- Crypto's in one big, scary bear market right now
that's threatening to destroy us all.
But as bad as things seem, you might have
recently noticed this tweet from an analytics firm.
Cardano is crypto's most developed asset.
That's quite the claim.
But with GitHub indicating a high level
of project activity, could Cardano be
the hope that this bear market needs?
I'm a longtime investor of Cardano myself,
so I needed to find out.
I built this entire research report that dives into
the interesting projects being built on Cardano right now.
That way, we can determine if
this will really change everything.
And by the way, this entire research report
will be available on my membership site Finova.
There we have entire money making courses
free with your membership, a massive community of investors,
and live coaching every single day aimed at helping you
Yes, YOU take control of your own finances.
Plus you can grab a free trial linked down below.
Now, we need just a little bit of context here.
Cardano is a general purpose blockchain.
It's kind of like an operating system.
Cardano is powered by a little thing called the
named after that snake eating its own tail.
Ouroboros is a proof of stake protocol.
So instead of mining for coins, users stake their coins as
a show of good faith in the system, like, hey,
I'm investing in this thing, so I want it to run smoothly.
Which makes sense.
Most people tend to avoid self sabotage,
unlike that time I let my girlfriend order pizza.
Who does that?
Cardano's primary currency is a coin called ADA,
named after the mother of computing, Ada Lovelace.
At the very least, they're great at choosing names.
Now, some refer to Cardano as
Others take it to the extreme
and call it the Ethereum killer.
In a 2021 interview, Cardano's founder claimed it
was 1.6 million times more energy efficient than
Bitcoin, which is not a small number.
But with that background out of the way,
Because this is what really matters
to businesses creating value in crypto.
And can they defeat this bear market?
First off, there's more than 1000
projects being built on Cardano.
1003 by my last count.
You'll immediately see that almost half of these are
NFT collections, though, so no doubt most of them
are promising to dominate the Metaverse, go to the moon
and do it for the culture.
But beyond this, there's a fairly
even distribution of project types, including
stablecoins, gaming, marketplaces and developer tools.
However, in my breakdown, I found that
The first is what I consider to
be the most practical Web 3 business:
Decentralized exchanges, or DEXs for short.
Interestingly, they only make up 3.8% of
Cardano's entire ecosystem.
This has some incredible implications, the main
one being that it kicks banks, brokers
and payment processors to the curb.
There's no middleman, and no one
has control of your crypto.
So, yeah, while a whole lot of Web 3
projects promise to change the game, DEXs already do.
This is already a thing.
The first of these Cardano projects is Minswap.
Now, although its price performance has taken a dip
recently with everything, it has some interesting ideas.
There are DEX where liquidity providers are rewarded
with fees taken from each and every swap.
Anyone, you or me, can provide liquidity
and earn passive income, which is awesome
on DEXes. There's no private investment or
VC funding, and tokens are fairly distributed,
giving Minswap a pretty community-centric feel.
Data from building on Cardano reported that Minswap was
in roughly 3000 wallets and had over 750,000 transactions.
It's got a long way to go, but
it's made a pretty darn good start.
SundaeSwap is a DEX that lets you provide
liquidity and create a market that others can
use to exchange tokens. In return, small fees
are collected from swappers, giving the liquidity providers
a return on their investments as well.
They've shown up in roughly 13,000 wallets and have
a transaction volume just shy of 1 million.
WingRiders is a DEX powered by Vacuumlabs
which is a fintech development company.
They've been building on Cardano
since the very beginning.
And something interesting here is 50% of its entire
supply is being vested across a variety of areas,
with the other 50% going to ecosystem development.
It's going to be really interesting to
see how that strategy plays out.
Next up is MuesliSwap, the first native scalable
DEX on Cardano that uses milk as its token.
They operate on Milkomeda and Cowswap,
with ambitions to become a
multi-chain DEX on many different blockchains.
They take their inspiration from traditional stock exchanges,
and this helps provide crypto traders with more
advanced features, like limit orders, which is rare
for a DEX to offer.
I like this angle because personally, I think the
most value in DEXs will come from taking services in
traditional banking, typically reserved only for the big guys
and giving everyone access to those features.
So far, they're in roughly 1,000 wallets and
have a transaction volume of around 400,000, but
time will tell how wide adoption will become.
Now, let's move on to Non-Dex DeFi projects.
These make up just 2.1% of Cardano's ecosystem,
but they have some really interesting potential.
The first of these Cardano projects is AADA, whose
name sounds like one of those businesses that want
to be at the front of the phone book.
So they named themselves like AAA Advanced Auto Parts,
but anyways, they're a lending platform on Cardano.
You can deposit, borrow, mix swaps without any
intermediary, or use their ERC-20 converter, which
allows users to migrate Ethereum tokens over.
So far, its tokenomics are looking pretty diverse,
with the majority allocated to
staking, governance and a private round.
At 20,000 transactions,
the prices remained fairly consistent over the last month.
But like everything in the crypto space, they've
taken a large, large dip since May.
Meld is a DeFi banking platform that
brings some really cool utility over.
They're an open source non-custodial protocol that
allows you to borrow fiat currencies like
US dollars or Euros against crypto collateral.
Of course, this can be risky if you're over-leveraged,
but it also can be a huge help if
you know what you're doing, because you can avoid
a taxable event in your crypto gains.
In theory, this protocol lets you maintain
control of digital assets while giving you
access to crypto and fiat transactions. Pretty cool.
However, it's all very new and the
concept is far from proven just yet.
Liqwid brings another novel idea.
They create money markets with interest rates that
are tied to the supply and demand of
each and every market, which means when demand
goes up, so do the rates automatically.
And this sounds great, especially given how interest rates
have helped collapse entire markets in the past.
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Now, DeFi and DEXs aren't the only
exciting projects in the Cardano space.
There are some others that account for
5.4% of the ecosystem and just
don't fall within a traditional category.
Take Charli3.
It's the first decentralized Oracle network
for the Cardano blockchain.
An Oracle network is what connects
the blockchain to the real world.
Let's say a crypto insurance project needed weather data,
and Oracle would be the company that sources this
data and then provides it to the blockchain.
These will only become more
and more important over time.
Now, Ardana is a Cardano project that aims to be
the leading stablecoin and stakable swap DEX on Cardano.
It's had some notable investors, one of whom was
O_O
Three Arrows Capital, which kind of
blew up the entire crypto space.
So we'll have to wait and
see how that project pans out.
And until then, AnetaBitcoin is a
protocol that brings the value of bitcoin
on Cardano and the smart contract platform Ergo.
The idea here is Bitcoin holders can
unlock the value of their assets and earn
income, all without third party involvement.
It's great in theory, as it helps bring
the value of crypto's Bitcoin backbone to Cardano,
which could help strengthen this entire blockchain.
And lastly, World Mobile Token is a
utility token designed to power blockchain based
telecom networks in Africa and potentially beyond.
Super ambitious.
And if it can see adoption, there's the potential
for it to shake up telecom in emerging economies.
So these are some of the exciting projects on Cardano.
Do they have the potential to get
us out of this bear market, though?
In my opinion,
But what I do believe is eventually there'll be
a catalyst, maybe a new technology or price action,
or maybe even a meme coin that creates a
ton of excitement in the crypto space again.
And this will start a kind of positive
feedback loop, bringing things back to normal and
then eventually into another boom period.
All we need to do is keep learning and be patient.