Cardano Monthly Report - October 2022

October has been an NFT month in the Cardano ecosystem. All major NFT projects saw their floor prices increase. The interest was definitely led by The Ape Society. The collection, mentioned previously, saw its floor price go from 3 000 ADA (when it was first mentioned on our Cardano Discord Forum) to 15 000 ADA in 3 short weeks. Driving this hype was the sale of one of the apes for 180 000 ADA, equaling $65 000 at the time.

It seems this Cardano NFT interest has been at the expense of the Solana ecosystem. According to OpenCNFT, within a 24-hour period, NFT trading volume on Cardano increased by 110%. At the same time, the number of trades increased by 36.6% and the number of items sold by 39%. In addition, the top 12 CNFT collections have seen their values increase by at least 100% to 2,500% in the last 24 hours.

Keeping up with the Cardano news

“Cardano is a rocket in the crypto space”—EU Parliament

It may come as a surprise to some, but Europe and not America are leading the crypto regulatory change. October saw the European MiCA bill leak (click here to watch a video that explains the bill in detail). The UK has also taken steps to recognize a framework for the blockchain industry, which you can read about here. All this interest should be a long-term positive for the industry, as sensible regulation is needed for the mass adoption of blockchain technology.

Given this progressive move by European governments, it would appear bullish when EU lawmakers come out supporting Cardano, as they did in the below tweet.

Cardano Announces New Release for Layer 2 Scaling Solution Hydra

IOG is clearly not happy to take a breather post the Vasil upgrade that went live last month. The development team has already released an update to the Layer 2 scaling solution, Hydra.

Sebastian Nagel, the principal developer for Hydra, posted a GitHub release that details the new release's numerous API modifications, fixes for issues with the Hydra-node, and enhanced Hydra user interface. In addition to other enhancements, it calculates transaction costs as a “mint fee” and reports them in the tx-cost benchmark.

Hydra, a crucial Layer 2 solution to further enhance Cardano's scalability by overlaying a new protocol on top of the current Layer 1 blockchain, is one of the most exciting recent improvements made feasible.

Hydra is a Layer 2 scaling solution that aims to boost throughput, lower latency, incur minimal to no expenses, and significantly reduce storage requirements.

Hydra's scalability solution has undergone a successful demo, according to SundaeSwap, a Cardano DEX. The team is thrilled with the achievement and feels it represents a significant step forward in SundaeSwap's and Cardano's scaling efforts.

Cardano Bridges to Algorand

A recent announcement states that the Milkomeda A1 Rollup is currently active on the Algorand mainnet. A blockchain interoperability service called Milkomeda seeks to give non-EVM blockchains like Cardano and Algorand access to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The fundamental currency of the A1 Rollup is wrapped ALGOs, sometimes known as milkALGOs.

As a result of a collaboration between Milkomeda and the Cardano-based DEX Blueshift, Blueshift will be able to use Milkomeda's A1 Rollup to introduce its DEX model to the Algorand ecosystem.

The Algorand ecosystem can now access the Milkomeda Cardano C1 sidechain because the Blueshift protocol is based on it.

Fundamentally, Algorand and Cardano are two fundamentally different blockchains that are unable to exchange assets or connect with one another because Algorand uses the Algorand Virtual Machine (AVM), which runs on an account-based paradigm.

However, the Milkomeda A1 rollup has made it possible to join Algorand with Cardano. In the near future, Blueshift hopes to provide further functionalities that will enable Algorand users to transact with Cardano assets across chains without first having to sell their own assets on a centralized exchange.

Closing remarks

Despite the bullish news shared throughout the month, the ADA price is still down. Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, has been hinting at some major announcements. Some speculate this may be the launch of the Djed stable coin; read my article on this here, while others are suggesting a deal with German car manufacturer BMW.

If either is true this should positively impact the price of ADA. If you do want to find out exactly what the big announcement is, then follow our Cardano forum on Discord here.

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