Cardano Weekly: Hydra Live, STRIKE Heats Up, Surf Levels Up

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We’ve got another jam packed week of news in the Cardano and crypto space. Always lots happening here and I’ll try and keep you guys up to date with everything in this space. So hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe on the way in. And yes guys, I am back. Took a bit of a break. I’ve been sick. I had the flu twice. I was sick for about two months straight. Then I had burnout from all the work I had to do as well. Got a day job, all these other things. And I’m trying to reschedule how I do these videos. So just one news update a week, one interview a week.

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And a short tutorial. Hopefully I get back on track with all the other videos I need to do for other projects and whatnot and get them out there. But I’m back doing these on a regular basis again. So please hit that subscribe if you haven’t done so already. Let’s get into these news updates. The first one I have here is just a public service announcement. And this is around a scam that has appeared around the USDM account. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s been compromised.

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And it’s saying that there is a double USDM for every coin minted. This is not true. This is fake. It’s been verified by Andrew Westberg, who I think still works for the project – may have stopped working – but he’s confirmed this is a scam and it’s not their website. If you have a look at the post as well, it goes to mendenta-global.com. That’s the scam website. I did have a look at it for you guys so you don’t need to go there and look yourself.

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It’s basically just a copy of the Mineta website, but then they’ve integrated a connect wallet that goes – it’s one of the generic ones that you can pull a library off – and it connects to any of the MetaMask EVM-style wallets. And I assume that it would then just drain your wallets afterwards. I don’t have an EVM wallet. I’m opening it on a burner PC as well. So I’m not too worried about connecting and trying and testing these things out.

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Let me do it guys, don’t do it yourselves. You may lose all your assets. That’s a public service announcement. Beware of those scams. There are plenty of them going around. So be careful. Now back to the news updates in the Cardano ecosystem. This first one here is around the Cardano Foundation’s collaboration with MiCA Crypto Alliance. They are going to provide high quality, standardised resources for the Web3 ecosystem. Now MiCA, if you don’t know, this is the

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compliance for the EU. So having this type of relationship really puts the Foundation on the front foot within the EU ecosystem. So anything that the Cardano Foundation is doing is ensuring that they’re in the right space and providing the right information for the people that need it in that regulatory space. So this is a brilliant partnership between the two of them. I hope to see some really cool stuff coming from them.

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This update here is one of Omogo’s projects and this is Cardano Card. If you ever wanted an easy way to spend your crypto assets, this is going to be it. I’ve got a couple of these cards. This is my crypto.com one. It’s just one of the basic ones, but using that, you can move some crypto assets to the card to fund it. I think you have to convert it to Singapore dollars or AUD or USD. We’re fiat-first, so you sell at that point and then you can load up the card. It’s like a prepaid debit card.

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But you know, the nice thing – it was like a metal card and this was a really cool thing back in 2017 when I signed up for it. I didn’t really get to use it that much, unfortunately. And you know, the tap and go and the microchip thing doesn’t work anymore. It’s kind of useless now, but having an alternative like this one here, this gold Cardano crypto card is going to be cool. It’s going to be cool. I haven’t seen it in real life. They were showing these

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at Token 2049 in Singapore. I think Charles got one, Frederik Gregaard got one as well. So maybe I’ll get one. I’m on the wait list. Let’s see how we go. But I’m pretty interested in this one. Maybe I can get the guys on an interview or something and we can talk about how it all works and user experience and everything else. I have to say the user experience of this crypto.com one is shit. It’s an absolute nightmare to use because you have to sell your assets all the time. You have to top up.

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I had running subscriptions through it and stuff and then they would fail because I had to go and sell more assets. It was just really clunky, that kind of user experience. Hopefully the guys here have worked out something a little bit better, so we’re not having to sell all the time. You can just load it up with a bunch of crypto. You can stake it and everything that you expect in the Cardano ecosystem, but with an easier way of spending it. We’ll see. We’ll see how it goes. But Cardano Card

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is the name here. I’ll put the links to it down below if you guys are interested as well. This next big update – I thought this was really big – is the 0.0 release of Hydra. So this is basically a production-ready version of Hydra. For those that don’t know, Hydra is the way of scaling Cardano on an L2, a layer two side chain – I think that’s the technical words. Don’t worry about it, but it’s a

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chain that you can put on the side and run it as a Hydra layer. And then those transactions that run on there can be really, really fast. You can have lots of transactions per second. And then that will roll back onto the main chain. So it’s a really good way to scale the Cardano ecosystem, but it’s really app specific. So if you’re running Hydra nodes, you may have a network of them. And that way you can run your application on top of that network of Hydra nodes.

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So that’s the way it works. It’s a little bit different to running anything on mainnet. But if you look at the Ethereum ecosystem, that’s essentially all L2s these days – Arbitrum, whatever it is, Polygon – they’re all L2s of the Ethereum network. It’s something very similar to that. Hydra is something we’ve all been waiting for for a long time. We’ve seen demos of it running Doom. We’ve seen Hydra vending machines at Token 2049 as well.

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So it’s a really cool thing to now have it production-ready on mainnet. So projects out there that are wanting to build scalable dApps can do so. And there are some being released really soon as well. I know Delta DeFi are building a trading DEX that is powered on Hydra. And I believe they’re trying to release it for the next Summit update.

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We’ll see how that one goes. I’ll keep you guys up to date and talk about that user experience of trading and doing something with Hydra. So it’s going to be really cool. It’s a really good update. Now let’s go into some project updates and there are some really cool things happening at the moment. I haven’t been keeping up with everything, but I’m hearing glimpses of what’s going on. And the very first one here is from VyFinance and their V3 scripts. So they’re now upgrading their DEX – ViFi

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DEX V3 – and they’re using Plutus V3. So this is the latest and greatest of smart contracting languages on the Cardano ecosystem. And it’s built for speed and efficiency. So this is taking Cardano dApps to the next level. I don’t think anyone else has touched Plutus V3 yet. Everyone’s working with Aiken, the smart contracting language for Cardano that’s a DSL (domain specific language) which is built on top of Cardano smart contracts.

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So when you compile it, it converts to Plutus, but that uses V2. Now, ViFi have gone ahead and taken that step further to build their next platform on V3. Amazing stuff. So what are we going to see from this? What does this mean? This means ViFi as a platform will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition

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with expanded token utility, redesigned interface and a smoother, faster user experience. This year marks a major leap forward for the ViFi ecosystem. If you haven’t tried it out yet, please do. I’ll put links down below for all of this so you can see what it’s all about. This next project here is – seriously, if you didn’t get into Strike Finance, look into it. Really stressing to look into it. I got back in very early days. I bought some STRIKE tokens. I’ve been staking it and it earns ADA

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because of all the fees that the protocol earns. Now the amount of transactions and volume that Strike is doing at the moment on Cardano – it’s the majority of the transactions on chain at the moment. Everyone’s just using this perpetuals platform to try and find gains where you can. Let me just read this for you. Heating up: our protocol has now made over 100K ADA in the last 14 days and over 850K ADA

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all time for STRIKE stakers. Thanks everyone for the support. So it’s good numbers. It’s really good numbers considering I don’t think STRIKE is even a year old yet. And they are pretty much dominating all the charts within the Cardano ecosystem. We’ve still got Minswap, which is dominating on the DEX side of things with all that liquidity there.

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But in terms of a dApp, borrowing-lending protocol, anything else, STRIKE is really making massive gains there. So I’ve used it a little bit as well. I did a building DeFi video on Cardano and I was looking for a buy-in entry point at that time. And I really wish I did because it just skyrocketed from there, but please do your own research. This isn’t a promotion of this particular platform. I’m not paid by the guys. I just like the platform because it’s earning me extra ADA at the moment.

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So do look into this one here. It’s quite a nice platform to play around with. There are some risks involved of course.

I did a whole course on this as well. Links down below, but you can find it at learncardano.io where you can learn more about perpetuals and how it all works. All right. Next one here is Surf. Now I did do an interview with Phil just recently, links in the top right hand corner for you guys, but it’s a borrowing and lending protocol that launched a little bit earlier this year, and they’re gaining a lot of momentum at the moment. If you’ve used LenFi in the past, if you’ve used Liqwid Finance, it’s

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very similar in a lot of the aspects where they’ve got isolated pools and you can borrow and supply assets against those particular pools. Here are some highlights from the month of October so far. So I’ve just highlighted here on the screen: they’ve launched one-click leveraging. So this is one of the features that I talked about in the interview as well. So they’ve launched that now. One click can leverage – borrowing assets, selling it and then borrowing more assets. So you can do that now on the platform.

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They’ve got the protocol becoming the third largest holder of SNEK globally. They’ve surpassed 15 million ADA in TVL on the platform. When I did the interview, they were at 14 million. So they gained a million within about a week. Pulse announcement integration, which I will talk about in a moment as well. And then we also have the loan calculator and institutional pilot liquidity on the platform as well. All the other things.

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Check it out. You’ve just got to see what they’ve been up to. It’s a really nice platform to use as well. I have to say it’s quite simplified in how it works. So it’s really easy for anyone that is first time coming into the ecosystem, looking at DeFi – they can use it for borrowing and lending on the platform. It’s really good to play around with. Now this other one, which I just alluded to here, and this is Pulse. This is Pendle on Cardano. And I haven’t really looked into this one at all, but let me just explain what I do know.

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So what exactly is Pulse and what’s Pendle? It is the ability to trade future yield on your assets and unlock that liquidity now. So let’s say you have a hundred thousand ADA and you know you earn staking rewards off that over a year – you get maybe 2.5%. So you get that little bit of yield that you know you will get. You could probably lock that into a smart contract and trade that yield now and maybe

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you know, the market’s going to crash. So you’re trading that yield, you’re unlocking that ADA, you’re selling it now, and then just holding onto it and you can repay that – essentially a loan – at a later date. So I believe that’s how it works. And being able to unlock that value within your yield-bearing assets is really cool. And then you can have the extra partnership here with a lending protocol to

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make that all happen. This is the type of thing we’re seeing now on the Cardano ecosystem and having these types of partnerships between different projects to allow you to unlock different things and start having different yield opportunities is really cool. If I lost you there, I’m sorry, I’ll go into this stuff deeper in future videos. I do have an interview lined up with the founder of Pulse,

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Christian, who is also the creator of Helios, another domain specific language for Cardano to write smart contracts. So I’ve got that interview coming up – should drop around early to mid November. So do check that one out when it comes. Hit that like, subscribe, notification bell, and I’ll let you know as soon as it comes out. But this is really cool stuff. We’re seeing more and more innovation, more and more cool features coming to the Cardano space. So this partnership here between DexHunter and Splash I thought was really good as well.

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DexHunter being probably the most popular DEX aggregator out there in the ecosystem. And then Splash being a really good DEX protocol that’s really efficient in how it works. They’ve got some really cool, innovative stuff that other teams and projects have copied. So they’ve always led the charge in how DEXes should operate – low fees or no fees in some cases – and a one-click transaction. So you’re doing a swap,

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the asset comes back within that transaction. So really, really cool stuff. So now they’re looking at integrating both of those features – the DEX aggregator plus the protocol of Splash – all into one user interface to make a super, crazy-big DeFi platform. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what the guys come up with here. I know both the teams are very skilled and have built some really cool things in the past. This partnership

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is absolutely amazing. Do check that one out as well, guys. Keep your eyes and ears open for what they build. Another really cool thing that came out of Token 2049 was finally an interview and a conversation between Ran from Crypto Banter and Charles from IOG (Input Output). You know, they’ve been at heads and always fighting in regards to what Cardano is, what it has to offer and all that stuff in the past.

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But finally we’ve seen the two of them get together and actually have an interview to talk through everything – Cardano and Midnight. So if you haven’t seen that one yet, check it out. I haven’t watched it all yet. I’ve only seen little clips and whatnot, but it’s good to see bridges being built within the ecosystem, within crypto in general. These guys have been fighting each other online for ages. Finally, they’ve – I don’t know what happened – but they’re talking.

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They’re talking, they’re doing interviews. So this is really good stuff for the entire crypto space. So do check it out. Links down below for you guys. The Cardano Summit is coming up right around the corner. We’re just under a month away. So on the 12th and 13th of November next month, we will have the Summit in Berlin. If you don’t have your tickets, now is a good time to have a look at it. But the Cardano Summit also has a bunch of free tickets. So if you’re involved within the ecosystem, if you are

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a stake pool operator, if you hold a lot of assets or participate in DeFi, there’s a bunch of ways to get a free ticket. Let me just pull this up. I thought this was really cool. The way that they did this was really, really cool. So let me just find the website for you guys and I’ll show you how it all works. Here we go. So can community members apply for a discount ticket? Yes. So this is a link here: heykadano.org/summit deals.

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And you have a discount qualifier. You can verify it. You need to connect your wallet on here and do a wallet verification. But if you’re a stake pool operator, if you’re a DRep, if you’re a developer – so you have to prove that you can solve a particular datum – you could probably put that through ChatGPT. I do a lot of Cardano-related coding through it. If you’re an ADA holder, Hysteria – I don’t know what this is, this must

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be a game that’s built on there – or if you’re a Cardano Ambassador, these are the ways that you can get free tickets. This discount is quite nice. So if you do qualify, check it out, get your ticket through this way. Otherwise you’d be paying for the ticket yourself through the Summit website. But all the details are there as well. How much are tickets at the moment? Yeah, you can check for discounts, pay with – hang on, let me just pay with euros and see what it is. So there we go. It’s 400 euros or 718.89 ADA

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at the moment, so a little on the high side, but I think tickets for Token 2049 were even more than that. So it’s a general price for summits and events and whatnot really. But yeah, do check that one out. If you are in Europe, it’s probably something quite easy to get to. By the way, the discount doesn’t include flights or accommodation or anything like that. It’s just the ticket for the event. Check that out. If you’re in Europe especially, it’d be a little bit easier for you guys to get to, but they’ve got hackathons and all these side events and meetings and whatnot

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there. If you are going, make sure you check out these hackathons because these events – what, $30,000 in prize pool for this particular event on the 11th. So if you’re in the region, sign up to this hackathon. You might be able to join a team or something there and meet some people that are building something or wanting to build something and help them out in doing something really cool.

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Get yourself in front of the community and then also get in front of some really big people in the space. Who knows, it might open up a lot of doors and opportunities for you. So check that one out guys. This is pretty cool stuff. There are a lot of other side events appearing as well. I’ve seen it on my X feed. So do have a look at what there is. Make sure you sign up to everything. I know it’s really important to network at these events. So do check them all out. Links down below in the show notes for you.

I’ll see you guys in the next video.