Cardano’s Big Week: SecondFi Recovery, Open USD & 500M ADA

Alright guys, a lot of big news updates in the Cardano ecosystem. I’m going to fly through these and tell you exactly why these particular updates matter for you as an ADA holder. They all have quite a bit of impact for you so let’s go through them. The first one here is the update around SecondFi.

So this used to be Yoroi, they rebranded to SecondFi and if you were using their wallet you may have been compromised or you may be already know that you’ve been compromised and you’re waiting for the process to be updated here. So they do have a big update. If you have been compromised, if you have been using the app, make sure you submit a support ticket to support.secondfi.io. Links down below for you guys.

But they have a asset recovery checker now, checker.secondfi.io. This is what it looks like here. If you have your wallet address handy, let’s say you’ve restored it in another wallet and haven’t used it, that’s really important, or you have your address saved somewhere else, you can use that here and check if your wallet has been compromised or not. It’s really important if you do restore on another wallet app that you don’t do any transactions because that is what will reveal your signing keys and let the hacker take assets from your wallet.

Do not do any transactions. That’s a really important thing here. But you can use that checker here and verify if you’re impacted or not. It will never ask you to sign a transaction.

Remember that. Do not sign transactions on your potentially compromised wallet. The big thing here, they also have allocated 16 million ADA worth of funds to make the users that were hacked whole again. That’s what it sounds like.

So Mocha has set up a recovery fund address to return assets to the victims of the attack. So that is exceptionally good news to hear. They have an address here where they’re allocated those funds, put them aside so that they can distribute to those particular users. Now, that is specifically for the users of that 16 million ADA in the initial hacks, not the 129 million, which the White Hat hacker did afterwards.

So now, notably, assets recovered by the White Hats, including the fourth event, are accessible and safely held. So a lot of those assets will be returned to users through the recovery process. So it’s important that you don’t delete the app because that will be your key to the recovery process. Now, the team also said they’ll be at Webex in Tokyo.

So if you happen to be in Tokyo, I know a lot of users that use Yoroi, SecondFi, are Japanese. So if you are in that area, you can talk to the team directly. You can shout at them. You can abuse them.

Don’t abuse them. They’re working their asses off to get this all back together. But, you know, you can talk to them and ask them how the funds are going, how they’re going to be recovering them and getting your ADA back. I know a lot of people were impacted by in DeFi that were participating there.

I’ve seen state pool operators that use the app as well and had their state pools connected to their wallet were also affected. So a lot of people across the board here have been affected. So it’s good to see that the funds are coming back to a lot of users here. Now, just as a reminder, SecondFi will never request private keys, seed phrases, wallet credentials or access to your wallet.

There’s also email scams going around at the moment as well. So all communications so far through SecondFi have been through X itself and not through email. So if you see any emails going out, it’s highly likely it is a scam. So be careful of that.

Now, the team here at SecondFi also have put together a hardware wallet migration guide. So if you have a hardware wallet such as a Keystone wallet, if you’re not using it or if you’ve just purchased one, highly recommend the Keystone wallet. Fully air gapped. This thing is brilliant.

You never plug it in. You never plug it in. It uses QR codes to scan and verify transactions. So you hold it up.

You’ve got this little camera here on the back here and you’ve got a fingerprint scanner here that will scan your fingerprint. So you need to verify your fingerprint to sign transaction as well. The camera will capture the QR code on the wallet, verify the transaction there, verify it within the app, and then you have to camera it back. So the computer will need a camera to verify, send that data of the verified transaction back again as well.

So it’s a beautiful wallet, very cool user experience, a lot easier than the Legend Nano where you have to press so many buttons. But anyway, if you’re interested, links down below. There are affiliate links, so it does support the channel if you do buy one through those links down below. But they’ve put together the guide here on how to migrate your assets over to the hardware wallets if you happen to use one.

But they’re also recommending that you jump over to different wallets as well at this point in time. So I think they mentioned here a Lace wallet. I can’t remember where I saw it, but you will need to restore it in a different wallet application, and Lace is probably a good one to use. So a lot there happening from the Second Fire team.

Another big mention that I should tell you about is the midnight redeeming process. So a lot of users in the comments of my channel have asked, what about all of my midnight tokens, my night tokens that I mined through Yoroi? What happens to them? At the moment, they’re all being paused.

So anyone that is trying to redeem through the Glacier Drop will not be able to. They’ll have to go through and wait for this whole process to be cleaned up, because I believe they’ll be mapping the addresses of the compromised wallets to the new ones after Second Fire go through this entire process and work out who owns what wallet now. So it’s going to take a little while. The midnight team have put out an official notice about this as well, being temporarily suspended until this whole drama is sorted out.

So if you’re expecting midnight tokens, night tokens, and want to sell, unfortunately not at this point in time, because the whole process is locked down at the moment. But we’ll see that back up again very soon. So that’s everything around the Second Fire side of things. Hopefully it gives you guys some clarity about what’s happening around the Second Fire side of things.

Remember, there are scams going around, so be very mindful and vigilant out there. Next really big news story that could have some big impact on the Cardano ecosystem is OpenUSD. So this is a huge brand new open standard for stable coins in the crypto space, but not just crypto, it’s payment rails overall. So this is going to have major impact if everyone behind it can manage to get it off the ground and utilized and actually used within the ecosystem.

And they have a lot of promise here. And let me just bring up all the logos and all the teams, all the companies that are a part of this. And this is huge. Just look at this.

Besides the major payment processes from around the world, just from an Australian point of view, this is huge. We’ve got Commonwealth Bank, we’ve got NAB, we have ANZ and Westpac. They’re the big four banks here in Australia, the biggest four banks that make more profits than any other banks around the world. I think that stats right, but they’re big, big banks here and they’re extremely profitable because they make a lot of money off of their consumers.

But if you look at this banner of logos here, you don’t see anything Cardano related. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but let’s just jump back to the big announcement here from OpenStandard. So the whole point of OpenStandard is that there are still problems, as they say, when using stable coins. And I’m not a stable coin issuer.

I don’t work within the stable coin space. I don’t do huge amounts of remittance payments. So I don’t know the problems, but these guys do. So here we go.

Still, the whole process here still faces significant hurdles with fees to mint, fees to redeem the stable coin assets and it becomes expensive and especially with large volumes. And they aren’t always benefiting from revenues earned from the underlying assets. So we know this, we use USDC. The only place that you can really earn from holding USDC is on Circle.

So it’s kind of like a closed ecosystem there. If you want to earn the yields from the underlying assets that make up USDC, you have to do it via their app, their Coinbase. So it kind of locks you into their ecosystem and isn’t beneficial if you want to move somewhere else, a different app, whatever it is. So this is opening up the whole ecosystem there.

Then the third issue here, developers have little recourse if the roadmaps of third-party issuers do not meet their needs. So that’s very true. So if any of these companies here wanted to build upon USDC, their ecosystem, they may not benefit from anything that they actually build. Their payment’s great, you know, fast payments, whatever.

But because the Circle team own everything, they’re the ones that really benefit in the end. So it’s kind of like a decentralizing the benefits and the reason why to build on a stable coin protocol. Now, if we go down here, what else do they say? Businesses need something that’s open, low cost, high thorough put, broadly accessible and aligns with their interests.

Cool. Now, these are all the companies themselves. So they’ve listed all of their names here from all the banks, all the institutions, all the big tech companies and all the crypto players. Now, in the crypto players here, we see Solana.

Great. Fireblocks, Gemini, Metamask, Cool, eToro, big names there. I don’t see Cardano at all. Where is Cardano in this and why weren’t we brought to the table?

Are people working with them? Are people in contact with them? When this news came out, a lot of people were criticizing the founding entities for not being connected or having relationships with these partners to actually make this happen. And it may be lack of business development, maybe lack of connections.

It may be the historic view of Cardano that is hampering things here. But there is a glimmer of hope. And I’ve highlighted here with this company here called Braille. And I had to look into this one here.

So Braille. This is an announcement from the Cardano Foundation after all this stuff with OpenStandard. We welcome the announcement of OpenUSD and our partner Braille as a launch partner. We’re exploring other integration options also, and we’ll share more in due course.

So the Cardano Foundation doesn’t have a direct connection with OpenStandard, but through their partner Braille here, they do. So who on earth is Braille and how will this impact Cardano? So this is Braille here. It is a financial technology company building tools that help businesses create and manage their own stablecoins.

A stablecoin is a blah, blah, blah. Okay. They’re infrastructure for stablecoins. You can find out a little bit more about them at braille.xyz.

Looks like they’re pretty well established and supporting lots of chains with lots of billions in transactions through their platform. So it looks like a good, solid partner for the Cardano Foundation to have partnered with to actually make this OpenStandard thing possible. So we aren’t exactly being entirely left behind. We do have a connection and it’s through this particular partner here at Braille.

Now, where is this going to go? How are we going to be impacted by this? Who’s going to build on this when we barely know anything about it? Luckily here, Project Catalyst is kicking back in this summer and they’re launching a mini pilot here.

2 million ADA. Not much ADA at all. I think that works out to be roughly about $250,000 or $300,000 USD. At the time of recording this, maybe a little bit less actually.

But the scope of this particular pilot will look at particular categories of submissions. Pyth, and that’s the Oracle side of things. But they also mentioned here Braille, and that is the partnership that the Cardano Foundation has to potentially build on OpenStandard. So that is really cool.

Okay, so there is some impact here. We will potentially see Cardano dApps integrating in via Braille to get connected with OpenStandard and have OUSD brought onto the Cardano ecosystem. Okay, so potentially more stablecoins on the ecosystem, a little bit more fragmentation there, but we can work things out. We’re not completely left out of the loop here at least.

The other things that are coming out of Catalyst, we’ve got the stablecoins proposals. So any project that is building on stablecoins, USDCX or Cardano Native, such as USDM, USDA, etc, etc. We also have programmable tokens and then on-chain identity. So technically these three really link together nicely.

These are Braille, stablecoins and programmable tokens. It’s all around being able to comply and align ourselves in the stablecoin ecosystem with freezing of assets and locking assets to addresses. So if we had more of this programmable token ecosystem on Cardano, we could possibly have stopped hacks like what we saw with SecondFi and that 16 million ADA that was converted to USDCX. We could have seen a lot more of that blocked and recovered quite easily, but we’re not there yet and a lot of DeFi maxis don’t really want that either.

But anyway, we have a good out of here for open standard. So I’m looking forward to seeing what happens there. Next new story I want to look at is some debate in the Kaduna ecosystem about revenue and where dApps are getting revenue from and how and where we as a Kaduna ecosystem should be spending and focusing our time and treasury funds. So Decimalus here from Fluxpoint Studios building some awesome stuff but he mentions here generating revenue from Kaduna user and activity hmm I think there’s like three uh does it mean three users maybe it does or three dApps either of the two there’s not much activity on chain at the moment.

Let me continue here further we Fluxpoint Studios have learned more had leaned more into revgen from web2 because there’s objectively not enough interest and or Kaduna DeFi activity to generate revenue for more than three or four dApps sad but true and this comes from Kat’s comment here she’s a big proponent in perpetuals the perpetual space strike finance is um one of them I’m going to keep saying this feel free to mute me if you’re tired of hearing it but if you want to increase Kaduna on-chain activity we need to support businesses that are currently generating revenue and this probably ties into the strike finance proposal at the moment where they’re looking for treasury funds to put into their platform to try and grow the platform more but then generate revenue for the treasury too I think it’s a brilliant idea I think people should support that proposal as well I think it’s a good one strike finance have proven themselves as a good platform to try and generate more revenue more fees and perps perpetuals are the hot topic at the moment so I think it’s a it’s a good thing but if you support the ones that are making revenue now it kind of mute any other new ones that are trying to build in the ecosystem and generate revenue in different verticals the next verticals so we know that prediction markets and perpetuals are hot right now what’s hot next what’s coming next and I’d argue that AI agents x402 payments and things like that are the next thing they’re the next thing that we should be looking at and the rails that should be built and everything now I know Patrick Tobler from Endmaker or Masumi network they’ve done a lot of work there and they’re well ahead of the game like years ahead of the game building the platform there and making AI agentic payments a thing and I think that’s really going to be the next era of blockchain and stable coin payments so that’s something that we really need to pay attention to and focus investment on so if we keep on focusing on what’s hot right now great we’ll generate revenue now but we need to generate revenue in the future and start funding those things that are coming up next so Decimalus here makes a really good point we need to look into generating revenue on the cadana ecosystem in different ways and you know if if we if it is some of these new ideas with agentics side of things then we need to actually look into it and fund it as well not just what we’re looking at at the moment and playing with at the moment so cash here brings up a nice post and brings up some stats for the month of June 26 000 transactions in June and this is for way up so way up is looking quite good at the moment and it may be because they’re doing the migrations from JPEG store over to way up the NFT marketplace JPEG store closed down so and way up is now taking over but we’ve got 26 000 transactions there from the way up team bodega prediction market 7.1 surf finance borrowing lending 7k uh dono go it should be dano finance now but 4k there and then strike finance 3.4k transactions so overall some good activity for the cadana ecosystem in comparison to really what we were transacting before but the volume here is nice on the way up side of things but this is nowhere near enough for the cadana ecosystem to survive off transactions alone i did the calculations for this before but it needs to be a hell of a lot more for state pool operators to be completely uh independent of the reserves and uh that’s that’s where we really need to be and i think we need to be there now um let me explain that for those that don’t know the cadano state pools out there they get 340 ADA from the reserves this was an incentive pool set aside it’s not from the treasury but it’s pre-minted and just set aside there as a reserve to pay state pool operators to keep them operating it’s like a kick-starting for the ecosystem and eventually over time transaction fees will go up and as they go up we don’t need to rely on the reserves anymore and the reserves will eventually run out anyway so the idea is that by the time the reserves run out transact transaction volume on cadana should be high enough to make the state pools profitable at the moment they’re not it’s far from that profitable state and if that reserve funding wasn’t there most of the state pools would probably die out or we wouldn’t even bother running a state pool at all so we need to get this transaction count up as high as possible the problem here is that the most attractive thing about cadano is coming in and just staking your ADA it’s easy non-custodial you don’t need to interact with a smart contract or anything just get your ADA move it to custodial wallet point it to a state pool set and forget and walk away and because of that i believe that’s why a lot of people don’t participate in cadano defi they go for the easy option plus there’s all these tax implications when you actually do participate in defi here in australia if you do a swap it’s a taxable event you have to pay capital gains tax if you do borrowing lending same thing if you make a loss you have to report on that if you make profit you have to report on that it’s quite a headache when you go through all this and you have to track every single transaction and work out if you made a loss or gain and then work out your tax on top of that so it’s it’s very prohibitive for a lot of people to participate in defi but we still need to get transactions up on chain so whatever however we can do that is desperately needed at this point in time but there’s a lot of hurdles that we have to get over and one of them is the fact that a lot of cadano users just simply stake and don’t do anything else on top of that now this next item here uh phil here phil works tirelessly in the cadana ecosystem he’s created a brand new platform here it’s called the proof platform and it’s to make his d rep priorities clear and a lot of the prior a lot of the proposals that have been put on chain recently orientated around defi such as the pogon proposal and other defi related proposals they’ve all failed and they haven’t gone through on chain and this is really what we need to get the transactions up if we have protocols that generate yield generate revenue it will attract users to actually use it so think of it like this if you as a speculator in the market uh investor someone playing around the crypto space you have 10 000 us dollars and you have an option what should you do with that money you could put it in an index fund which is pretty easy and that usually generates return around seven to ten percent that’s pretty easy to do and uh you know the the laws around that make it easy now the other side you could also put it into cadano defi and that will give you a smaller return maybe maybe higher return if you put it into ada staking it will give you about two percent at the moment it’s not really appealing is it so if i had 10 000 would i put it into ada staking or would i put it into a index fund i probably would be more attracted to the index fund it makes more revenue there but if you have options such as pogon other defi related things it will attract users to move away from those index funds and whatever is easy and safe to something a little bit more risky because it gives you more of a return and you don’t want just defi crypto tokens you want real yield you want real assets such as usd or btc or ada so those type of tokens are the ones that you want out of the ecosystem if you are willing to take a risk so i think that’s really important and phil here um is a really good d rep but it controversial at times a lot of people have weird ways of communicating but phil definitely does have kadana’s interest at heart so if you want to check out his platform it’s only a landing page at the moment so i’m assuming he’s going to put more on here over time but you’ll see how he votes his um his ideals where he wants to vote how he wants to vote etc etc but do check out the platform in time and check out how he will potentially try and drive more defi in the kadana ecosystem now this does bring me on to more governance side of things and this is this was expected i knew this was coming now this first one here net change limit for those that don’t know net change limit is the amount of ada that can be withdrawn from the kadana treasury over a period of time at this point it is set at 350 million ada until mid next year so we have one whole year to spend 350 well it was actually a year and a half because it started in january but we’ve already spent that it’s all gone essentially all gone all allocated to various projects and i think there’s like 20 million left so with a whole year to go and a lot of initiatives still out there and people seeking more funding there’s this proposal here now to increase the net change limit to 500 million ada and there are mixed reviews on this firstly yes a lot of people knew this was coming yep yep a lot of people did there was a lot of talk about it but a lot of people are either for it or against it so the first ones are you know against it using more ada pulling more ada out and selling it for stable coins to pay developers and protocols and whatever it’s definitely going to send the price of ada down we’re at 17 cents usd at the moment which is a nice recovery not too bad but selling more ada another another big chunk here will definitely have some sort of impact over time now this was all changed and i highly highly believe it was changed and going to increase not to allow for all the cardano daps and projects out there that missed out on that first round of funding to get funding it is purely for this project here cardano prime i highly suspect this has been put forward so that cardano prime can get their foot in the door and get their 120 million ada to boost up the cardano defy ecosystem so i did an interview with these guys please do check it out links in the top right hand corner there but they have a full scope an idea and plan of how to increase defy activity on cardano and then set the road the infrastructure the the roadmap everything put everything in place so that next time we do campaigns like this it makes it easier projects can then come in and say i want to do a campaign similar to what alpha growth did with the cardano prime project and bring up more liquidity and activity i’ll point out one thing that they did for the compound ecosystem so compounds are borrowing lending protocol on the ethereum space but one thing that they did was they integrated in a defy protocol directly into coinbase so coinbase users when they were participating in their you know the dap ecosystem there it seamlessly integrated that into the defy space so users using coinbase didn’t even know they were using a platform called morpho and that’s the type of experience that users want that’s the type of experience that’s how defy should work for a lot of people i don’t know what’s happening in the background and i frankly don’t care as long as i’m getting a yield and return through the best user experience possible so the alpha growth team here are looking at similar ways to do that for the cardano ecosystem so the idea here is that we get a an application such as coinbase with hundreds of millions of users around the world connected to cardano defy and with that rail put in place we’ll see something as simple as native cardano staking through coinbase connected directly to the cardano state pool ecosystem imagine if they took a really really nice approach where they said all right let’s delegate all this instead of to coinbase state pools delegate it to single state pool operators in the cardano ecosystem or something like that you know they could put in that kind of parameter in there to randomly delegate to particular users and allocate the ada that way and then give the return to the stakers that way so that’s pretty cool but there’s also borrowing lending protocols out there in the cardano ecosystem there’s also bitcoin defy in the cardano ecosystem a lot of protocols are turning things on at the moment so imagine that happening from coinbase with that seamless user experience over to cardano so that’s where alpha growth are trying to insert themselves into the Kadana ecosystem and why this 120 million is needed to make that happen. And when you convert 120, it’s only 19, it’s just under 20 million.

It’s not that much. It’s actually quite cheap if you look at it from a USD point of view, just that we all look at things in ADA and it turns out to be really expensive in ADA at the moment. But this highly likely is all, this 500 million ADA adjustment is highly likely going to be swallowed up a lot by this particular bit of request from alpha growth. There’ll be a little bit left over for the Kadana ecosystem and other people that are building and developing and doing all the good stuff out there.

But pretty much it’s all going to the alpha growth team here. It’s just the reality of it, guys. Now, there is a bit of talk about this at the moment, this brand new website. I haven’t seen this one before.

It’s dereptalk.com. And we can see various delegates already pushing this one through. So we’ve got some dereps here voting on this one. And so far it’s the yeses that are pushing this one through.

So we probably will see this one get through on chain. I really didn’t think we would, but I think if the people in charge, the people that are most influential get their hands on this one and push things through because they know what is needed, it will most likely change to that 500 million ADA. Anyway, guys, if you are looking for a derep, I’ve built this derep matchmaking website, which you can use to help you find a derep. This is it here.

You can take a little quiz. You go through here. You can answer all these various different questions. And based on your answers, it will try and find you someone that matches up with your views.

So that random clicking came up with Chris Katter here. He’s currently got 5.9, just under 6 million ADA delegated to him by 156 people. And it’s a 67% match. So now I can connect my wallet here, whatever wallet you’re using, and then delegate directly to that particular person here.

So it’s a nice way of trying to find someone that agrees and is aligned with your particular views to potentially delegate to them as well. So I put some parameters and filters under here. So it’s any derep that’s under 30 million at the moment and has active on-chain activity and is an active derep. So it kind of decentralizes.

That was the main goal of this particular matchmaking dap here. So do check that one out, guys, if you’re interested. That’s all I have for this particular Kadan News update. I said it was gonna be quick, but no, I still went over time longer than I expected as well.

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Lots of news out there, and I’ll see you in the next video. And I’ll see you in the next video.