- Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson revealed numerous partnerships and projects that will be made public in March.
- IOG will try to port the most popular decentralized exchange on Ethereum, Uniswap, to Plutus.
- Still to come in February is “a big liquidity announcement” – Coinbase?
In a video for Twitter, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOG, talked about birds (“Coming Birds”). The inventor of Cardano (ADA), however, did not become an ornithologist, but spoke metaphorically of birds tweeting him the latest news and announcements. With that in mind, Hoskinson kicked off by saying that “a lot of stuff is coming, a lot of announcements are coming and really cool announcements for Cardano.”
First, towards the end of the month, the Mary hard fork will take place on the mainnet. The fork will integrate native assets into the Cardano network. Immediately following the HFC event for Mary, IOG will release the Plutus testnet, which “will basically be the foundation for the launch of ‘Alonzo,’ the Q2 HFC event that brings Plutus to the network,” Hoskinson revealed.
Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships for Cardano
Later in the video, Hoskinson talked about numerous partnerships. Although he couldn’t reveal any details, the potential of the announcements he leaked was enormous. The announcements will kick off after the Mary hard fork in March:
Silvio has been working very closely with a strategic partner of ours, Runtime Verification, and it keeps growing and growing and growing, we keep bringing more and more partners in, and keep making more progress.[…]
March gonna be all about Goguen. We gonna announce some partners we have, we gonna announce these cool things that are coming for it, and also on how we are planning on testing things.
As Hoskinson let slip, there are numerous projects in the pipeline that will migrate to Cardano. Further, IOG itself is undergoing efforts to establish a DeFi ecosystem. The company will port Ethereum’s currently most popular decentralized exchange, Uniswap, to its own smart contract platform. Beyond that, a partnership with Celsius Network is also in the pipeline. However, Hoskinson wanted to leave the announcement to its CEO Alex Mashinsky.
We gonna run a lot of experiments. I’m very interested to see if we can take something like a Uniswap and reimplement it in Plutus. We are working with some real token partners, the publicly announced one is SingularityNET. Alex Mashinsky is kind of gnarly about some things. So I leave him to talk about what he’s doing with us.
Hoskinson also fueled the Coinbase rumors. As he stated, IOG will bring new infrastructure partners on board and will also make “a major liquidity announcement” before the end of February. Of course, Coinbase is just speculation, but it would likely be the biggest liquidity announcement to come. Hoskinson said:
We are also going to be announcing over the next 60 to 90 days a series of infrastructure partners for off-chain infrastructure, a new wallet support, and there’s also a big liquidity announcement that’s coming, but I can’t say anything about that. It was promised to me this month. We’ll see what happens.
Regarding the strategies of Plutus, Yella and the new Alpha Frontier program, Hoskinson revealed:
We’re also bringing on two dedicated development firms and their job is just to do nothing but write lots of Plutus code to be the hell out of the Alonzo testnet and verify that everything … [is fine].
There’s a huge strategy for Yella, a huge strategy for the KEVM that Runtime Verification is going to do. We gonna roll out that in the Alpha Frontier program in March as well. […] [We] gonna roll out this whole concept of Alpha Frontier and what we are doing with K is a specification language.
A dedicated dApp store, a university and Africa
No less interesting might have been the announcement that IOG is developing an app store for dapps. IOG has been investigating an app store internally for over three years and has now found a good way to implement the idea, he said.
Further, Hoskinson revealed a “very high probability” that IOG will make an announcement about a partnership with a university within the next 60 to 90 days. Specifically, a dedicated software development center will be established that will focus on the development of smart contracts. IOG will make a donation to the university for this purpose, and involve commercial companies. On the current status, the IOG CEO said:
So we gonna make an announcement at some point of which university is the lucky winner. We’re playing bachelor right now, deciding which rose to give.
Last but not least, Hoskinson also referred to the “big commercial deals” in Africa, with John O’Connor already revealing last week the secret that Cardano has signed a deal with an African nation, making 5 million people of the country Cardano users.
There’s a major commercial deal that starts leaking. […] We are ready, but the government is not quite ready. But my understanding is that it is in the final stage. […] We believe that is going to occur in February. […] This is a major deal, involving 5 million people. John O’Connor said some things about that […]
