform. This is what it’s looking like at the moment. We’ll see this one in a couple of weeks.
10:55
So let’s see here. They did mention it here. did see a potential less than 14 days. There we go. So hopefully in a couple of weeks, we’ll see this one launch as well. I’ve got a lot of things that they’ve got to work on to make this all happen, but you’ll be able to go through here, have a look at all these particular predictions, these particular markets that you can look at and vote on and place essentially a bet on the outcomes for each one’s here and each one of the bets will have a certain payoff. So.
11:23
It will give you the opportunity to use some ADA and a simple yes, no outcome and earn that little bit extra there too, depending on how it goes. So really interesting stuff. Prediction markets is definitely a big thing. The founder of Polymarkets over on Polygon, Shane Copland was named and listed in Forbes 30 under 30. this is a top 30 companies, no, hang on, top 30 founders under 30.
11:53
30 years old. So this is a really big showcase of how crypto and projects like polymarkets and other prediction markets are going mainstream. So this is really exciting stuff. And hopefully we see projects like Foreen and Bodega markets on Cardano push forward as well. Now this is an update from my favorite hardware wallet, Keystone hardware wallet. They have released a brand new update, a new firmware update enhances security and recovery.
12:22
And they got some steps here are some outlines of how it all works. But I’ve done tutorials on this. So if you do want to find out how you can upgrade your Keystone wallet, check it out. Links down below for you guys. It’s on my tutorial channel as well. And I’ve got affiliate links for this. So if you do want one of these Keystone wallets and you are interested in supporting the channel that way, you can purchase it via my affiliate link helps the channel. So, you know, guys really appreciate it if you do so.
12:52
But Keystone, absolutely fantastic hardware wallet. If you are serious about protecting your cryptocurrency assets, whatever chain it’s on, check it out. Like I said, links down below. Novella is an awesome deep in project, a decentralized physical infrastructure. They are decentralizing all that stuff and they’ve released their brand new roadmap for 2025. This is what we’re going to expect this year.
13:20
whether they hit it all or not, I’m not sure, but it’s pretty good to see that projects are always modifying their roadmap, changing things, pivoting where they can and seizing on different opportunities, but also giving back to the community and providing some extra additional rewards and opportunities where they can earn more assets. In this case, a 2.5 boost of IAG rewards tokens for the next 60 days.
13:47
So if you are a novella token holder and VL token holder, you can stake within the platform and earn some extra IE tokens. Both of these assets, both of these Cardano native assets are doing really well at the moment. So do check them out. Novella just makes getting into projects such as IE and World Mobile and other projects like that just so much more easier. You don’t need to understand the technical aspects of setting up nodes.
14:16
setting up all that infrastructure novella allow you to tap into that stuff. They set up all that hardware and infrastructure and manage it for you. And then all you need to do is purchase these NVL tokens and stake it with them platform to earn the rewards from all that infrastructure that they set up. So it’s a nice way of going about it. And I think it’s an easier way, especially if you don’t have the technical skills, technical hardware or infrastructure at home or wherever it might be.
14:46
to be able to tap into these ecosystems. So novella awesome stuff guys. Now new cast that I I was pretty excited about this to see but gas fees on Kedano are history. So this is a way new cast have been working on a way to make gas fees those transaction fees that you have to pay negated and this allows for dowels or sponsors to pay for those transaction fees.
15:15
So all of the transaction fees that are out there, we paid by the Dow or overall fees are generated from staking. example, let me put it this way. Mint swap have a huge amount of ADA within their ecosystem. lot of ADA that estate to liquidity pools that ADA is earning rewards for staking. How about we use all of those rewards to pay for all of the transaction fees that happen on Mint swap decks?
15:45
So now that anyone that goes to MinSwap and does a trade, they don’t have to pay any fees. Doesn’t that sound good? This here, what newcasts have done will allow that to actually happen. So now a DAO can vote in such as the MinSwap DAO, they can vote in to have this implemented and have fees negated on their platform. That sounds absolutely amazing. Now, as long as there’s enough in the DAO to cover those fees, that will be possible.
16:13
So really, really cool stuff, guys. If you want to find out some more about this and look at the technicals, you can find their GitHub repo here. So it’s all open source. You can go ahead and start playing around with it. And they also have their catalyst proposal here, which was all part of. And you can read the breakdown and get a better understanding of how it all works. I absolutely hate this idea scale website. So slow. But you can see how the
16:42
Gasless transactions will work on Cardano. We’ve got the whole thing here for you. Links down below for you guys. This here isn’t really a big update from Begin Wallet, but I thought it was pretty cool that other people are discovering what they’re up to and what they’re trying to bring for the Cardano ecosystem. And now, of course, the Bitcoin ecosystem. So this is a Bitcoin OS person writing about Begin Wallet and what they’re trying to achieve here.
17:07
And I love this thread. will put it down below for you guys in the show notes on learn Cardano.io so you can learn a little bit more about what Begin are trying to do, but they’re trying to make the most seamless mobile experience for everyone in the Cardano ecosystem and tying this together with some of other updates that I’ve spoken about with IMAX and bring in identity features into the wallet as well. I think is really cool. They’ve got their own.
17:35
here shortened IDs as well. this is Andrew.begin.id. So, you know, it’s those type of things integrated in with Ada handle and other aspects that just make it a really cool wallet. So if you haven’t tried it out yet, please do begin wallet. I’ve been working for quite a while and I don’t think I have a large amount of funding either. So for what they deliver and bring to Kadane, I think is absolutely brilliant. So do check it out.
18:03
links to this thread and begin wallet all down below in the show notes. Now this particular update here is around my attempt to try and raise some funding for a particular event in the crypto space. And this is to bring Cardano to token 2049 in Singapore later this year. Now there that we need a lot of money for this. And, you know, I’ve spoken to a couple of other people on X and it’s upwards of 250,000 USD to actually make it happen.
18:33
The booth cost is absolutely astronomical and I’ve been talking to a couple of people and I think Dave here has been doing this for quite a while now. He ran the discover Cardano booth over in token. I think it was token 2049 in Dubai and he’s got a lot of experience in this. So he’s definitely the go-to person for making this all happen. But I’m trying to find the people that are interested in going to the event.
19:02
but then also trying to get a booth and a good big presence there for the Kidana ecosystem. From there, we can actually also run side events and all sorts of other things. But Dave here has put in this marketing proposal and this awesome presentation around how and what type of impact having a booth at these events would have. So he’s put this all together. There’s lots of information here. It’s really worth
19:31
digging into his crunch the numbers and everything else around it so awesome awesome overview here Dave links down below for you guys in the show notes you can learn a little bit more about this one and hopefully we can get this one up and running this year otherwise we may not have any big events on this side of the world at least in Asia South Australia a pack region or even in Europe we might not see any bigger Katana presence there but.
20:00
Hopefully we do. And hopefully we can get this one up and running. Now, I think I’ve mentioned these guys way too often in my video updates. Maybe not often enough. I don’t know. But this is really good to see that they have now some enterprise customers for their compute side of their solutions. So, I’ve always been about decentralised storage and apparently from Navjit’s conversations that I’ve had, the decentralised storage was the harder piece.
20:30
The decentralized compute was easier. Apparently, I don’t know how. It sounds a lot more complicated to me, but they have their first enterprise client here and that’s Intersect. They’ve got a three month trial, two plus one for free. For early results already shown 40 to 50 percent cost savings alongside notable boost in performance. Really cool stuff, guys. I didn’t realize they had launched their compute side of things, but it’s good to see that they’re getting enterprise level clients.
21:00
in an onboarded and starting to use their solution. this is where they’re going to get a lot of really good feedback from these particular customers. I’d like to see who else comes along now. They’ve got a first trial customer here, but who else will come on board and start using their enterprise solutions here. Really exciting stuff. Really good work, Igon. This update from Charlie 3 I thought was really cool and they brought out a brand new API.
21:28
That brings in all of the token data, everything that you could possibly need to build dapps on Cardano. So 17,000 plus tokens updated every single block. So from that, you’ll see the token price. Actually, they’ve got details down here, but you’ll be able to see everything that’s happening within their ecosystem. Let me just pull up this Synapse website. You can sign up for early access and you can see exactly what’s going on. But we got price data, historical charts.
21:57
and sources from various Dex’s within the ecosystem. So this is really, really good stuff, especially if you want to anything on Cardano. There will be some sort of cost with this as well. APIs, there’s always a cost, but hopefully it’s not too expensive and at least I’m hoping for a free tier so we can start building stuff on there ourselves. So we can start playing around with it and building tools for people that may be interested.
22:23
This is really good stuff. Congratulations to the Charlie 3 team. Bring that on board. Now the stablecoin ecosystem on Condano is growing and it’s really good to see USDM, USDA. They have over 10 million in liquidity and that seems to be growing at a good rate at the moment. Ideally, we want hundreds of millions. So close to billions in liquidity for these stablecoins. So we’ve got a long way to go.
22:50
But this proposal here to allocate to 3.33 % of the treasury or 50 million ADA over 12 month period seems like a good step in the right direction to build stablecoin liquidity on the ecosystem. So this is a really good idea. I’ve seen other proposals from Ed and stuff where we look at some monetary actual money managers.
23:16
to look after the liquidity as well so they’ll be moving it to different aspects different protocols to try and gain as much back as possible as well it’s one thing to mint from the treasury and start providing liquidity then users will have to use it. But then also having someone to move those assets around to where they’re gaining the most yield and and returning it back to the community as well so I think that’s two things that we need to look at and I really really like the idea.
23:44
But this here this is the proposal on the Cardano forum at the moment it was initially put up as a I think an info action or no governance proposal on gov tools so you can have a look at it and there has been some discussion around it but this is the latest and updated version of that and you can have a digger bigger deep dive into this one here to get a better understanding of what the guys are up to at the moment.
24:11
So do check that one out. It is going to be a big impactful thing for the ecosystem overall. Now there is a little bit debate about this one and I do have a follow up video about this. Is getting more liquidity into the ecosystem the key piece that will drive DeFi or is it just the current scapegoat at the moment? The thing that people are blaming why Cardano’s DeFi isn’t
24:38
booming as much as it should be, why the trading volume isn’t as high as we want it to be. I’ve got some ideas and plans on this to try and make it a little bit better, but is this a silver bullet? Is this going to fix what we need for a Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, just providing more liquidity or do we need more things? That’s something to think about guys. And I do have a follow up video about this. So make sure you hit that like, subscribe notification bell to see that video.
25:06
Now the very last thing I’ll leave you with guys is my new tutorials I’m putting out for Cardano press. It’s been a while since I’ve done tutorials on this and a lot has changed. So if you’ve ever wanted to build on Cardano and you have almost no technical skills whatsoever, this is the solution for you. Cardano press allows you to tie in our plugin onto a WordPress website and start interacting with the Cardano blockchain pretty much instantaneously.
25:35
This here is a demo site that I put together for this particular video tutorial here. And in under 10 minutes, I could set up the core plugin and then you immediately get the connect button up and ready and you can start connecting your wallet to the website and have gated content. So you can use gated content features such as you need to have a fungible token or a certain amount of fungible tokens, maybe SNK tokens you need at least.
26:03
A million snack tokens and you’ll be able to access a certain game that’s been embedded on the website or you need a snack NFT and then you can have access to the game or something like that. So it’s a nice way of gating content. We’ve made the website the plugin also be able to delegate to state pools in ice PO’s and also as a governance tool as well so you can vote on various proposals. So.
26:30
Lots of things you can do with this plug in and I’ll be going through on a weekly basis doing more and more of these tutorials take you from nothing all the way to a fully developed solution. So if you’re interested in that, if you’ve got an idea burning in the back of your mind and you’re just wondering how can I build that, this could be a solution for you. I put up this tutorial on my other YouTube channel, so crypto tutorials. So it’s a more broader crypto kind of thing.
26:56
Rather than just Cardano, but you can check that one out. Give it some love guys It’s only got one like at the moment and 18 views But really really hoping to get this one driving this year as well. Anyway, that’s all I have for you guys for this particular update Hopefully you did hit that thumbs up like subscribe already if you’re not make sure you do that right now I’ll see you guys in the next video
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