To Freeze or Not to Freeze, Cardano USDC, Wyoming Stable Coin Project

00:00
We have a couple of news stories here in the Cardano space to go through and every weekend never seems to disappoint. There’s always some sort of drama going on. And this episode, I’ll be looking into Charles’s reaction to the Wyoming stablecoin, also having a look at the general feeling and sentiment from the community around the stablecoin circle

00:28
is now looking for the community and what people are actually thinking about that. We also have a look at what happened to Iagon as well in this 24-hour DDoS attack and I’ll look over these details in particular posted up by the community members and also from Navjit from Iagon itself. All right, all that coming right up. So let’s have a look at Charles’ reaction around the Wyoming stablecoin project in general.

00:54
Now this all came about because there was this presentation at the University of Wyoming around demoing Cardano having the ability to freeze tokens and assets in general. So one of the selection criteria for the stablecoin was that it had to be able to be frozen. So if you’re a money launderer or the law needed to gain access to the particular tokens within your wallet.

01:24
they needed the ability to freeze those assets and then reclaim them for whatever reason. So if it’s criminal activity, money laundering, whatever it is, they needed a way to seize those funds. And Cardano natively out of the box at a glance didn’t have that capability. But over the last year in 2024, many community members have chimed in saying, actually Cardano has that natively and other developers such as the team from Fluid Tokens,

01:52
had jumped in and actually built out a SIP, SIP 113, 113. And this particular Kandana improvement process actually showcase how the locking and freezing of tokens actually worked. And this was implemented back in about mid 2024, but this demo here actually shows it all working. I’m not sure if this is a implementation of that particular SIP, or if this is a different implementation that the IOG team.

02:21
put out for this particular presentation at the Wyoming blockchain stampede. But whatever it is, this demoed exactly how it all worked. I have a really crude screen recording here. And let me just show you just quickly how it looks. Now we’re going to go to the minting authority. Now we’re getting to the interesting part, because we’re going to freeze Alice’s accounts. This is the view of the minting authority. And we can see there’s a normal wallet on the right-hand side. But then there’s also this admin.

02:51
panel that we can use to create new WST tokens and to freeze and unfreeze addresses of end users. And then on the left, there’s a list of all of the active addresses that currently hold WST tokens. And these are the two users that we have. Alice on the top and then Bob at the bottom. And we can copy Alice’s address now and go back to the freeze screen and freeze her account.

03:23
You can put in a reason there.

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freeze. The list of frozen addresses is a data structure that we store on the blockchain. And the Pluto scripts that implement the WST policy, they can look at the list to see if the sender of these tokens has been suspended or if they’re not in the list. And if they are suspended, the scripts would fail, so the transaction will not go through. But the

04:01
that build on top of this, they can also use the same list and see if an address has been frozen. So if I built an app on top of WST, I could also use the same data to go into that. We added this reason text field here just as a little reminder maybe that in a real world application, this step of freezing an address will be the last step in a kind of long manual process. So maybe.

04:28
Alice’s account was flagged because of suspicious behavior, or maybe she just didn’t pay her bills in a private system, maybe. But that’s what this reasons field is for. Now we can actually open this transaction. So click on this link. Going to the Cardano Explorer.

04:51
Okay, and here we can see that this is a real transactional mainnet. It was added a few seconds ago. There are a number, two contracts were run. So one of those contracts was the SIP 143 contract, and then the other one was the WST contract. And also if you click on metadata,

05:14
click on that, we can see that this is what we just entered in the reason field. So here you could put in a link to a document or a website or something to reference the reason for freezing the account. So as you can see there, it’s working. You can see it from that terrible screen recording, but you also have the blockchain explorer here on CXplorer.

05:38
with the particular transfers, the freeze, the seized assets, all the transaction details are there. So you can have a look at that if you like, and you can see how it all works. There’s also the implementation here. Okay, so this is from the input-output GitHub repository. So it’s their implementation of it’s there. So you can see it all working. But this is the guy that Charles is a little bit upset with. It’s the ED of the Worming Stable Token Commission, Anthony Apollo.

06:06
accusing him of not understanding how smart contracts actually work, nor being able to even look up the type of data on the Cardano blockchain explorers. Now it may be the case that he isn’t tech savvy, he isn’t up to speed with everything that’s out there, but he is the person making the decisions here in regards to which blockchain to implement the warming step coin on. So obviously there’s a lot of people influencing.

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his decisions. Charles obviously wanted to be one of those particular people or at least have a shot at it and to prove that Cardano could actually be a viable solution for this type of product. Now what’s the big deal about this? Well it’s one stablecoin project, why does it even matter? And this is why Elon Musk is calling for using blockchain tech for the Department of Government Efficiency.

07:02
Whatever the implementation may be, it doesn’t really matter. The point here is it will get a lot of eyeballs and showcasing whatever blockchain is chosen, its capabilities and technology, and how it can possibly be implemented at a government level to create some sort of level of efficiency. So here we have Anthony Apollo talking about their published assessment of blockchain networks for initial.

07:31
issuance of the stablecoin Wyoming’s Wyoming stablecoin. So we can have a look at this. So we can take a look at this report and their scoring. It’s on their Notion website here. So there’s a lot of information. Everything’s public here, which is quite good to be very public at a government level. But this is the scoring link here. This is how they’re scoring all the blockchains. They went through everything and gave comments and remarks against all the criteria that they were looking at for this selection process.

08:01
So we’ve got our grand upturn. We’ve got all the major blockchains here. There’s 29 of them. And we can scroll to Cardano here on the documents. There it is there. And there’s a couple of things that we can look at. And the first one here is the explorer. Now, one of the mentions that Charles said, the person couldn’t use an explorer. Now, I’m wondering here, I don’t know if you guys remember, but

08:26
There was an absolutely horrid Explorer, one of the very original ones. This was a dark background with very hard to read blue text. I’m wondering if the commission came across that website as the first Explorer they approached as opposed to one of the other Kidano community built ones, which are absolutely fantastic. And if they did end up at the really poorly designed one, which was built way, way back in the early days.

08:54
It would have really put them off because it was very hard to use and I could totally understand if that was one of the issues. And I really wonder if that was the case because this website here, the explorers showcase on Cardano.org, I haven’t seen this page, this landing page before. Before, when I used to search for explorers for Cardano, it came up with that old IOG built one and it wasn’t very good at all compared to any of these. These are far better.

09:25
So I’m wondering if the commission saw that and then this page was changed over accordingly. And the last bit here, the freeze and seize. Yeah, it’s not one of those core features that Cardano has, and I don’t think it was very visible. But as you could see from the demonstration here, that it is all possible without any additional Cardano improvement proposals, it’s all done with smart contracts. That’s a little bit of an issue there. And it’s unfortunate that these demonstrations.

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of the capabilities weren’t done well before the selection criteria. And I have to say in Cardano’s defense, none of these selection criteria were actually published online or anywhere for anyone to see. So we didn’t know that we had to have this ability shown to the commission for selection. So that’s one of the sticky points here, a couple of the sticky points. And you can see from the comments down here as well, the native stable coins, assets, GED,

10:23
or Minetta didn’t have these abilities for freezing or seizing capabilities. Mainly because the Kodama community doesn’t want those capabilities. We want total freedom of our assets. We don’t want to be able to freeze our assets. We don’t other people, other projects, whatever it is, coming in and taking our assets saying, no, you can’t have that. So it’s something that we don’t really in particularly like. The other comment here about midnight. Yes, it could serve as an L2 and make this all possible.

10:53
with EVM capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, Midnight is still not deployed. I was hoping to see it in 2024, but no, we have not yet seen Midnight. So it’s obviously not a viable solution at the moment for them. So this is the sticky point at the moment. And while Charles is so annoyed with the Wyoming stablecoin commission. So hopefully we’ll see something come out of this. Maybe we’ll see some people change their minds, but I think at this point in time,

11:21
It’s pretty much stuck in their ways and the ED of the Wyoming Stovercoin project will probably go through their shortlist that they have and choose one of the other blockchains. Now, the other news story I want to follow up on is this USDC saga. So last week, I reported that Frederick Greggard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, did meet with the executives at Circle to talk about Cardano’s implementation of USDC.

11:50
and they rejected it and said it wasn’t strategic fit. And you know, the community sentiment around this is really split. A lot of people do want it and I see the value in it. I really do. Having USDC integrated directly into the Kadino space means that liquidity can easily flow in and out of the Kadino ecosystem. So if you’re wanting to sell, if you are trading on the Kadino space, you can exit out onto any chain, onto any exchange easily and

12:19
the fiat currency within your wallet afterwards or on board yourself really easily as well. When people are coming in, all right what do I do I’ve got some USDC over an Arbitrum let’s move some over to Cardano and then start trading or buying NFTs or whatever it might be. So it’s a really positive in that the on and off ramps make it absolutely wonderful. But the other thing here is that we are now dealing with potentially dealing if we did get it integrated with that very centralized ecosystem.

12:49
And maybe this was why people aren’t looking into the Cardano space for this type of integration. With this high level decentralization, there’s no way to control the chain. There’s no way to actually have sway over it yourself. So it could be one of the reasons why USDC Circle weren’t interested in Cardano because there was no financial benefit from Circle for doing so. There’s also rumors about

13:18
Circle asking for billions of liquidity injected into the ecosystem by the Treasury or by the Katana Foundation or IOG. There’s rumors about that. From what I’ve heard, they aren’t true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Why join an ecosystem and have next to no liquidity there? So instead of Circle providing and forking up all that liquidity and taking the risk,

13:43
they’re asking the foundation, I.O.G., Emurgo, or even the community itself to fork out those funds so that they can have that liquidity there. And what’s going to happen? Are they going to take all that liquidity themselves or try and trade it out and move it to other chains? That could happen, and that would leave the Cardano space in a very, very poor position. So for me, it seems that Circle isn’t working with the Cardano space at this point in time.

14:11
Do we want to burn our bridges and just stick our fingers up at them? Probably not. Maybe they will come around in a couple of years time. And if that’s the case, we can’t burn our bridges. We do still need those interoperability connections to the Kodama space. Don’t forget we have midnight, we have partner chains and all sorts of other things coming as well. And of course, if you burn a bridge here, people talk. People… This space is very small.

14:39
The blockchain space is small, the crypto is small. So if you upset an executive at Circle, they’re gonna tell their friends at Base, at Kraken, at Coinbase, wherever it might be. And because they do talk, they’ll give Cardano even a worser name. They’ll tarnish it even further, saying, don’t work with these guys, they’re terrible to work with. So we can’t really burn up bridges here. This space is way too small to do so. If it is about money,

15:08
Circle can very easily get some funding through Catalyst, launch a couple of Catalyst proposals throughout the year and get all of that money for free. I’m 100% certain the community, there’s enough people out there that are banging in the comments down below. By the way, if you haven’t left a comment down below, please do and if you haven’t hit that thumbs up and subscribe, please do that as well. But there are plenty of people that want this and if Circle just put in a little bit of effort.

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and they could put in minimal effort actually just say hey we need this much to integrate Circle done. People will vote for that and get the money through and get the funds through and get it implemented. So it’s free money as Cardano well says here it’s free money they could get those funds very easily from the community and get to get to USDC integrated. Anyway where’s this leave us from here?

16:05
100% USDC natively isn’t coming to the Cardano ecosystem. We need to support our natively grown or solutions within the Cardano space, USDM, GED, and also USDA whenever that’s going to launch. So we really need to support those particular projects out there building stablecoins for our space. Of course, there’s IUSD and there’s other ones as well, but.

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They’re the main ones that we’re looking at at the moment. So if there’s anything out there, if those projects need catalyst funding, whatever it might be, please support them. Let’s get the liquidity up higher, more trading volume, more of those particular tokens minted within the Cardano space so we all have a better trading experience. Now this last new story that I wanna go through is Iagon’s ability to fight off a DDoS attack. Now this is absolutely brilliant.

16:56
Iagon for those that don’t know if you haven’t been following it, if you haven’t kept up to date with what’s building in the Kodana space, Iagon is a decentralized storage platform, very similar to like Filecoin, and they provide an absolutely brilliant service. A lot of people jumping on board providing data storage and also using their offering as well. So this is a really cool project that’s building in the Kodana space. And over the weekend, they had a coordinated large scale DDoS attack.

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which was hitting their servers for over 24 hours. And some of the information that came out of this I thought was quite interesting. So if you have a look at this, peak at 300 gigabytes per second and 40 million packets per second from a multi-vector attack constantly shifting patterns and requiring continuous adaptation to defend against it was hitting their servers for 24 hours. This is absolutely insane. The cost of this,

17:52
They worked it out for a 24 hour period. The attacker spent between 100 to 900 thousand dollars on the attack. So whoever is doing this has a substantial amount of funds to do so. And you can do this DDoS for hire. There’s plenty of companies out there that will do it for you. You can just find them around and say, hey, attack this company here. Take them down as long as you can. And, you know, they’ll do it.

18:20
So it’s either DDoS for hire, state-sponsored, so a cyber group, well-funded competitors that may be trying to take it down and tarnish the reputation of Iagon, or large competitors with resources, big corporations, et cetera, et cetera. So whoever’s doing this definitely has a lot of money. But Iagon didn’t falter. It didn’t go down. It’s still 100% operational during this particular attack. So…

18:49
Definitely some really good tech here, some really good decentralization of the network and also very good engineers fighting off the attack. So this is absolutely brilliant. Now they could have kept this going. If this was a 10 day attack, this would have been a hundred million dollar cost for this particular attacker, but they decided to call it off after 24 hours after realizing their efforts weren’t working at all. So

19:14
It doesn’t mean this is bulletproof, it just means they’re really good at what they’re doing at the moment. So hopefully we do see even better security processes put in place. 100% to full mitigation on anything else that happens in the future. Now the community remains unshaken. Our infrastructure technology is built to withstand these challenges and we continue to push forward. Plus we have some great team members. Special shout out to Holger.

19:41
So Holger is one of those community members that’s been in the Cardano space for quite a long time now. So Holger’s stake pool here, Cardano 24, if you do want to delegate to one of the best stake pool operators out there and one of the contributing Cardano members from the very early days, you can find his ticker. His ticker is simply just ADA and you can delegate to him, support his work in the Cardano space and his work at ICON. So he’s one of the, I think he’s the chief technical officer now.

20:10
So he’s risen up the ranks, made a reputation for himself, and got hired in. But this is his relay. Check out his relay network here. So his staples. I don’t know how much he’s spending on this, but this will cost him a fortune. I’ve only got five relays and he’s got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Fourteen relays around the world. Most of them look like they’re in Europe. Which is fair enough. Holger, if you want some more relays around the world, got some places.

20:39
So actually, hang on, look at this. It’s got 24 relays, 14 public and 10 private. Right, gotcha. Okay, you are insane, Holger. But that is the type of contributor that you want in the Gdana space and being able to forge off this particular attack within the Iagon networks is absolutely awesome. What did it do for its price? The Iagon price did jump up over the weekend after that particular attack. It did have that maps of spike, but of course after spikes and overbuying, there is always some sort of correction.

21:08
So the community did jump on the news of that, but of course, other people did take profits as well. So overall, awesome job to the Iagon team. Congratulations for fighting off that DDoS attack. And I will definitely be playing around more with the Iagon nodes. And hopefully I can get one of those self-contained Iagon computers. What’s it called? The Iagon Pro? I can’t remember what it’s called now. Let me just pull it up for you guys.

21:36
There it is, the Cyclone QS. So the Cyclone QS Pro is the one that you want because you can use that as a Iagon node, but then also as a stake pool as well. And that means you can run a whole bunch of different things on there. So not just the stake pool, you can become a node provider. You can be a back share provider for various decks as you can do lots of different things for it. But if you want to find out how I did it within my own home with my own hardware,

22:06
Check out the tutorials, I’ll put links down below for you guys. I’ve done some awesome stuff with this thing at home and I absolutely love it. Anyway, that’s it. That’s all I have for you guys. Slightly different approach where I’m not staring at the camera. So let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. For once, you know, you don’t have to stare at me, you don’t have to look at me and I’m pretty sure a lot of you guys and girls out there are pretty sick of staring at me anyway. So this is a slightly different approach. Let me know how it is.

22:34
and let me know what you guys think. I’ll see you all in the next video.