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- With Project Catalyst, a decentralized VC fund, Cardano has the best launchpad in the industry, better than Polkadot’s Polkastarter, according to Charles Hoskinson.
- Hoskinson is “very interested” in working with Wolfram Alpha to develop an oracle framework.
In a new interview Crypto Banter’s Ran Neuner, IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson talked about why the crypto community should be bullish on ADA and why Cardano is the “best project” in crypto space. As Neuner elicited, there are a lot of DeFi projects being announced for Polkadot right now. Polkadot’s launchpad, Polkastarter, plays a central role in this, he said.
When asked what Cardano is doing to bring DeFi projects to the Cardano blockchain, how the strategy differs from Polkadot’s, and whether Cardano is also planning a launchpad, Hoskinson said:
We already have that. We have the best in the entire industry. That’s another thing. It’s like … ooh Polkastarter. It’s a centralized organization with some committee or group of people. We have Catalyst. There’s 200 million dollars in it, and its community run. It’s partnered with IdeaScale, one of the best innovation management companies in the business. We are just about to put an accelerator on top of it.
Cardano’s decentralized VC fund
As CNF reported, the third round (“Fund 3”) of Project Catalyst has been running since the first week of January. A total of $500,000 is being made available for community proposals to support the adoption of Cardano. With Fund 2, 250,000 USD were distributed to 11 community projects, with Liqwid Finance being the first DeFi project to be funded and being possibly being the first DeFi project to launch on Cardano.
As Hoskinson noted in the interview, over 5,000 people participated in the first experimental round of Catalyst. As Project Catalyst progresses, 50% of the entire network is expected to participate in funding new projects under the decentralized venture capital (VC) fund:
The first experimental round we had with Catalyst over 5,000 people participated. Our goal is to get 50% of the entire network voting and participating in that. Literally a hundred of thousands of people voting, being experts, curating, going back and forth about proposals and then of course thousands of applications and projects and efforts being approved on a yearly basis.
It’s a decentralized VC. This is what we have been talking about for five years. We spent 4 years spending on the voting science. […] So that’s the way to do it. Because no one is in control. […] Also, you can diversify: So you can do a little bit of marketing, a little bit in project, a little bit in DeFi. So Goguen is coming, so what we’ra going to do? All the funds and the millions of dollars there are Goguen targeted.
Hoskinson’s VC fund’s mission
On the other hand, Hoskinson also pointed to his own VC fund, the DC Fund. “I have put 10 million USD with ADA in it, and what we gonna do is bootstrap critical infrastructure, like the DEXes, the stablecoins and the oracles,” the IOG CEO revealed.
Regarding oracles, Hoskinson pointed to the partnership with Wolfram Alpha. The company provides a natural language processing tool and is the world’s largest source of computational knowledge. Apple’s intelligent assistant, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, among others, are also based on it. And as Hoskinson revealed, IOG is “very interested” in working with Wolfram to develop an oracle framework:
We are working with Wolfram, and we are very keen to do an oracle with them. And we think we can build a very generic and beautiful oracle framework with them to plug things in.
This is a mature ecosystem, it’s not a moon boy, unicorn, rainbow ecosystem. This is something where real money is at stake, where real people are at stake.
