Cardano Weekly Recap: Coinbase Wrapped ADA, Midnight Airdrop, and Vespa Partnerships

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A Cardano news update to end your week. It is the 16th of May 2025. We’ve got lots to go through here. We’ve got updates from Coinbase bring over Cardano onto base. That’s pretty interesting. We have consensus on at the moment in Toronto and lots of news coming out of there about Midnight, that privacy chain that IOG is building. We also have various updates from Vespa, the really cool mobile wallet and lots of news from the ecosystem covering Bodega, Optum, SNEC, LenFi and a whole bunch of other projects.

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even one NFT project coming over from the Ethereum chain. This is pretty cool. Let’s get right into it. Hey everyone, I’m Peter Bui. it’s your first time here, you know the drill. Thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I try and cover everything in the Cardano ecosystem, but there seriously is so much happening at the moment. So if you are a project out there and I keep on missing you for whatever reason, jump onto my website, learnCardano.io, use the contact

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form, contact me there and I will try and cover your project in an upcoming video. But seriously, there is so much to cover and I really appreciate coming back all the time and watching these videos. But this first news story here was pretty wild and this is Coinbase bring over wrapped assets to base. So base is their own DeFi blockchain initiative that they started themselves. And that’s where it’s kind of like the Wild West. They have all their meme coins and all this

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weird stuff happening over there. Other serious projects too, such as world mobile, they moved over to base and other projects like a corner copious. They’ve got bridges over to base as well. There’s a lot of users there, a lot of liquidity. So it’s an interesting space to be, but here they are now bring over Coinbase, ADA, Coinbase, doge, Coinbase, light coin and Coinbase, Ripple XRP. Now these are coming over as wrapped assets. So they’re using a bridge and I’m assuming it’s from the

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Coinbase app, the centralized exchange over to their base chain as well. So it means there’ll be more of that liquidity on a new chain where there’s a lot of activity and a of people would want that. there’s arbitrage opportunities, all sorts of things. So in terms of opening it up, fantastic. Awesome move by Coinbase. Now, when is this going to happen? I’m not sure. There were no dates set in place. They state here, we will announce their launch at a later date. So we just have to sit back, wait and see.

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what actually happens with this particular announcement and when this liquidity come over. So if you are a part of the base ecosystem, you’ll be able to finally trade some ADA over there for meme coins or whatever it is. Or if you’ve got a whole bunch of meme coins, can, you know, hedge it back over to ADA if you need to. So you will have more trading options. That’s the whole point of this year. And we’ve also had some really interesting news from ConsenSys. This is happening in Toronto at the moment.

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And some of the boost this year are absolutely amazing. This blockchain video store is phenomenal. The amount of time and effort to put this one together. I, I, can’t imagine, but it’s really cool. Absolutely love it. But the really cool stuff that came out of the vent is Charles’s presentations at consensus. So it’s always interesting to hear what he has to say. And probably the biggest push that we’ve seen this year is all around midnight. So there’s plenty of panel discussions about midnight.

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what it has to bring to the blockchain ecosystem. And I’m pretty excited to see this one launch. sounds like it’s going to launch sometime this year, very, very soon. But there’s some big milestones that the Midnight team have put together here. And the first one is the formation of a foundation. So the foundation will be the driver of adoption empowering builders and supporting the evolution of the Midnight ecosystem. Now we need to remember that Midnight is built on

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on substrate from the Polkadot ecosystem. So this is going to have a massive focus on interoperability and cross-chain capabilities. So this is a privacy chain that is supposed to work across the entire blockchain space. So this is really important to see. And having a foundation to drive that adoption, I think is really key because there’s so many chains here to work with. Cardano being one.

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Bitcoin, I’m assuming Ethereum, obviously, these main chains here is going to take a lot of effort to attract developers to start building and integrating cross chain capabilities for midnight. So there’s going to be a lot of opportunities here for builders and people that are getting into the midnight ecosystem. So this is something definitely people should be looking out for. If there’s a foundation, there’s going to be funding so we can start tapping into those funds and start building some cool and amazing things.

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Now the other big announcement from this event was the midnight airdrop. Now the details are a bit vague. This is the thread here that I got that Anuj here has put together and the details aren’t, I don’t think they’re exact, maybe because of the reporting of the information here. But there is going to be this big airdrop for all ADA holders, but not just ADA holders. There’s going to be airdrop to 37 million users across eight different blockchains. That’s insane.

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there’s going to be a lot of eyes on this airdrop and it’s going to reach many, many users. So we’re going to see massive amounts of liquidity moving in and out with midnight at the very early stages. Now this is all termed as the glacier drop and we’re going to see ADA holders, anyone that holds ADA being airdropped the tokens. now

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I’m not sure if it’s the dust and night token, because there’s a bit of an argument a little bit further down on this thread here. Straight pull here points out, I assume this is a misunderstanding what the source of this claim both tokens would be airdropped. In my understanding, the shielded gas token dust is not tradable, decays over time and generates by unshielded deflationary night token, which is the only token you can place your drop. Happy to stand corrected.

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So that was my understanding too with how this is supposed to work. There was a two token ecosystem and the night token was the one that was going to be airdropped to like the node validators, for example, for running the nodes. So I believe the night token is supposed to be airdropped, but I’m not too sure either way. The point of this is that we need to start paying attention to this big glacier airdrop.

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So this is really important guys. I’ll put bookmarks and links and everything down below around the glacier airdrop. I’ll try and pull up my old references about it as well. But there’s more and more information and I’ll keep you guys up to date with everything that’s happening around midnight. My next new story here is what Vespa is doing at the moment. Now these guys now Vespa, Delta DeFi and these guys here fluid tokens. They’re all in

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San Fran Silicon Valley at the moment with Draper U. So they’re all shortlisted and they’re all over there in San Fran and they’re networking, they’re getting to know each other and forming partnerships. And this is majorly cool. seeing Vespa join in with projects such as Delta DeFi, which is also at Draper U at the moment to build some really interesting experiences is going to be cool. So Delta DeFi are building

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a defile layer, but concentrating on Hydra, Hydra implementations. So this is supposed to make trading really fast. If we have a look at this little demo here from Neil, Neil.ada, he’s been getting a lot of attention from a lot of builders lately. And the team from Sindan Labs, they’re mainly focusing on Hydra implementation. And this is a demo video of their trading on Delta DeFi.

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using Hydra. And I don’t know if this really showcases how fast it is, but let me just press play here for you. So click by order, boom, order submitted, click order submitted. So I really don’t think that really highlights how fast it is, but at the moment within the Cardano ecosystem, if you’re doing an order like this, it takes a few seconds. You can see a bit of a delay and then suddenly you see that in about

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10 seconds or whatever after signing transactions, et cetera. So this here, I think I demoed it on Sunday swap when they had a hydro implementation, but you can spam this button essentially, and you get auto submitted, or submitted, or submitted all in the background there. So that’s the speed and level of trading that this team is trying to get. And having this on a mobile experience, and I’m assuming that’s why they’re partnering up with Vespa.

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They’re trying to make the best mobile trading experience possible on Cardano. So you open up your Vespa wallet, it’ll be integrated in with Delta for DeFi. And you can see some awesome buy opportunities load up your wallet and click buy, buy, buy, buy, or sell, sell, sell, sell, it might be. That’s the idea of like how fast you are expecting to be able to trade on a DEX such as Delta DeFi protocol. Sorry.

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So this is really exciting. Now this other partnership here, Vespa and Fluid tokens. What Cardano team represents building on Bitcoin better than Fluid. Hmm. Okay. So Vespa is launching on Bitcoin and Fluid tokens will be our technical partner for bridging our integrations. So this is of course a very good move. All of the other mobile wallets out there are moving in with integrations with Bitcoin. We’ve got Tokyo, which have working closely with the

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Bitcoin OS team and Maestro who’ve done their integrations there. Then we also have Begin Wallet, which have done a massive amount of Bitcoin integrations as well. And now to have a Cardano mobile wallet to join the fray there with the Bitcoin side of things. Absolutely awesome and definitely a good partnership here with Fluid Tokens to bring them in. So Fluid Tokens, they’ve been working on their platform, the Fluid Tokens for the Cardano ecosystem where you can borrow, lend,

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our NFTs, you can go through all these interesting borrowing lending DeFi protocol stuff that the Fluor Token team have done and they’ve done it for Bitcoin ecosystem too. So now we’re going to see that within the Vespa wallet. So it’s going to just give it that best experience in-house experience. So this is really cool stuff. So congratulations to all these teams here. So congratulations to Vespa, Delta DeFi and Fluor Token for forming those partnerships. And I can see here,

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that being over there at Draper you being together in one room and, know, just, being devs and talking some cool shit, uh, obviously has formed some really good partnerships. So, you know, guys, um, I’m really happy for you. Now there’s one last thing here around Vespa and our Kandana press plugin, our plugin that is used to build really quick and easy Kandana powered websites now has

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officially got Vespa support. So Gene here, Kermage, he’s been working on trying to debug things with Vespa wallet because it’s not as easy as it looks to debug things on a mobile device. But we found some tools, he’s found some tools and is made that debugging experience a lot easier. So now we are fully supporting Vespa. So we have a full mobile experience that can work.

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So if anyone out there is using Cardano press on their website, make sure you upgrade this latest version here. 1.3, zero dot zero. This version here has that Vespa support. So it’s pretty cool that we’ve got that now it’s been lagging for a bit, but we’re now have supported, I think pretty much all the wallets, desktop and mobile experience. There’s some other little tweaks here as well that I’ve been asking for. And this one is, but being able to

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I connect to a website and control the wallets that actually appear. And it wasn’t easy to customize it at first, but now it is. know, little things like that. It’s been something I’ve been wanting for a while, but Cardano press now supports Vespa. That’s the main thing I want to get out there. Now I’ve got some broader ecosystem updates and I want to get through these as quickly as possible because I know these news updates get really long.

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So first off, Bodega Markets here, V3 public test net on track coming later this month. So we’re already halfway through the month of May and Bodega Markets is driving some really cool things here. So what you’re seeing here is the ability to buy and sell shares of a particular prediction market back and forth all day. So get ready to trade shares back and forth during all events. So this is something that’s been really wanted and other

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prediction markets have. So essentially you may go to a particular particular prediction market such as Cardano ADA to reach all time high by end of year. And you may have voted yes. And you know, 58 % chance. Yes. Now you may want to exit that position early and not wait to the end of this particular particular prediction market. And this one might end in six months time, but you need the ADA now. So being able to trade that

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and sell that early will give you liquidity. And that is something that’s really important on these prediction markets, because if they’ve got a long expiry date, you want to be able to exit the position quickly. So they’ve integrated in this marketplace now where you can buy sell into a particular market at any point in time. So you can get into a market early where you may have like 150 % gain and you can sell that at 100 % gain.

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and exit early. And you know, you never know the odds of it might change and flip the other way and you would have come out better in the end. So that is the power of being a trade your share back and forth within a prediction market. So really cool stuff guys. Can’t wait to see this one launch. This next one here is around what OADA is bringing out at the moment. And this is pretty cool. This is a brand new one where they’re tying in the splash token. So this is from the Dex splash.

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And they’re using the liquidity there of the splash token to bring in a new synthetic Oh splash. And you can stake that through their platform. And it’s got a lot of interesting features here. So if you, if you’re familiar with Optum and how O-8 works, it works in a very similar way, but they buy back splash tokens with an ecosystem to try and drive up the liquidity that way. So it’s a bit of a different mechanism here. And it’s purely for

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with more splash tokens within their workflow here. So it works differently compared to what OATR does with the governance and staking rights being removed. So this here is awesome for anyone within the splash ecosystem itself. So do keep an eye out for this one. I’ll do follow up videos on this one here. I know it’s a, I’ve gone through this one a little bit early and it’s pretty confusing for people.

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that aren’t familiar with how Optum Finance works, but I’ll do follow up videos and tutorials about this one so you guys get a really good understanding of it. Now this next one here, this was posted by Splash Protocol, but this one talks about SNK. After Kraken listing, KuCoinCO is now eyeing SNK. It’s the beginning of Cardano native token on KuCoin. Could be. So I expand this one here. This is

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BC Wong is the CEO of KuCoin, probably the biggest, one of the biggest exchanges here in Southeast Asia. But let me just read what he says. We see the enthusiasm, Snake. Our team keeps a close eye on community-driven projects and we love the energy here. Keep building. Now from the last count, think Snake has about 14 centralized exchange listings and one tier one.

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exchange listing. that’s, that’s the, Kraken one. So if we see KuCoin come on board, that’d be two. And that will start gaining the attraction of the other big players out there. We may see it on Coinbase and we may very well see it on Binance very soon. So keep your eyes on this guys. The more attention KuCoin gets for and listing SNK, the more likely we’ll see it on the other big exchanges too. awesome start. You know, SNK here, they’ve helped.

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the groundwork, the hard technical code and everything that needs to be done to list donative tokens on these tier one exchanges. So we’re going to see more guys. I’m really excited about this. This next new story here is around Lenfi. And I talked about this in one of my other DeFi, the building bags series that I’ve just launched as well. But this here is Lenfi and

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check out these charts guys. It looks like a massive sell-offs. This one here, this red candle here, it looks like that the team may have sold at that point or this might’ve been the point when a lot of investors lost confidence and it triggered a lot of a sell-off at this point. So that might’ve been that, but we can also see other big red candles here. And these last two may have been the final straw of the team.

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Lenfie team selling off at this point, but I can’t confirm any of this. And I really don’t know if it is them selling or not. But I stay here. Oh damn, there goes all my farming positions. So I did check into my farming positions on Lenfie. I did hold a lot of Lenfie tokens and yeah, they don’t look good anymore. It looks pretty bad. So I had to exit all of those and hopefully I

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I can recover from those particular losses, but I don’t see it recovering from, you know, where it is now where I’ve just sold going back to, you know, those, those highs here of like four ADA per Lenfie. So, um, yeah, no, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Now this here, I thought was really cool. uh, you know, D reps out there at the moment, we’re doing a lot of work. We don’t get paid for it. And the sync AI team, uh, they’ve got this.

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brilliant governance hub website. And what they’ve done now is added in the ability to tip your D rep. So you can go to the platform. You can enter in a D rep ID and in the amount that you want to tip. So it could be two ADA and you can send a tip. How cool is that? So if you like what they do, if you think they’re doing a good job and providing good information about governance and voting in the right direction that you like.

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You can tip them and people are. So this person here, Kat, I just tip my D rep Phil using the Sync AI network governance platform. Kind of cool. Sorry Phil, it was a small tip, was just poking around and wanted to test it. When did Phil reply? No, Phil didn’t reply. Phil, come on. Gotta reply this stuff. I’ll give this a like, hopefully that amplifies it a little bit and maybe Phil will see it. Actually, let me just do this.

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There we go. Hopefully Phil sees that anyway. Awesome work from the Sink AI team there. I absolutely love what they’ve done and adding those tiny little features in there just makes things really nice. Now this last major news story here is about Journey Crypto and Journey Crypto has joined the Kidano ecosystem. As you can see from the numbers here, 777,000 followers. That’s a lot of people.

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following this guy here and he started to make his way over into the Cardano ecosystem. Don’t know if someone paid him or what the deal is there, but he’s expanding his journey club to Cardano and the Anvil guys here, they helped bring them over. So this is really cool stuff. So congratulations there to everyone that’s involved. This pretty cool work. Now there’s always drama and the drama behind this one here was the price.

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that the NFT was minting at from what I gather the NFT was minting at 1400 ADA and at today’s price that’s pretty pretty high just roughly around a thousand USD and there was a lot of negativity because of that high price I think in the Cardano ecosystem you don’t see NFTs really that high in terms of cost compared to Ethereum for example where NFTs are really expensive because of the price of ETH.

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So it’s a very different kind of experience. But the post here just points out, you know, if you don’t like the price, don’t mint. You don’t need to be out there spreading negativity around the project. I totally agree with that. I had my NFT project minting for 40 USD when the price of ADA was really, really low. So it was like 30 cents. So it was something like 130, 170 or something, 172 ADA per NFT.

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And people looked at went, it’s a bit high. I was like, is it really? You convert it out to about, you know, 35 bucks. It’s not that bad in the whole grand scheme of things, especially when it unlocks subscriptions for the plugins and stuff. But anyway, it wasn’t a hype, but this is, you know, a lot higher, a lot more expensive than my NFT project. you know, like this guy here says, if you don’t like it, don’t mint it. No one’s forcing you to.

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This is what the NFT here looks like. And the cool thing that is happening is that people from the Ethereum ecosystem, so are migrating over to Kedano. And that’s kind of effect that this has had. And check out what this guy writes here. So migrated Journey Club journeyers are starting to roll out. Both these were bought on ETH and migrated to Kedano. I love it. And yes, so do I. Seeing this type of cross-chain

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Bridge assets is really cool. And I’m sure we’re to see more of this in the future as well. More projects coming over to a chain where it’s cheaper to actually do things with it. Price of ETH is going up again at the moment. So we’re going to see gas fees go up again because of the price and more eyeballs on it and having some, having the ability to move assets over to a cheaper chain, such as Cardano and having different DeFi players with NFTs.

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is going to be really cool. hopefully we do see more of this, but congratulations to Journey Club for actually getting this all done. The other thing I didn’t realize was Journey Crypto actually has a physical NFT store and NFT gallery. I’ve got no idea where this is. It looks like somewhere in California with palm trees or maybe Florida, but he has his own gallery for NFTs. So if anyone has more photos and pictures of this, I’d love to actually see it.

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I’d love to see what looks like, but yeah, hats off to anyone that has had this NFT store during the bear market and has kept it going. So that’s absolutely awesome. Good stuff there. Now I won’t talk about this one anymore, but if you do want to check out the project itself, you can get to it there. Journey Club out on X. Now the last thing I will do is give a shout out to my brand new D rep website. This is it here. You can get to it at drep.learncadano.io.

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or learn Kidana slash D rep will take you to the same place. And we had fun building this. So this site here was designed by me, PO, a awesome designer that has been in the Kidana space for quite a while now, but he’s been, he and his team have been churning out designs, um, lately for different various different Kidana projects everywhere. So they, they redid the book IO website.

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They’ve done them, Cardano wallpapers. They’ve done a lot of different projects. scroll through their X, XR feed here and you can see a lot of really cool stuff that they’ve done. But they put together this website here. I absolutely love the design and you can go through and find out about my D rep profile approach, how I vote, all the content that I produce. And the really cool thing that we did here with the Cardano press is we created a brand new plugin for Cardano press.

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And that now allows you to integrate in D reps. So we can have a full D rep website with a listing of all the D reps in the world that are dynamically created. Or you can just have your own D rep website where users can now click eternal, for example. And from there you can start delegating. So if you are a D rep out there, you can build your own website and have delegates delegate directly to you.

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you buy a domain name, they’re fairly cheap. And then you can have this little mini site, install it, get it up and running, and then allow users to delegate directly to your D-Rep profile from your website. How cool is that? Now we bought the same thing for state pools and many state pool operators out there are using it. But now we’re going to see a lot more D-Reps using this as well so that they can build their own profile websites where they can talk about

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write about their voting decisions, how they vote, you can have your whole voting history on here as well. So lots of really cool stuff. Anyway guys, that’s all I have for this particular news update. I know it’s a little bit long, I try to keep it as short as possible, but that’s the way the Cardano ecosystem is. There is seriously so much happening at the moment. Anyway, if you enjoyed it, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I’ll see you guys in the next video.