Cardano’s Ecosystem Just Got Bigger — 3 Partner Chains Are Actually Building
Episode by Peter Bui on April 13th, 2026
Midnight grabbed the headlines as Cardano’s first partner chain — but it’s no longer alone. A growing number of projects are now building their own chains on Cardano’s partner chain infrastructure, each with a specific use case that benefits from lower transaction costs, faster speeds, and custom-tailored rules. In this episode, Peter walks through three projects currently developing partner chains in the Cardano ecosystem: Materios, Vola Network, and Charli3.
If you’ve heard the term “partner chain” but weren’t quite sure what it means or why projects are choosing this path, this is the explainer you need.
What Is a Partner Chain?
A partner chain is a separate blockchain that bootstraps its security and decentralisation by tapping into Cardano’s existing stake pool operator network. Rather than building an entirely independent chain from scratch, a partner chain inherits a layer of trust from Cardano’s validator ecosystem while operating independently with its own rules and economics.
The technology is built on Parity Technologies’ Substrate stack — the same modular framework that underpins the Polkadot ecosystem. Substrate’s modularity means developers can plug in only the features their application needs, making it well-suited for purpose-built chains.
The key benefits of a partner chain are:
- Faster transaction speeds — a smaller, focused network can process transactions much more quickly than a general-purpose chain
- Lower transaction costs — purpose-built chains don’t carry the overhead of a global L1
- Custom configuration — developers can tailor consensus, fee models, and data structures to their application’s exact needs
The trade-off is a degree of centralisation. To achieve fast, cheap transactions, partner chains run smaller validator sets. For single-application networks, this is generally an acceptable trade-off — the use case doesn’t require the same level of decentralisation as a global settlement layer.
Midnight: The Flagship
Midnight, developed by IOG, was the first major partner chain to launch on Cardano. It brings privacy and selective disclosure to the ecosystem, allowing developers to build applications where users can prove facts about themselves without revealing underlying data. Midnight has been performing well in the months since launch and set the template for what a partner chain can look like in the Cardano ecosystem.
Materios: Gaming and DeFi Infrastructure
The team behind Materios is the same group responsible for Fluxpoint, the Tribe game, and Adam — an AI trading bot that’s been active in the Cardano DeFi space for some time. Now they’re building Materios as a dedicated partner chain for their entire ecosystem.
Materios is already live on its own testnet, with a working block explorer where anyone can browse transactions. Node operator slots are open, meaning community members can participate in running the network and earn revenue from fees. The announcement generated strong engagement — a signal that the Cardano community has been waiting for more partner chain activity.
Vola Network: Decentralised Storage
Nuvola Digital announced Vola Network back in October 2024 as Cardano’s DePIN aggregator partner chain, focused on decentralised storage, CPU/GPU compute, and DePIN protocol aggregation. The use case makes the need for a partner chain immediately obvious: if your application moves data in and out of decentralised storage hundreds of times a day, paying 0.17 ADA per Cardano mainnet transaction would be economically unviable at any meaningful scale.
A partner chain solves this cleanly — Vola Network gets near-zero transaction costs and high throughput for storage operations, while still sitting within the broader Cardano security umbrella. The team has been actively developing since the announcement and is approaching public testnet.
Charli3: Oracle Data on Substrate
Charli3 is the established oracle provider for the Cardano ecosystem, feeding price and market data to DeFi protocols across the network. Their partner chain documentation outlines a Substrate-based architecture with data adapters and on-chain/off-chain bridging capabilities.
In the episode, Peter notes that the Charli3 team responded directly with an update on their MVP progress — delivered as a future-recorded segment that adds context to where the project stands today.
Charli3 MVP Update
The Charli3 MVP was completed in 2025 and successfully demonstrated the ability to aggregate data from over 100,000 token pairs spanning Cardano, Binance Smart Chain, Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon — all delivered onto Cardano. The chain updates every six seconds, and multiple data feeds can be bundled into a single Cardano transaction, significantly reducing costs at scale.
The current limitation is that the MVP only supports push functionality — data is pushed onto the chain rather than being pullable on demand. Pull capability requires additional development work. Charli3 has relied on Catalyst funding to reach this point, and the path to production will depend on market adoption and further funding rounds.
Why This Matters for the Ecosystem
The emergence of multiple partner chains signals that the technology has matured enough for production-ready teams to commit to it. Each project is choosing the partner chain path for the same core reason: their application needs something a general-purpose L1 can’t efficiently provide, but they don’t want to give up the security and decentralisation that comes with building within the Cardano ecosystem.
Midnight proved the model. Materios, Vola, and Charli3 are now proving it can scale to multiple use cases — gaming and DeFi infrastructure, decentralised storage, and oracle data delivery. The infrastructure is there. The question now is how many more projects follow.
Key Takeaways
- Partner chains bootstrap security from Cardano’s stake pool operator network while running as independent blockchains with their own rules and economics.
- The tech is built on Parity Technologies’ Substrate stack — the same framework used by Polkadot — making it highly modular and customisable.
- Midnight is the flagship partner chain, but Materios, Vola Network, and Charli3 are all now building their own chains on the same infrastructure.
- Materios (gaming/DeFi) is already live on testnet with a working explorer and open node operator positions.
- Vola Network (decentralised storage/DePIN) is approaching public testnet after announcing in October 2024.
- Charli3 completed a partner chain MVP in 2025 capable of aggregating over 100,000 token pairs across five blockchains, updating every six seconds.
Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only. Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice. Always do your own research.
Text Transcript
We’re seeing more and more projects build on partner chains to the Cardano ecosystem. This allows for a whole bunch of really interesting mechanisms, and I’m going to go through all of that and talk about these projects that are building partner chains to the ecosystem here.
Let’s get into it.
Hey everyone, I’m Peter. If it’s your first time here, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I talk all things Cardano, Midnight, and all these other brand new partner chains that are coming to the ecosystem.
I am an ambassador for the Cardano ecosystem and Midnight as well.
Let’s get into the details here.
Partner chains isn’t a brand new piece of tech. It’s been around for quite a few years now, but it’s coming to a point where it’s a lot more mature.
With the partner chains, it enables a new blockchain to bootstrap the security and leverage Cardano’s stake pool operator ecosystem. We have your own chain that is the partner chain, but then it taps into the existing Cardano ecosystem that way.
It shares that level of security decentralisation with a mixed level of validators within the network. It’s really interesting tech.
The other interesting thing is that it’s built on Parity Technologies’ Substrate stack. This comes from the Polkadot ecosystem and Substrate is very modular in how it’s built. So you can tack on things that you might want in there to make it built the way that you want.
We’ve had Midnight, the biggest partner chain project launch on the Cardano ecosystem, bringing privacy, selective disclosure onto the ecosystem. And this is all very exciting.
And we’ve seen how well Midnight has been doing over the last few months. And of course, this is an IOG product. Charles is all behind it. And of course, it’s the big first flagship partner chain that has come out to the Cardano ecosystem.
But we’re seeing other projects come on board and do the same thing.
And one of the main benefits of a partner chain is that you can have faster transaction speeds. You can plug in and add in more features that you might want. And you can also have cheaper transaction costs.
So if you’re running an application or something that needs faster transactions and a very low transaction cost, you can have those modifications in there tailored to what your application needs.
So that’s a really good benefit of a partner chain.
Now, one of the trade-offs here is that it probably would be a little bit more centralised compared to what Cardano is. So to have that fast transaction speed, to have that lower cost, you need a smaller network.
And because it’s running just one unique application, it probably is okay in those type of situations.
So let’s have a look at what is actually launching.
And this is the first one here I want to mention, and this is Materios. This is the team behind Fluxpoint, the Tribe game, and also Adam, the AI trading bot that has been around for a little while now.
So if you haven’t seen any of that stuff, do check it out. I have done interviews with Nate, the founder of the projects.
And now he’s released this thing here, Materios as a partner chain for their ecosystem. And it’s really interesting what they’ve pieced together here. And I can’t wait to see this one in action.
It is actually live on their own testnet at the moment. So you can have a look at the transactions. They’ve got their own little Materios Explorer here. It’s all within staging, and you can see how it all works.
You can also become a node operator for their environment as well, and help decentralise their network and earn revenue fees for running it as well.
So it’s really cool to see that.
And everyone got really excited about this. I posted this up and it got quite a good amount of engagement, 300 likes at the moment. So it’s not too bad.
But there were others before them that announced that they were building as a partner chain as well.
And Nuvola or Vola Networks, they’re building up their network on the partner chain tech as well.
So you can see here, I’ll put a link down to this, but Nuvola, what they’re doing is decentralised storage. And you can imagine if you’re paying Cardano transaction fees each time you’re using a network, that doesn’t make sense.
You’re paying 0.17 ADA for every transaction. You’re moving things in and out of your virtual decentralised Dropbox. That’s going to cost an absolute fortune.
So to be able to do that at scale and at an affordable rate, you need to have your own private network. And this is where a partner chain for the Vola Network makes sense.
You get it? You get what’s going on here?
So that’s why they kind of need something of their own to be able to take advantage of lower transaction costs and faster transaction speeds.
It all makes sense there.
Now there’s one more project that talked about the partner chain, and this is back in 2024 when they first started on it.
And this is Charli3, the Oracle that is building on Cardano. And I shouldn’t say building on Cardano, they’ve built, they’re done. They’re providing Oracle data to a lot of projects within the ecosystem.
And their documentation here talks about the partner chain side of things. You can see here, it does mention that it is all on Substrate, the partner chain.
They’ve got data adapters, bridging for on-chain, off-chain data. And they’ve got a little bit of links here to various repositories, to their GitHub repositories, I should say, about their partner chain tech and everything else around it.
Now I haven’t heard too much from the Charli3 team recently in regards to their partner chain involvement, but I did ask them the question and hopefully we do hear back from them in regards to their development with Substrate and the partner chain side of things.
And if their whole Oracle has yet moved to the partner chain side of things.
Now I just have to jump in real quick here. This is me from the future recording, but the Charli3 team did get back to me in regards to an update with what they have done with their MVP for this partner chain build.
And let me just pull up on the screen here.
So the MVP was complete in 2025 and demonstrated the ability to get the data of over 100,000 token pairs from Cardano, Binance Smart Chain, Base, Arbitrum and Polygon on Cardano.
And the chain updates every six seconds and can be bundled multiple feeds into a single Cardano transaction.
There’s no pull capabilities, only pushing the data onto the chain. So it needs a little bit more work to get that pull capabilities in and working that way.
But overall, really cool.
They’ve relied on Catalyst funding to make this all happen. So I don’t know if they’ll be able to get this into production takes the next phase yet. They need more market adoption to be able to do that.
But awesome to see and thank you so much to the Charli3 team for providing me the update and letting everyone else know where you guys are up to with the partner chain side of things.
So guys, we’re seeing more and more projects launch on partner chains.
We get those advantages of being its own private chain, but then also the advantages of being able to roll that back into and inherit Cardano’s decentralisation and levels of security there.
So really exciting stuff, guys.
Let me know in the comments down below what you think about all this. Are partner chains cool? When did you first hear about the partner chain tech?
Apparently, it’s been around for quite a long time. I’m trying to find when I first heard about it. And it is at least three or four years now when I first heard about partner chains and building on Polkadot’s tech.
So there’s a lot of really cool things there.
If you want to check back in my videos, I did a lot of videos about partnering up with Polkadot, exploring their ecosystems, exploring what we can learn from them as well when they first announced all this.
So it’s been around for quite a while.
But let me know what you guys think down below.
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Like always, guys, stay positive and I’ll see you in the next video.
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