Cardano Summit 2022 - A report back

Last week saw the Cardano community come together for two in-person events. First, the IOG hosted Scotfest in Edinburgh. And then, on the weekend, the Cardano Foundation hosted a summit in Lausanne, Switzerland. I was fortunate enough to attend the Switzerland event and was blown away by the level of activity in the ecosystem. However, after two full days of networking, I still felt like I left without speaking to most of the projects in attendance.

While they hosted the main event in Switzerland, community events were hosted at 50+ locations globally. Over 10000 people attended a Cardano Summit event.

With so many eyeballs on Cardano, this was a great announcement opportunity, and the ecosystem did not disappoint.

Midnight

The first significant piece of news was the planned launch of a privacy-focused side chain. IOG themselves have been working on the project for the past four years. The side chain comes with its token, namely Dust. I’ll be digging into these details in a dedicated article early next week.

For now, you can watch the video of Charles announcing Midnight below.

Stablecoins

One very apparent hole in the Cardano ecosystem has been the lack of a native stablecoin. For a long time, we expected that Coti would be the first to fill this void with the algorithmic stablecoin Djed. I wrote an article about Coti and the Djed project here. The rumours heading into the event were that Djed would finally get a launch date and the Coti team did not disappoint. With a launch date promised for January 2023. You can read the full press release here.

The Djed news was not the only development in the stablecoin conversation. In fact, at the event, Indigo took live the first native stablecoin on Cardano, namely iUSD. I’ll be covering Indigo and their iUSD in an article looking at stablecoins on Cardano.

As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours; before the weekend was done, Cardano was treated to the launch of a 3rd stablecoin. This time from Emurgo, who launched their regulated, fiat-backed USD stablecoin USDA.

As already mentioned, I’ll dive into the different stablecoin options, what makes them unique, and details on the companies behind them in an article next week.

Clay Nation, Metaverse, and Snoop Dog

Another release during the event was from the Cardano-based NFT project, Clay Nation. The release was in the form of a music video for Champ Medici, Snoop Doggs son. Unsurprisingly, the video features Snoop Dogg. However, what was unexpected was the feature of Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson who makes an appearance both in human and clay form.

Clay Nation has a collection done in partnership with Snoop Dogg, and there are rumors that Snoop will host a concert in their metaverse. You can watch the video below.

Empowa announces 25 000 housing development for Beira Mozambique.

Note that I am an active member of the Empowa team.

At the event the RealFi movement got a major boost when Empwoa CEO, Glen Jordan announced the project has signed an agreement with the Mayor of Beira Mozambique, to finance 25 000 climate-smart homes in Beira, Mozambique. In the delivery of these homes, Empowa will collaborate through SDU Beira, which is supported by the Dutch government. You can find out more about this project here.

Conclusion

Seeing so many unique projects in one space quietly building blockchain businesses was inspiring and left me feeling like the Cardano ecosystem is alive and thriving despite the general chaos in the crypto markets.

I’ll be writing several articles based on insights from the event, so follow along on the Cardano threads to learn more about the ecosystem's development.