News about Cardano and the cryptocurrency industry, and my new articles for the week of February 4-10.
My New Article:
USDM: The Tokenized Dollar On Cardano
The Mehen Group team understood the need for the Cardano DeFi ecosystem for a stablecoin that can be directly converted into fiat currency, and thus created USDM, a fiat-backed native Cardano stablecoin that can be exchanged 1:1 for USD.
New users commonly join the Cardano network by going through centralized exchanges to convert their dollars into ADA. Mehen seeks to be the fiat on-ramp for the Cardano ecosystem, bringing additional liquidity directly to the blockchain.
News Of The Week:
- Cardano Hard Fork: to make it easier for developers to build cross-chain applications, Input Output Global (IOG) has added new built-ins to Plutus to support ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. The mainnet update is tentatively proposed for February 14, 2023 21:44:51 UTC., at the start of epoch 394. Tweet.
- Cardano EVM Sidechain: IOG team launches public testnet of Ethereum sidechain. News.
- U.S. Regulations: Kraken has agreed to shut its cryptocurrency-staking operations to settle charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which considers that the intermediation of PoS, like SaaS, is custodial, and therefore, the intermediary must give clear accounts of how it manages the money of its clients. With the Kraken decision, SEC has banned centralized staking, through an intermediary, in the US. News. My article about the topic, published in December: The Impact of Current Cryptocurrency Regulation: Cryptoassets, Commodities, or Securities?.
- Sundaeswap: The first vote on SundaeSwap governance on-chain is already underway. If the rules are approved by Feb. 19, 2023, the process for submitting proposals for improvement will be established. Tweet.
- Liqwid Finance: The Liqwid protocol has been temporarily stopped through a multisig transaction due to a security issue. The team announced that the protocol funds were safe. Tweet. The app was brought back online after 2 days of being offline. Tweet.
- Ardana: The remaining tokens for the seed and private sale tokens have been distributed completing the vesting of all presale tokens. This is the the first phase of transitioning the Ardana project forward. Tweet.
Weekly development report as of 2023–02–10
Milkomeda
Milkomeda A1 and C1 developers will soon have access to SupraOracles’ services. Tweet.
Cardano Wishlist
One of the most reputable developers in the Cardano ecosystem, Mateusz Czeladka, has posted a Tweet thread with what he considers the development needs to evolve the blockchain. Tweet.
Last Words. My Opinion.
The Bitcoin PoW protocol has disadvantages with ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) mining. Currently the computing power of the Bitcoin network is so high that it makes it impossible to be mined otherwise.
Let’s see its disadvantages:
- They consume enormous amounts of energy. It is an expensive network
- Individual miners cannot compete with large farms and have no way out but to join together by further concentrating hashrate into large mining pools
- The devices evolve their technology and must be renewed, otherwise they cannot compete. In many cases they do not manage to amortize the cost in the time of use
- ASIC rigs occupy large spaces, and that is installation cost.
- ASICs are easily located by power consumption and space occupied. This is an attack vector
- In case of having to move facilities it requires time and logistical cost (the mining ban in China a couple of years ago impacted for a while on hashrate)
