Cardano’s MiCA Push, Digital Commodity Status and 22M ADA Vote

Okay, guys, here is a big Cardano news update for you all, everything that’s happening in the Cardano ecosystem over the last week, so let’s get right into it here. Now, first off, before I get into this Cardano Foundation news update, just be careful. There’s a lot of hacks, and there’s a lot of vulnerabilities.

There’s a lot of compromised pieces of software out there thanks to AI being able to discover them. Some of these hacks and whatnot have been around for a very long time, and as a result of AI researchers using the tools that are made available to them now, they have found these vulnerabilities and have proven how to exploit them as well, so that’s the scary thing that’s happening at the moment, so if you are online, if you’re using any website out there, just be careful because it could be compromised.

So just be extra wary over the next few weeks while engineers, system architects, system engineers patch things and get things back to normal. So just a word of warning for you guys. It’s been a very, very turbulent month of October in terms of cybersecurity, with more vulnerabilities found this month alone than, I think, this year, so…

And there’s more and more coming, so just be wary, guys. So let’s get into this first news item here. First off, the Cardano Foundation submitted a response to the European Commission around the review of markets in crypto asset regulations, the MiCA compliance side of things. So they want to change some things here and make things somewhat more difficult if there’s more regulation around it, so the Cardano Foundation here has a full response, and you can check it out on their website here as well, and I’ve highlighted a couple of things here, but I’ve done a little bit of a summary here, and let me just take you through it.

So now the foundation is pushing for clearer and more consistent rules that recognise the difference between a decentralised blockchain and the traditional financial services at the moment. One of the major focuses is Cardano’s non-custodial staking model compared to other chains such as Ethereum, where you do need to lock up your ETH and hand it over to the protocol or the smart contracts or Lido as a third-party service to actually stake your ETH.

So those types of models have a custodial aspect to it, whereas Cardano’s model, the ADA, the asset always stays in your wallet, and that’s the clear difference here. So they want to make sure that the regulation that’s coming into place doesn’t pigeonhole ADA holders into that same model and just say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, you’re staking.

It’s the same thing, right?” No, it’s not. It’s very, very different. Non-custodial staking is a very good design of the Cardano blockchain, and we want to make sure that is very clear. So thank you so much to the Cardano Foundation for putting that through to ensure that ADA holders in Europe aren’t pigeonholed into the same bucket.

Now, there’s a lot of regulation that’s coming into Australia as well, and I’d love to see the foundation put in a letter to ASIC, Australian Securities and Investments Commission, to ensure that we get treated the same way here in Australia as well. It’s pretty much the same type of, letter, but it could be applied to the Australian regulation space as well.

Now, the foundation also opposes introducing unnecessary new regulation framework around DeFi lending and NFTs and other blockchain activities, instead advocates for applying existing laws based on actual risk and functions. So that’s a really good move there too, and it also warns that excessive compliance costs and regulatory uncertainty could disadvantage smaller projects, discourage innovation, and push blockchain businesses outside of Europe, and we’re seeing that happen a lot in other jurisdictions as well.

So we don’t want that innovation to move, especially in economies that are seeing a little bit of uncertainty at the moment, and a lot of Western countries are seeing that, so you don’t want to push that out to different jurisdictions around the world. You want to keep it in those countries, keep that innovation, keep that building happening there in those particular countries.

For example, I’m building things here in Australia, and I don’t want to have to leave Australia to continue building in the blockchain space, but if regulations change, I’ll have to. So anyway, good work there from the Cardano Foundation for pushing that stuff through. Now, this other post here is around the SEC’s classification of ADA as a digital commodity and not a security.

Now, that’s a good thing, so it’s not a security, so when we’re, all compliant in that regard, but this letter here by Stellar, Hedera, Aptos, Ava Labs, Cardano Foundation, and Chainlink want more clarity around it. So we’ve got the classification, which is great, but now we need to get an explanation of the crypto rules so that we know where these chains and these assets actually stand and how they are interacted with.

So let me just read over the post here that I’ve got. “The Cardano Foundation has joined forces with Stellar, Hedera, Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Chainlink to urge the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, to formally recognise digital commodities as non-securities in its proposed crypto regulations. While the SEC in 2026 interpreted already distinguishes digital commodities from securities, these organisations want regulations to state that classification directly to provide stronger long-term legal certainty.

They argue that native blockchain assets like ADA serve essential functions, including paying transaction fees, securing the network through staking, and participating in governance rather than simply representing an investment in a company.” And that is all very true. We’ve seen governance on Cardano, how chaotic it can be, and you need ADA to be able to vote within the ecosystem, so it’s not just a investment.

It is much more than just an investment token. There’s so much to it. Me as a stake pool operator, I earn ADA from running the network itself, and that comes from the protocol, so the protocol pays me, not the Cardano Foundation, not IOG, not Charles Hoskinson. I run- A Cardano node, and for my efforts, I get paid by the protocol.

There’s a reserve pot there of ADA, and the ADA comes from that, and ADA also comes from transaction fees, the activity on the network. So the more activity that happens on-chain, the more I get paid as a stake pool operator. At the moment it’s not much, it’s barely even paying for the bills, but it’s still efforts by myself that is getting the rewards from it, not from a central entity.

So there’s a lot of aspects here, and, they all want that recognised and put in paper so that it is all very clear. So ultimately, the goal here is to reduce the regulatory uncertainty, protect blockchain innovation, and give developers and businesses clearer rules for operating in the United States. So all very good stuff there.

You can read the letter here. I’ll put a link to it down below. But good to see that all these companies, all these chains have joined forces to push the SEC in the right direction. So really, really good activity there. Right. So now let’s move on to the governance side and what’s happening with the treasury within the Cardano ecosystem.

So this first one here, this, I, I didn’t realise this was coming through, but Toto Finance, Total Tokenisation. They are working to build a Cardano strategic copper reserve, essentially bringing copper as an asset on-chain, as a real-world asset. Cool. A simple asset, it’s a widely known commodity, and bring it on-chain kinda makes sense to me.

It’s kinda like the… one of the first stepping stones to tokenised assets on any chain. You start with something really simple as tea, which we’ve seen. We’ve seen silver come on-chain. We’ve seen a bit of gold as well. But copper is another commodity that’s widely used around the world, it’s widely traded, and bringing it on-chain kinda makes sense as well.

So this is a treasury proposal for 22 million ADA. That’s a lot of ADA, guys. That’s a lot of ADA. What it’s being used for? I don’t know. I, haven’t gone through details of this yet to find out what is needed, how much it costs, and all that stuff. But you can see the details around the treasury proposal here, so they have their official announcement.

We’ve got the details around this. We’ve got the GovTool link here as well, which I do have in the background here, but, you can read their announcement, their post. Like I said, I haven’t gone through this one in detail yet, but their treasury proposal is here, and at the moment they need to hit that threshold of 67% to be able to get this through.

Currently, at the moment, they’ve got 13 million yes in ADA voting power, 0.25% of the votes, which isn’t enough, guys. I don’t think this one’s gonna get through. So it’s interesting if they are even going to make a dent in this one. I don’t know the team, I don’t know any marketing that they’re doing, I don’t know reach, outreach, awareness of this.

I’ve only seen a couple of posts, and I thought I’d just bring it to people’s attention because it is quite a interesting one in regards to what is possible, in regards to tokenised assets. But, you know, they’ve got a long way to go to actually make this happen and bring it on-chain. Voting opened up on the 15th last week, and they’ve got to the 16th of November, Epoch 668, when this vote ends.

I’m no longer a DRep, so I won’t be voting for this one at all, but it’s a interesting one to see at the moment. Now, this treasury season ends essentially at the end of this year, if I’ve got my dates correct. So we will see a lot more treasury proposals being submitted around now-ish to beginning of next year, we’ll see a lot more as more projects seek more funding.

Is there much treasury funds left? It’s kinda dwindling a bit, guys. It’s being used up quite quickly. So will we see, more treasury proposals? Yes, we will. We’ve got already some other ones here that are, hanging around, so some other ones that we need to look into as well. Okay, guys, that’s treasury proposals at the moment, and I won’t go into any more of that.

Now, this next news story here is around a brand-new min margin for CIP-23 that will be pushed through the Cardano blockchain sometime in December when the Dijkstra hard fork happens. And with this, it will make smaller stake pool operators more… What’s the right word? More competitive with some of the bigger ones out there.

Okay, now a few more news stories to round up this update. The 5am.earth project has hit 100,000 farms registered on Cardano. This is using the Cardano blockchain and the metadata that’s available to register all these farms, and they’re using their app so they can see how the farms are mapped out and whatnot.

So that’s a great use of the chain. We’re actually seeing on-chain activity because of all this mapping, so that’s an absolutely crazy milestone to have there, 100,000 farms. I remember when it was 10,000 only a few months ago, so they’re mapping more and more here. And this is all about, having all that data mapped on-chain, and you can verify all that information, so they know they can plan things.

They can provide DeFi loans in the future for these farms ’cause they know how big the lots are. They can get some more data around it and all that stuff. So brilliant stuff, really good use case for the blockchain space. Now, this project here, this is cool. This is really, really cool. This is a Settlers…

A Settlers is a game I used to play back in the day. I think I played up to Settlers V or VI. Anyway, it’s a top-down RPG kinda thing where it’s a strategy-based game. But this is a representation of the Cardano ecosystem in 3D rendering. So you can see all these little people walking around from one application to another.

But this is a really nice and cool way to explore what is available within the Cardano ecosystem. So we’ve got API providers, we’ve got chain indexes, node networks, governance and treasury side of things, so what’s happening in governance there. We’ve got, proof and verification, supply chains. We got oracles, we got NFT, gaming, media.

Media? I didn’t notice that before. Am I here in media? Am I included in media? No, no, I’m not media. Okay? Maybe I’m this stray bo- … No. Okay. So I’m not in here at all, YouTubers aren’t included, but this is really cool to see everything in the Cardano ecosystem in terms of infrastructure and DeFi protocols.

So there’s a lot here in the DeFi protocol side of things. But, you know, it’s kind of a really cool way to explore what’s going on within the Cardano ecosystem. So awesome work there from Fabian to put this together, so absolutely love it. Should get more views here. Let me hit the repost there.

Maybe that will help get the views out there, but awesome stuff. Links down below if you wanna explore it. Now, this here is an update from RealFi. So RealFi launched on the 1st of October this month, so roughly 23 days ago from the time of this recording, and they’ve hit $2.7 million worth of, USD…

This acronym for their USD, so sUSDrf, so USD RealFi, S is for staked, so staked USD RealFi on chain. So that’s really cool. So their tokenised fund is growing at the moment. More and more people are using the platform, and all this data is coming in from Token Terminal. So I actually played around with the data from Token Terminal.

So Token Terminal is a on-chain aggregator of data. They have a agent skill that I implemented into Claude, and that allows me to track and visually see all this stablecoin data from the Cardano ecosystem and other RWAs. So I’ve got this really cool tool now that’s g- set up in Claude that gives me alerts and trackers of when things are moving, things are going up, things are going down, and I can generate graphs and all this stuff from it.

So it’s a really cool skill, guys. So if you’re using AI for any of this kind of stuff, and you wanna tap into some of the Cardano data, that skill from Token Terminal is really cool. Links down below for you guys if I remember to post that one. Real good stuff from the RealFi team.

We’re gonna see more liquidity, I assume, coming out from the RealFi team as they bring in more liquidity because this actually gives you real rewards, real yields from the platform itself, so really cool stuff. Now, this last news story that I wanted to highlight here, and this is a product around using the heat from a Bitcoin miner to heat water, and in this case, a hot water tank that you might have at home.

Let me just play this for you. This was wild when I saw it. Upgrade your water heater with Bitcoin showers. Meet Bitwater, a Bitcoin mining powered heating element powered by Bitcoin mining ASIC chips. Same tank, same electricity, plus Bitcoin. Powerful specs designed for high mining utilisation. Simple installation into the electric tank you already have.

Regular water heaters suffer from corrosion and limescale. Bitwater protects your water heating system. Control it all from the app. Bitwater: heat water, mine Bitcoin. How, how cool is that? It’s absolutely wild, I think. The whole idea of using the heat generated from a Bitcoin miner to heat your water, heat your home, whatever it is, has been around for a while, but these guys have engineered a way to do it so that you can put in your expensive Bitcoin miner into a hot water tank, and it won’t corrode over the next couple of years.

So this is amazing. This is really cool tech. I really hope this is real and not just some vaporware kind of thing that, you know, they put up and, you know, it’s not a real thing. Let me just try and check out the website and see for myself. But, you know, having a Bitcoin miner to having a home heating device or something like that is really cool.

All right. Let’s have a look at the website itself. 899. Is that for the whole tank or just the heating element? A water heater element with Bitcoin miner built in, screws into your… Okay, so that sounds like it’s just for the heating element itself. The really, really cool thing about this is that it will work with your existing hot water tank.

That was smart. Instead of building the whole hot water unit with a Bitcoin miner in there, tap into the heating element, the existing design of that, and work within that form factor to create a heating element there. Amazing. Amazing. Now, you know, one of my big criticisms of Bitcoin mining was that it is so energy intensive, and I always thought it was a waste.

Imagine using all of that electricity just to secure a network and, you know, the transactions aren’t that active. You know, you’re still producing all that hash power to secure the network, but activity is low. Now, this is repurposing that excess energy that is being created from the heat to actually be useful, and that is really cool.

So I wanna see more of this. Bitcoin miners do one thing: secure the network. But if there’s a byproduct from it, great. Fantastic. If it could cook a steak for me, fantastic. Let’s do that. Let’s, let’s heat up a frying pan and cook a steak for me. So you know? The possibilities are endless here, but this here is a really good utility.

Many, many people around the world have hot water units like this, and being able to plug and play a Bitcoin mining ASIC rig into there that doesn’t corrode and is long-lasting is absolutely amazing. So this is a really good thing. Now, I’m not endorsing this product. I’m not being paid by these guys.

I just thought it was quite a unique bit of innovation, and I wanna see more of this kind of stuff. All right. Anyway, guys, that’s all I have for this particular news update. Lots of stuff happening in the Cardano ecosystem and the crypto space in general. I’ve got a lot more videos coming out around the regulation space and tax space within Australia, so if you are Australian and interested in that, make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell.

Even if you’re not in Australia, hit that thumbs up on your way out. Help support the channel. It’s the easiest way. I’ve got YouTube memberships down below and also Buy Me a Coffee links there as well, so a great way to support the channel. But otherwise, stay positive, guys. More news updates for you next week, and I’ll see you in the next video.