Cardano Has the Tech. So Why Is Everyone Else Winning Deals?

Some big news stories for you guys this week. These ones here are some highlights that I think could potentially affect your ADA holdings. So let’s get into them here. Now, for those that don’t know me, my name’s Peter.

If it’s your first time here, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I’ll keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the Cardano ecosystem and broader crypto space. And this story here is definitely one of those broader ecosystem stories. Now, X402, this brand new foundation that was created by the Linux Foundation, is all about a brand new standard that is being used for agent to agent payment.

This is AI agents. So for those that haven’t caught up with the whole AI side of things, AI agents are essentially your personal assistant that is created with the AI that can almost do anything for you. And that also includes things like making bookings or online purchases. But in this situation, this brand new standard was created so AI agents could talk to each other and pay each other for certain things.

Maybe it’s access to data or access to a certain API or service, whatever it might be. And at the moment we pay for services on a monthly basis. We use like a software as a service subscriptions, but that could all be coming to an end because now we have on demand payments and on demand micro payments via AI agents. So an AI agent could go to another AI agent and say, hey, I want to post a video on your owner’s YouTube channel, such as my own YouTube channel.

And my AI agent might say, yeah, that will cost you 100 US dollars. And the AI agents could pay each other for that and then schedule up the posting of that video. So all of that is possible. So if you are interested in any of that, check out what X402 can do, because this is the foundation for AI payments.

And it’s really cool to see that the Kadana Foundation has some sort of seat at the table around this. And I did look into this one here and there’s various news posts that are going up. This is the official post from the Kadana Foundation talking about this as well. So it’s good to see that there is involvement from the Kadana side of things.

Now, if you want to see what projects are building and working within the AI agent space on Kadana, if you haven’t checked out Masumi Network yet, do check them out. I’ll show you a little bit more in a moment. And then also Odarano is also working in that space, too. Now, I did look into this announcement a little bit more to find out what actually is going on.

And essentially, this foundation is a collaboration of a whole bunch of people in the ecosystem at the moment that are making decisions on how and what and which direction this payment protocol should go. So Circleware, Coinbase, they were the ones that pieced this one all together. But let’s have a look at who is actually supporting this on a higher level at the moment. You can see all the big names here.

That’s all well and good. But let’s go to the members area that are actually paying for a seat at the table. You can see all the big name brands here. These are AWS Cloud, American Express, Google there, MasterCard, Visa.

So they’re the main payment gateway people that are out there at the moment and infrastructure people. So it’s really good to see. We can see Solana Foundation, Stellar and Ripple from the blockchain side of things. But then we can see the general members down here.

Allo, Arkham, Fireblocks, a lot of infrastructure stuff in the crypto space as well, LayerZero, Polygon. Then you go to associate members and then you see the Kadana Foundation right at the bottom there. So it kind of leads me to question how much of an influence the Kadana Foundation has in the X.402 Foundation. And if you look at the very bottom down here, we can see what an associate member is, what kind of position seat voting power they might have.

And it’s essentially just a logo placement on the website. So I don’t know what this actually means for Kadana. Hearing the stories and the hype around this, I thought was really exciting because X.402, I really think is a perfect use case for blockchain. But what is the Kadana Foundation doing as part of this?

I don’t know. Not much from the looks of it, from being an associate member. If they forked out more money, so to be a general member, depending on how many employees you are, you’re going to fork out a little bit more here. So it does add up a little bit.

But to be right at the very top and actually make decisions in regards to how payments are done, how it’s implemented or whatever standards or where things should be deployed, whatever it is, I don’t know what they’re voting on or what they’re talking about, but you need the premier membership there. And that’s 200,000. So it’s all a pay to play ecosystem at the moment. And that’s how this X.402 Foundation is working.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know. What are they going to be doing? I don’t know either. But here we can see what level of involvement Kadana is having within this space.

Now, some of the benefits here, it’s very, I don’t know, is it even worth paying that much? You got the direct influence on budgeting, core governance and decisions and participation in the committee. OK, fair enough. But what is the committee doing?

I don’t know. Premier placement on the website. Cool. That means your logo up there.

Is it worth 200,000? I don’t know. Prominent feature in press releases and all that. And yes, they did get a prominent.

All these organisations got a executive quote in the article and media releases. And, you know, that’s kind of good for exposure. That’s for certain. And then the last one here, appointed seat on the governing board.

Again, I don’t know what they’re governing at the moment. It’s an open standard. But, you know, we’ll see. Now I do these videos on a regular basis to keep you guys up to date with everything that’s happening.

I do all these interviews and I don’t get paid for any of this. All my revenue primarily comes from the YouTube ads and sell of NFTs. So if you want to support the channel, you can become a channel member. You can have a look here.

These are all my fantastic channel members at the moment. You can subscribe if you have the means to do so. 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. Now with that out of the way, let’s get back to it. Anyway, I thought it was good news when I saw it.

But then when I dug into it to find out exactly what’s going on, I was kind of a little bit disappointed that, you know, the Katana Foundation is just an associate member further down on the list. It doesn’t have any real say in regards to what’s happening here. But maybe we’ll see some bigger developments in the future. But I think the more more practical side of things is actually seeing the implementation of X402 on Katana.

And that’s where OData now is coming in and, you know, building, actually building and delivering things to actually make things happen. And of course, Misumi as well. Now, Patrick here put up a video because it was is all over this stuff at the moment. And he quoted, I’ll quote what he said here.

I’m extremely excited for this announcement. So I decided to build an explainer page for X402 on Katana. So Katana’s core architecture is extremely strong for X402 with the EUTXO model. Combine that with Laos Hydro, Misumi, and we have a killer stack.

And I completely agree. And to actually have the technology implemented out there. That’s the number one goal here. So if you want to learn more about it, I’ll put the links down below to Patrick’s video here.

And you can check out the video with the explainer about this stack and how it all works. Now, the cool thing here is that, you know, if you can have Hydra here and you have two AI agents talking to each other, you can have millions of transactions per second and you can do all those micropayments really quickly. That’s one of the really cool things that is possible with Hydra and this next era of Katana scaling. So really, really exciting stuff.

Now, talking about Hydra, this one here was a little disappointing to hear, and Delta DeFi, the only DEX on the Cardano ecosystem built on Hydra, for that high frequency trading, that really fast trading, they have stopped operations due to the lack of operational runway. So essentially they’ve run out of money. So Delta DeFi operations will be paused effectively today until further notice. Now what was the failure here?

I don’t think it was Delta DeFi in general. It’s there, their platform’s good. Sindan Labs, the boys there, Higginson and I can’t remember who else I’ve been talking to over the years. They know their stuff.

They’re really good developers. MeshJS and all those libraries, I use them on a regular basis. Every dApp that I’ve built, and I have a bunch of smart contracts, escrow smart contracts, for example, I’ve used from what they have built, what they have put together is really good stuff. So it’s not a technical capability here, but I do believe it’s a marketing and business development issue.

So I’m going to ask you guys, have you heard of Delta DeFi? Have you tried it? Have you used it? Leave a comment down below, let me know, because I think that’s the biggest problem here.

Not enough people know about Delta DeFi or understand it to actually even use it. So if you haven’t heard of something, how the hell would you know to go use it and experience what Hydra is like on Cardano? Now I know these guys have done a lot of work with the Hydra team as well. Hydra recently received a lot of funding through the treasury to take Hydra to the next level and keep evolving Hydra.

What’s the point of building all this technology and scaling when the dApps that are building on it aren’t being used? They don’t have the capacity to grow and fund themselves because of the lack of users, the lack of funds, liquidity being brought onto the platform. So I think that’s our major problem at the moment. The tech is coming, the tech is there.

We’ve got Hydra, we have Laos coming around the corner and that’s been funded as well. But again, if we don’t have the users participating in DeFi using the blockchain, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. Now this one here I thought was quite interesting and Radov here points out this particular partnership with the Japanese financial giant SBI and they’ve decided to partner with Solana. Now for those in the crypto space, you would know that Solana is brilliant at their marketing side of things and business development side of things.

They have huge parts of their foundation focusing just on that to try and build adoption and bring in partners like SBI onto the chain. Whether this is just a pilot and just an experiment to see what it’s like, that might be the case and they might be paying millions for it just to make it happen. But just to get that kind of exposure and experience and a foot in the door in this financial space, especially in Japan, I think is huge. Japan has been big for numerous years for their financial sector for the carry trade where you can borrow money for real cheap in Japan and then use that to invest elsewhere in the world.

So you borrow for negative interest rates in Japan and then earn 10% yield somewhere else. So it’s like getting free money and then using it to earn rewards and then paying back the loan. That environment is changing at the moment but that volatility is probably a good thing, especially in the crypto space when you have market makers making money off volatility. And Alpha Prime is a good example of that but I’ll talk about that later.

Charles here commented on this and I thought this was a really interesting comment and I think he’s right here. Now why would this be a disappointment for the Canadian community? We started there but we need commercial representation to make these deals. If you want them, then pay for them.

Use the treasury to finance initiative and seal the deals. Or have we learned helplessness over social media and earned bonuses pointing blame at Charles. Besides that last sentence there, everything else I think is definitely a valid point. We need the representation.

We need the business development. We need the marketing, not just in Japan but anywhere in the world that is interested in implementing this type of technology and this is the biggest thing that Codano is lacking at the moment. This point here from Cash I think is very important and this whole point of if you build it, they will come. It’s not happening.

It really isn’t happening. You can build the best tech out there on Codano, build a super fast, super secure dApp but if people don’t know about it, they will not use it. If they aren’t educated, they just won’t know. It’s been made abundantly clear at this point that it’s not the case.

D is extremely important if you want Codano to succeed. It’s not optional anymore. IBD and Commercial Arm have led us down to this point. It’s not debatable.

This is one main reason why I’m supporting Alpha Growth because I think it will shine a very positive light on the ecosystem we have built and allowed us to have some reach outside our bubble and I completely agree with that. Cash here did do this big partnership with this ticketing and events platform called Sellout. They were trying to get funding in the Hydra Intersect voting process but it didn’t get enough support unfortunately. The whole voting process really didn’t work out well but I will follow them along for the journey and see if they can work out funding in a different way.

But business development is the biggest thing that we need to work on right now. Now there are various comments down here and some people still don’t know what Alpha Growth can do. This comment here I thought was interesting. Alpha has no records of success.

We’re about to lose all that money because people don’t know what they are doing. Plus, we need to get the chain faster. It’s probably why Solana got it. I don’t think so.

First off, two things. The Laos, the Hydra, that side of things, it’s coming. It’s been funded. It will come.

It will happen. We don’t need to worry about that too much. We don’t need to fund it anymore. We need to fund things that will drive up the transaction volume once we have that Hydra and Laos side of things.

We’ve got the scaling. It’s coming. We don’t need to worry about that. What we need to worry about now is people actually using the chain itself.

Now to answer Khodrok’s comment here. I know he’s an anonymous person and probably has 62 followers so I don’t know why I even replied. I’m going to put here all of the proof of what AlphaGrowth have done. This is what they’ve done for compound finance over the years.

Compound is built on Arbitrum. They started off with almost no liquidity and the AlphaGrowth team built up over three proposals the amount of TBL on their platform. It went from I think 19 million to 211 million TBL over a course of a year or so. Check out the blog post.

Those numbers might be incorrect but it’s all here within the blog post itself. Here we are. So the pre-incentive they started at 40 million and they topped it out at 213 million after their incentives period. So it’s a decent amount of growth.

It’s a decent, decent amount of growth. So this is all incentives for putting liquidity onto the platform and all that stuff. So you get extra yield and that comes from their proposal that they put in on Arbitrum to get a 1.8 million ARP grant. So that’s how they did it and I think it’s a very successful technique but you do need a big carrot to be able to bring in that type of liquidity.

So you can read all these three links here. I’ve got the AlphaGrowth one. I’ve got the comments here from Compound itself and then also Castle Labs who did an independent review of the entire process as well. well so you can see from three different points of view how that whole process went with what AlphaGrowth did.

And that’s just one case study and there’s various more case studies in regards to how and what AlphaGrowth can do for different ecosystems and now they’re potentially doing it for Kodano. They just need the votes from D-Reps to make that all happen. If we go down a little bit further, what did this guy say in reply? Not worth it.

Yeah, okay, whatever. I think it is worth it and I really think we need it now because we need that business development. We need the marketing. We need the reach.

We need the exposure. LAOS, Hydra, scaling, that’s all going to happen. I know it’s going to happen, but we need that big push from the ecosystem itself to get liquidity in. Now talking about build it and they will come or not come.

This is an interesting post around the future of Blockfrost. Blockfrost is a API service. They provide on-chain data of what is happening on the Kodano ecosystem. So I probably didn’t explain that too well, but you can use the API to do queries and get data from the chain.

So inspecting a wallet, for example, you can see what’s in the wallet, how many assets are in there. Then you can use a transaction builder locally on a Dapp or on your computer, build a transaction around that wallet and then sign that transaction and then send it back to Blockfrost so you can do a transaction, a swap, whatever it is. So a lot of the Dapps, a lot of the wallets, a lot of the Kodano ecosystem use Blockfrost. For all the stuff I built over the years, I use Blockfrost.

If you know about Kodano Press, Kodano Press is a plugin that I built for WordPress that allows a WordPress website to talk to the Kodano blockchain that uses Blockfrost. My Bounty platform, my leaderboard, my mini Dapps, my drep, find your matchmaker application, my staple delegation application, they all use Blockfrost. Now without Blockfrost, all of that, everything that I’ve built over the last three, four years dies, essentially, it goes kaput and I have to rebuild everything and wire in different API methods and it’s a lot of work. But their future is up in the air at the moment and they want to move Blockfrost to a community owned not-for-profit that lives completely on-chain, so essentially a DAO.

They want to make Blockfrost from a sub-entity within IoG, so let me give you a bit of history. Blockfrost started as its own entity and grew and became a service, got a little bit of funding, generated a bit of revenue, which is great, got bought out by IoG, I believe they approached IoG and said, hey, we want this to grow further than what we can do within our capabilities and then eventually get into the community’s hands, we need your help. So IoG took it on. From here, where it is now, they want to finally go to that last stage and have it in the community’s hands and have it as a community owned product, live on-chain as a non-profit.

So that’s the situation and that’s where Blockfrost wants to go right now. But to be able to do this, again, it needs treasury funding to make this happen. It needs the last bit of funding to make it all into the community’s hands and running through state pool operators, et cetera, et cetera. So they’ve made steps.

I’m an icebreaker, which is a node validator for Blockfrost. So some of their infrastructure, some of their hardware is being decentralized and put onto state pool operators out there. And I am ever thankful that I managed to get in as an icebreaker because I earned a little bit of revenue for it. So every bit of transactions that go through, I take a little bit cut off the top, which is kind of nice.

It’s a nice extra bit of revenue for the state pool. But here we are at this point in time, and we are now looking at Blockfrost potentially closing down if they don’t get the funding to make this final stage of the platform happen. I really hope they don’t close down. I can’t see it closing down.

They do have a lot of customers. I am one of them, for example. And a lot of the people that use KodanoPress would be paying for it as well. But this is where we’re at the moment within the community.

We need more paying customers. We need more users building. We need more users using those dApps and products that people are building. So will we get there at the end?

I’m really hopeful. If we can get the transaction volume up and more people using the chain in general, it has a flow on effect for everything else. And I can see if things like this get really adopted on Kodano, we will see the flow on effects to everything else down the chain. So in terms of supporting alpha growth, I think it’s really important.

In terms of supporting Blockfrost’s future, I think it’s really important as well. They’re all key pieces that we all need at this point in time. But I think the main thing that we really need to shift focus on is the business development and marketing side of things. How many Kodano content creators do you know out there making Kodano content on a regular basis?

I challenge you to put all their names in the comments down below. If you can tag them. If they’ve posted content on a weekly basis over the last two months, tag them down below. Let me know how many are left.

Anyway, guys, that’s all I had for this particular update. There are some other small news announcements here. We’ve got the Van Rossum hard fork coming up. It’s the end of this epoch here, which is in about two days time.

We will have the Van Rossum hard fork happen. If you happen to be delegated to a state pool operator that hasn’t upgraded their nodes yet, then you’ll be caught out because your pool that you’re in will not earn staking rewards. Just to let you know. Let me just.