Cardano News: IOG Hack, Mastercard, Bifrost and x402

Cardano news update for you guys. It’s been a little while. I’ve been in Silicon Valley, a part of the Draper U program, the Genesis program, and I am back. So let’s get through what’s been happening in the Cardano ecosystem and broader crypto space over the last month.

Crazy things happening in the hacking space and some things that have been affecting the Cardano ecosystem and some good news and some really cool things that are being developed at the moment as well. So we’ve got a lot to go through here. Let’s get right into it, guys. So the first news story is today, Cardano is looking a little bit better.

It did drop quite a bit over the last week, but it’s good to see this little spike up. But of course, if we zoom out, we still got a long way to go. So we are only seeing a slight uptick, but a little uptick is better than nothing at the moment. So I’m just happy with that.

But there are some public service announcements I need to get through. The IG YouTube channel at the moment looks like it’s been compromised. It’s not good. And you can see here, it’s a live stream of the input output account, and they are live streaming this QR code thing giveaway.

We see this all the time. But for the hackers to get to the top level account, essentially, in our ecosystem, isn’t a good look at all, guys. So be careful. Just know that the input output YouTube channel is putting out this scam at the moment.

So please be aware of that. Let other people know. Don’t let them fall for this, especially when it’s coming out of an official channel. It does not look good at all.

Now, for those that are affected by the SecondFi hack over the last two, two, three months ago now, there is progress. And if you haven’t migrated your wallet yet, you can use the SecondFi app to migrate to a different ecosystem, a different wallet, sorry. So you can do that at the moment. So if you have been compromised, but your assets are still there, you can move things off.

Now, for those that have had their assets taken out of their wallet by the white hat hacker, we’re just waiting a little bit longer. It should have been out by now, but we’re waiting for the final audits here so that we can reclaim our assets. I’ve also been affected by this process here. So I’ve had some assets taken out of my wallet, but I’ll be able to get them back through this recovery process here.

So they’ve gone through several audits at the moment. So the asset recovery tool is a zero knowledge proof way of proving that you own the hacked wallet, and then you can retrieve them into your new wallet. So they’ll go through the process of doing all that very soon, but it’s a three level audit process. So they’re auditing all sorts of things in that new recovery process so that you can get your assets back.

So just hold on a little bit longer, guys. We’re almost there. You can read the order reports and everything else that’s going on about it, but I’ll put links to this down below as well. So you guys can get, be kept up to date with everything there as well.

Now, like I said, it hasn’t been a good month for the Kadana ecosystem and some other protocols and whatnot have been compromised too. So we had the IOG channel, we had SecondFire, we’ve had Dano Finance as well. And a lot of tokens have been liquidated through what seemed to be a way for the hacker to just constantly withdraw assets from the protocol by putting in some assets and locking in as collateral. So they were able to put the collateral into the smart contract and then withdraw out the ADA from it, and then repeat that process over and over again without closing the account or needing to put in more assets essentially.

So they managed to drain a massive amount of assets through it, unfortunately, and I don’t think they are going to be recovered either. So that is really unfortunate. You can see Bobcorn here, he lost 131 million SNEC off the platform himself, not to mention other people that have lost a massive amount of ADA through the platform. So the bad thing about this was that Dano Finance didn’t announce that they were hacked for about three or four days after the compromise had happened.

So something had happened, no one’s looking, no one’s watching, or they just swept under the rug, I don’t know really. But users weren’t notified. They weren’t alerted that this hack was happening so they could do something about it, get their funds off the platform or anything like that. It just all fell apart.

So that was the main concern here. So Dano Finance was affected and hopefully you guys weren’t affected by this compromise smart contract either. Now here we’ve had more. The splash protocol in this particular stable swap pool, the OADA and ADA pool, was drained on the 13th of September, so earlier this week.

And the hacker here was able to withdraw all the assets from this particular pool. Super unfortunate. Now the hard thing here was that they couldn’t work out a way to swap out the OADA to ADA and get off the ecosystem. So they were doing massive trades with a slippage and a lot of impermanent loss.

But they managed to find a trading pair and this was the OADA and Fluid Token trading pair. So you can see the OADA here and Fluid Token and then they swapped from Fluid Token to ADA. So they optimised their trades there to get out of the ecosystem and unfortunately Fluid Token in the process was affected by this dumping as well. So people saw this and went wow, Fluid Token dropped by 10%.

Maybe the team is liquidating themselves and getting out. But no, not quite. It was all related to the OADA being exited from the ecosystem. So that’s really unfortunate to see as well.

But I think that’s all the bad news I have at the moment and we do have some good news. And the first one here is the Kadana Foundation forming an official partnership with Mastercard’s crypto partner program. Now this enables a whole bunch of work for crypto payments using Mastercard. So I’m not sure exactly what the details would be around this but I’m assuming it’s all around spending crypto assets via their Mastercard’s ecosystem.

So wherever Mastercard is accepted, you’ll be able to use a wallet and pay with ADA along with all the other crypto assets that Mastercard have partnered with as well. Now when this announcement officially came out with Mastercard and the other 60 or so blockchains, Kadana wasn’t at the forefront there and that was unfortunate. But we’re playing catch up. Like in most cases the Kadana ecosystem does, we’re playing catch up and we can now see that the Mastercard and the Kadana Foundation teams have joined in a partnership here to make things happen.

So at least we’re seeing progress there. Unfortunately not at the speed that we want but it is happening. This one here is quite interesting and this news update is around input output slowly, not outsourcing, but handing over the development of the Kadana ecosystem and future tech to different development companies out there. And this one here, from October 1st Midgard Labs will be leading Plutus Engineering.

The transition preserves continuity amongst engineers who currently maintain and extend the code base. So we’re seeing a lot of this. So Midgard is taking over Plutus Engineering. We’ve got Twig looking after the Paris side of things and there’s other blockchain companies that are looking after different aspects of the Kadana chain.

Which is a very interesting move because it was always under input output’s umbrella. Input output looked after so many different aspects of the Kadana ecosystem from dataless wallet all the way to the core code and infrastructure itself. But as the ecosystem matures it looks like input output will be more so focusing on the R&D, the research and development around the the blockchain itself. And then giving the development tasks to various companies within the Kadana ecosystem.

And really a lot of these companies here have been working on the chain for a very long time, have been working through the code, have been developing the Kadana ecosystem. They’re just separating into their own entities and companies now. So we will see a lot more of these companies start to bid for contracts and ask for treasury withdrawals to develop some of these core Kadana functionalities. So we will see a lot more of this in the future.

And I’ll bring up a couple more things here as well. And I think Scarless is one of those companies that we’re seeing more and more development around extra Kadana infrastructure that is needed and doing some really cool things. And the really interesting one that Scarless is working on is the Bifrost side of things. And Bifrost here, let me just scroll down to it, is all around the integration of Bitcoin DeFi for Cardano.

So the Fluid Tokens team have been working on Bifrost for a good two years now and bringing it on to Cardano Mainnet so that you can easily, and in a decentralized way, use Bitcoin on the Cardano ecosystem. So it opens up a whole lot of Bitcoin DeFi powered by Cardano. So I’m really excited to see more of this come into the ecosystem and we’re having glimpses of it from other projects like C-Swap and what they’re doing there and also Sundial too. So we’re seeing the start of Bitcoin DeFi within the Kadana ecosystem.

We’re going to see more of that, but Scarless is one of those companies that have been working on this Cardano Bitcoin bridge side of things. So Lantr Engineering, Fluid Tokens, Advancing the Catalyst Project, Milestone 4 to complete. Next step, tests with SBOs, registrations, decay, ceremony, bridge, et cetera, et cetera. So I’ve seen various SBOs register and be a part of this ecosystem too.

So that’s all really, really good stuff to see. Now, Scarless is all by this company here called Lanter and they have done a lot of work side by side with the Fluid Tokens team to bring Bifrost all into fruition. So that’s really good to see the more and more companies step into the Cardano space and start working and building up the infrastructure that we need. And you can see here from the official announcement from Fluid Tokens as well, Bifrost has been tested with the first SBOs last days.

One goal, Bitcoin DeFi on Cardano. And you can see that they’re always tagging Lanter as well, because they did a lot of the work as well. So it’s good to give them credit where credit is due. Now this post here by Blockjock from USDM, I thought was a really good highlight thing to continuously talk about.

And he mentions here, one click, just one click solutions for DeFi. And that is the level of experience that we’re aiming for, that user experience that we want within the Cardano ecosystem. So user may open up an app, one click deposit in their stablecoin assets or put in assets from their credit card and have that convert over to USDM and start staking it to earn yield rewards. That is what we want to see.

That is the experience that we want to see. I’m glad more and more people are talking about that, especially for enterprise adoption as well. We’re going to see more of this, and especially with DraperU and the alpha growth teams all working into this type of solutions and what we really want to see within the Cardano ecosystem. And this project here at USDMDeFi.com, you can find out more about what they’re trying to do and the angle and the direction that they’re going, but essentially creating more USDM within the Cardano ecosystem as easily as possible.

So I can’t wait to see more of that actually come into play. Now, while I was over in San Francisco, I got to meet Michele and Mike that were working on Gerolamo, the Cardano node that runs in your browser. And it’s pretty exciting to see because it opens up a whole bunch of DeFi possibilities and in a really decentralized way. So there’s a lot of benefits there for the user, the end user, if they are capable of running it.

And from what they’ve told me, they’re going to create that really good one-click experience where you can download your own node, run it in your browser and have gravity decks all powered in there. So you’re doing a swap that’s all contained within your browser itself. So you’re not relying on third party infrastructure. It’s you communicating directly with the blockchain from your browser.

So that’s a really good user experience. And I really can’t wait for gravity decks and Gerolamo to launch with all of those aspects and make it really, really good. But one of their achievements while we were there was that their Cardano node in the browser produced blocks. Yeah.

So they’re well ahead of the game here. So they’ve got a working node that can produce blocks within the browser itself. That’s really exciting. So you could run a Cardano node from your browser at home.

That’s how powerful this is. You can open up like a couple of browser sessions. You can have a relay and a block producer. That’s the only two that you need and have it running on your own computer.

That’s powerful. That is really, really cool. And then you can run a deck on top of that and all sorts of things. So whatever they’re doing, whatever magic they’re weaving, it’s really cool stuff.

And it was really good to sit down with Michele and Mike and see them work and actually build all this and suck up all the bandwidth in the building so they can sync all their notes. But it was really cool to see. So congratulations to the team there to getting that working. And this is their second block on preview.

So I think they’ve had three blocks now. The very first one got stolen, but that just happens when you’re meeting blocks. But the other two came through just fine. So really, really cool.

Now, not to be outdone, the other devs have been working on this and have now a full Haskell node running in the web browser as well. So I’m going to butcher saying this name, but Suong Heon worked on this and made the Cardano node powered by Haskell run in the browser. Now, I don’t know, like years ago, people were saying this wouldn’t be possible. This is just too hard, too much engineering.

But with AI, it’s made it a lot easier and faster to develop this stuff. A really good engineer that knows what they’re doing understands a Haskell node can orchestrate this and power and leverage the power of AI to actually get it built. I’m assuming that’s what happened here. For many years, people said this was too much of an engineering cost and not worthwhile.

But here we go. We can see it happening. We can see it working. You can watch this video here and can see the full node syncing within the browser.

So this is just really, really good stuff to see. It does increase the level of decentralization within the Cardano ecosystem where people can start running nodes in the browser. So that’s really, really good to see. Now, more good news.

This is the X.402 standard, the Cardano version of this, the Cardano standard of X.402 has been merged into the official repositories. So the Linux Foundation now manage all the X.402 Foundation’s standards and what the team here from Masumi have been working on for this particular work to integrate in Cardano has been merged in. So it was on their branches and being reviewed, but now it’s officially merged in. So this is the official standard.

If anyone is looking at agent to agent payments and using Cardano, make sure you check out this GitHub repo for the code and how it’s implemented, because this is the standard that we’re following. So amazing stuff, Patrick, and the team there. Really, really good to see. Now, moving on to the growth of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem, we’re seeing some really interesting stuff.

And this is alpha growth. I’ve done an interview with Brian and Eric a few months ago now talking about their proposal, and it’s gone through various iterations of changes with community feedback, and it’s gone to a point where it’s gotten approved. And now they’re going forth and asking for RFPs from the ecosystem to build what is missing in the Cardano blockchain. And this is all the DeFi side of things that they’ve identified that need to be addressed.

So here are the RFP categories. There are more that have been added to this, but they’re looking for wallet adoptions that serve both EVM and Cardano users, incentivized distribution, bridging, execution standards, vault standards, curated lending, concentrated liquidity, automated liquidity markets, CDPs, yield bearing assets, oracles, perps, RWAs, insurance, NFT marketplaces, launch players, and adjantic infrastructure. And there is more. I mentioned there’s more.

But if you’re building anything here and you need some funding to move forward, you can ask the team for funding. This is why alpha growth is here. They have done the research. They’re working through what needs to be added into the ecosystem to make it flourish and really take DeFi to the next level.

And there’s a lot of things that they identified. A lot of money is needed to actually finish off and make various things EVM compatible and cross chain compatible. And some of these really simple things like vault standards and curated lending that don’t exist, that are needed to be part of those building blocks within the DeFi space. So if you’re building something, if you know a project, if you work with a project, make sure they are aware of what alpha growth are doing.

Put in an RFP submission. Prove to them why you need the funding. And they’ll be auditing, going through all the projects and potentially giving you funding to make those things happen. So that’s really good to see that things are progressing here.

I did get to meet Brian in San Francisco as well. It was pretty cool just having a chat and just getting to understand what they’re doing and just spitballing some various ideas as well. So it was really good to have that chat with Brian. Now, DraperU, I will do a bigger deep dive on this, but this had to be the most crazy experience I’ve ever had.

To go in with a pitch idea and have it torn apart, put back together, pivoted various different times and then be on stage in front of Tim Draper, Andy Tang and the others there on the panel to talk about the idea, the concept of what I was trying to build and introduce to the Kadana ecosystem. And what I was trying to do was escrow contracts, the whole idea of various different escrow contracts. So different verticals could be built on top of it. We’re missing some of these pieces of these complex escrows with dispute resolutions within them.

Other ecosystems have them. Ethereum has them. Stellar has them. They all have the building blocks for this so that you can build up on top of that and build things like freelance marketplaces, Ebays, import-export platforms, really simple things that you think, oh yeah, just throw up an escrow contract and away it goes.

But we lack audited escrow contracts. I’ve used AI to try and find bugs and holes in implementations and it found bugs and holes because they haven’t been audited. So we need that part of the ecosystem finished so that we can go off and build things on top of that, such as freelancer.com or Upwork, whatever it is. And that was one of my original ideas.

I wanted to build a decentralized marketplace for work, but I can’t do it because the primitive, the smart contracts don’t exist in an audible way. So that’s what I was pitching overall at DraperU. Whether it will take up and pick up, I don’t know. And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.

I’ve got to make sure if I’m going to build this, that other people actually want it. Other people are actually going to build on it and just not ignore it and just build in different ecosystems. There’s lots of benefits of building on Cardano, deterministic fees and all that really good stuff, UTXO, it makes things really efficient. But do people want it?

Am I shoving a technical solution down people’s throats that don’t understand and don’t want it at all? I probably am. And I have to educate people about that. So the whole DraperU experience really made me think about how I build within Cardano, what projects I could bring forth.

And I highly recommend it for any other developer, any other builder, any project that is interested in creating something. I’ve always been like a developer-led focus of whatever I build. I think, hey, this is a great idea. This is a great project.

Let’s start building this. I think people get really big kick out of it, but then there’s no market. If you remember, if you’ve been following my channel for a long time, I built a plugin for WordPress called Cardano Press that would connect the Cardano ecosystem to the WordPress ecosystem. So if you’re building a website with WordPress, install the plugin and hey, presto, Cardano is connected to your website.

And I got about 70 or 80 different builders creating projects on top of that, which was great. But when I looked into it further, about maybe 1% of my user base were willing to pay. The rest of them, the 99% want to build it themselves, keep costs low. And that’s a whole idea of WordPress.

It’s a low cost solution to get yourself integrated in and building a cool website. So the revenue model wasn’t there. The open source side of things, that was great. You know, it contributed to a lot of people using it as a tool and building, but it did not generate revenue for myself or pretty much none.

So now with DraperU on board and the knowledge that I know, I got to attack those markets first and look for the revenue generating processes that are worthwhile, that are worth tackling and then building behind that. Otherwise there’s no point. There’s no revenue. VCs are trying to give you money so that they can get a return on their investment.

And if they give you money and there’s no return, what’s the point? It’s kind of like a nice, nice thing to do. It’s like, there you go. We’ll give you some money and you can build something cute.

And what’s the point? They want to return on their investment. So that’s where I’m at at the moment. So I will be pursuing this and working out the markets, working out customers, clients, and all that stuff first, before I lay another single bit of code or write a smart contract or whatever it is at the moment.

So DraperU experience, absolutely amazing. Expect more from them as well. They’ve got the Apex program coming up. I will be following along, seeing what comes out of that one too.

But the Genesis program, absolutely amazing. If you want to find out more, watch my YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. I’ve posted almost every single day of the program and you can be kept up to date with everything that happens there. It’s been absolutely amazing guys.

But the journey continues and where I’m going to next, Token2049. I am just confirming my tickets at the moment, but I will be there representing Codano, but most importantly, Midnight. Midnight are paying for my tickets. So I’ll be at all of the Midnight Foundation events, representing them, doing videos and everything else, doing interviews and all that stuff.

So if you are at Token2049 this year, you will see me. So reach out, book an interview spot, book a chat, whatever it is. I’d love to meet up with you guys. I’ll be at the events from the 5th to the 9th.

So a lot of before and after as well. So reach out, just come out and say hi. Now there’s a lot of side events as well. So I am trying to work out which side events to go to.

And with over a thousand different side events, every chain, every ecosystem are running four or five different side events throughout the entire week from Monday to Friday. I don’t know. Let me know guys. If there’s particular side events that you think I should be at, let me know because there’s so many and I have no idea what to go to.

But like I said, just reach out guys. Now, one of the really cool side events is the UTXO Pitch Night. Now this is a potential of half a million in funding. So if you are building within the UTXO ecosystem, building on Bitcoin, building on Cardano and other chains that use UTXO, you can tap into this fund here and Draper Dragon could potentially be behind you, Cardano Foundation, Draper University.

I don’t know if it’s a full like 500k worth of funding, but it might be off like a grant program and be part of Genesis program as well. So there’s lots of value there. And I really do have to say that Genesis program itself was highly valuable and worth just as much as the investment that they gave to me. So it’s definitely something to look into.

So if you’re building UTXO, check this one out, especially if you’re trying to bring Bitcoin DeFi to Cardano, this is definitely something to be at. Now, this last one here is the Hackathon as well that they have on. So this is the Origins Hackathon. This is being run not only by the Cardano Foundation, it’s also one of the big events for Token2049 as well.

So it’s something definitely to check out. I will be covering this one as well. I’d love to see what projects are building this space and what they’re delivering for the various ecosystems. So this is going to be a really good one to see as well.

But Token2049, finally get to go. This has been my first Token event forever. I’ve never been before and I’ve always seen these crazy events and been wanting to go. But finally, I get to go to Singapore and enjoy Token2049.

All right, guys, that’s it for this particular update. There’s a lot there. I’ll put links and show notes down below for you guys so you can keep up to date with what’s happening there. I will have another video specifically about Draper University.

And if you want to find out more about what I’m actually working on for this particular month, I have my content schedule here. Now, for the rest of the year, I’m going to be concentrating a lot on the Australian crypto space. So I’ve got crypto licensing here. I’ve got various exchanges and crypto services that I’m actually working with within the Australian space.

Everything from tax, self-managed super funds, various different exchanges and some some really cool broker level services. So I’m forming a partnership with these guys here at Stormrake and also working with Nexo on various different things. Their new credit line product that they’re putting together as well. So some really interesting things that I’m working on within the Australian ecosystem and various projects and exchanges, too.

So if you’re interested, I’ll just flash up my content schedule for the rest of the year here and you can see what I’ll be talking about over the next couple of months. Anyway, guys, that’s all I have for this video update. Make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe notification bell on your way out. Don’t forget to stay positive.

I’ll see you in the next video.