• Once the metadata functionality of Cardano is complete, there are over 30 opportunities partners that could adapt Prism.
• IOHK and the United Nations are working together in the Project Catalyst to support start-ups in the field of microfinance in developing countries.
• SingularityNET is the first project to migrate from the Ethereum blockchain to Cardano.

In the latest episode of IOHK’s monthly “Cardano Development Update” Tim Harrison and Aparna Jue reported on numerous advances and news in the Cardano ecosystem and interviewed various members of IOHK.

Alan McSherry reported on the completed implementation of metadata transactions on Cardano. As the technical architect of IOHK explained, the solution allows data to be stored permanently on the blockchain. This can be done in several ways, either “directly” or, for larger amounts of data, via a merkle tree whose root hash is stored on the blockchain.

The size of the data that can be fed in is limited to the transaction size, which is currently 16 KB, minus the size of the UTXOs, which allows approximately 8 KB to be stored on the Cardano blockchain per transaction. In order to make the use as easy as possible, IOHK has developed a service that handles the interaction with the wallet, so that users have only one interface.

As McSherry stated, there are numerous use cases arising from the solution, the most prominent of which will probably be the supply chain. Dynal Patel, senior product manager at IOHK, also added that Cardano is currently being integrated into the Atala suite. The functionality will be used for Prism’s DID (Decentralized Identities) solution as well as Atala Trace and Atala Scan. Regarding future use cases, he revealed:

We have a very lively pipeline at the moment. We got over 30 potential opportunities that we are looking at from a Prism perspective. The team is prioritizing some of those. So we hope to announce at least a few of those over the next month or two. The team is also working towards a demo for the Georgian government […] we built management consoles that can be used to create credentials, manage user groups and so on.

Aparna Jue also announced that Marlow will have a test environment for users and developers by the end of October (“Marlow Playgound”). This will include support for the popular programming language JavaScript. Marlowe will be a new language for modeling financial instruments as smart contracts on a blockchain. It is designed for people who are industrial engineers or business experts and not experienced developers.

Furthermore, Dor Garbash and Shruti Appiah, both IOHK, informed about a project funding by IOHK and the United Nations (UN). Within the framework of the “Project Catalyst”, the cooperation between IOHK and the UN aims to support projects that serve a good cause. Specifically, projects in the field of microfinance in developing countries are to be supported. IOHK announced this via Twitter:

We’re thrilled to announce that IOHK is collaborating with the United Nations for its 75th year anniversary! Project Catalyst will be used to vote on proposals which meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Projects can receive Ada up to $10,000. To ensure that the projects bear fruit, the selected projects will continue to receive support from the two organizations even after funding has ended.

SingularityNET migrates as first project from Ethereum to Cardano

In the last part of the stream, Charles Hoskinson spoke with Ben Goertzel, the CEO and founder of SingularityNET, which will be the first project to move from the Ethereum blockchain to Cardano. SingularityNET is a full stack AI (Artificial Intelligence) solution based on a decentralized protocol and is currently primarily hosting relatively simple AI agents in areas such as image processing, time-lapse analysis or genomics data analysis.

However, SingularityNET’s broader vision is to go one step further and use the platform to host a rich variety of AI’s, outsource work to other AI’s and dynamically collaborate with other AI’s to solve problems.

Goertzel explained that “the current speed and cost issues with the Ethereum Blockchain have increased the urgency of exploring alternatives for SingularityNET Blockchain support. The ambitious design of Ethereum 2.0 was “promising, but the timing of the introduction of various aspects of this next generation Ethereum” was unclear, which is why the project decided to migrate to Cardano.

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