Cardano Leios & Midnight Mainnet: What’s Moving Now

0:00 Alright guys, a big crypto news update for you guys. Lots of news in the Cardano ecosystem as well as the Midnight ecosystem. So let's get into these updates for you all. So first off, big shout out to the big man himself, Charles. Happy 39th birthday. I don't think I'd even be in this crypto space doing what I love every single day, creating videos, educating the community about crypto and Cardano.

0:25 If it wasn't for you.

0:26 So big shout out to Charles and thank you so much for everything that you do. Hopefully you enjoy your 39th. It's only one more year to hit your forties. All right. Another thing I want to mention, Pineapple is okay on pizza and let's go on from there.

0:40 All right.

0:40 So now the first serious news update here is around the Glacier Drop. So this is the Knight claiming process. So back last year, we had the whole Glacier Drop. We have the scavenging mining phase, and this was a way to distribute the Knight tokens to the entire crypto space. And I have to say the scavenging mining phase was a lot of fun, but we're coming up to the end of the thawing process. This is the redeeming process where we can actually claim our tokens. So the Glacier redeeming process was split into four tranches over this year.

1:16 And we're into the last and final tranche now. So we have 28 days from the time of recording this video left to claim our tokens. So if you haven't claimed any of your tokens yet, now is the time to probably look into claiming them. Unfortunately, for those that were affected by the second FI hack, I haven't been able to find a way to claim those particular tokens that may have been locked into a compromised wallet. So unfortunately, there may not be a way to claim those tokens.

1:49 I've been told that there are third party tools. I haven't found those third party tools. And even if I did, I don't know if I'd trust them with the amount of vulnerabilities and hacks that are.

1:58 Going around at the moment.

1:59 I'm very skeptical of scripts and code that is being put online and inviting you to use it to claim tokens or whatever it is.

2:09 But, you know, there is AI. I could run it through AI.

2:11 And test it and see what actually all does. But, you know, I'm very skeptical about a lot of those things. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything that works yet. I can't think of a way that I can make it work either. So it's a little bit unfortunate. If I do find something, guys, I will put a comment down below and do a follow-up video. But at the moment, I haven't found anything yet.

2:31 So if you're stuck with that SecondFi issue, there's roughly about 350 wallets that were affected by that. You may not be able to claim your Knight tokens. So we'll see how we go from there. But like I said, if I do find a way, I'll let you all know. Now, this is one of the big announcements that a lot of Kadana users were looking forward to. And this is the ability to earn Knight rewards for staking ADA on a Cardano stake pool. So it's like supposed to be a dual reward system. So this was promised or ideated a while back before midnight launched and before the glacier drop and all that, you'll be able to stake your ADA to a stake pool and various stake pools will be able to distribute Knight tokens as well as ADA

3:14 tokens too. And that gave, State pool operators are really good incentives to run the night network too. So run the infrastructure and everything that's needed on the midnight side of things.

3:24 That was really cool.

3:25 Now there's a new draft proposal outlining how participating Kodano SPOs and their delegators could earn night through midnight block production with rewards distributed directly on midnight. Now this mechanism remains under development and not yet active, but it's good to see that there is movement going towards that. I know that for quite a while, stateful operators have been asking about when this will actually be happening. When can we actually run a block producer node on the midnight network so we can actually start earning rewards and distributing yet?

3:59 I think we're still a little bit early. There's only a few apps that are launching on mainnet at the moment, but we are seeing those ramp up at the moment. And I will talk about a couple of them later in this episode too. Now, this was a great post that actually showed how Midnight connects to various other chains within the crypto space. And I thought this was quite important to point out because Midnight brings privacy to the cryptocurrency space in general. It doesn't work like Monero and it doesn't work like Zcash where it's a privacy specific chain.

4:32 It's a privacy chain, but can be tacked on to existing chains out there. So a chain that doesn't have privacy at the moment such as Cardano, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and all that, they can have privacy thanks to Midnight working alongside of it. There's bridges and stuff that need to work and create that level of interoperability, but that allows Midnight to be a solution for all these chains to bring privacy into their ecosystems. And I absolutely love that.

5:01 And you have to always remember that Midnight isn't just bringing privacy to itself and Cardano, it's bringing it to the entire crypto space. And we'll see more and more over the years because when you integrate in with Ethereum, they've got the night mode side of things. And I'm sure we'll see more and more of that over the years as more and more chains integrate in when they do realize that they want this level of privacy within their chains and ecosystems too. Now, it's been really good to see that the midnight chain has been growing in volume transactions and all that recently. Now, for a long time, developers weren't allowed to release their smart contracts on mainnet.

5:39 That was a gated process, but now those gates have been opened and any developer can now launch their smart contracts, their dApps onto the mainnet of Midnight. And that's really good because we are now seeing applications launch on Midnight mainnet. So we'll see a lot more of that. We'll see these transactions go up, but there are a couple of really key things that are coming up. And I just want to point out this presentation, that was at the SALT conference in London, I think this week. And I do have a clip here that was played. And this all revolves around Monument Bank. And this announcement was put up, I think, earlier this year, where I think it was around $ 280 million worth of assets were put aside to

6:27 be digitalized and tokenized and be put on chain. And this was a lot of users' deposits. And it will make the whole banking applications for those particular users a lot easier. Let me just play this clip here.

6:41 One of those things will be tokenization. So we're going to be launching tokenized deposit. It'll be a one-year fixed-term deposit. And the reality of it is it's quite a simple offering. It's programmable money. And it's the first of its kind, right? It is the very first of its kind in the UK. So there's a lot of banks that have been doing different types of digital asset transfers, settlement internally. This is the first time that retail will be able to participate.

7:17 Really interesting stuff. This monument deal is really just the beginning. It's the introduction to all of the space where we're going to see digitalization, tokenization of user assets on banking apps. And whatever that opens up in the future is going to be quite interesting. Maybe we'll see DeFi plays in there, DeFi micro lending and all sorts of things. Thank you to Sammy and Kidano Stefan for those links and references to this particular conference. It's good to actually see some of this stuff, especially where there's so much news and information going around at the moment. If people don't clip these things. you tend to miss it. So I thought I'd highlight that one for you all. A quick message

7:59 from our sponsor Nexo. Now you might want to access some cash, but you don't necessarily want to sell your crypto assets. Maybe you want to throw another big crypto party, but you don't want to end up like that guy that sold 10,000 Bitcoin for two large pieces. You need the cash, but you don't want to sell your assets. Now, depending on the situation where you are, Selling your assets may also cause a capital gains tax event. Now, this isn't tax or accounting advice or financial advice. Please seek a financial advisor for the correct advice for your situation.

8:34 But consensually, there are many ways that people look into to gain liquidity without actually disposing of their assets. And one of those is to actually borrow against your crypto assets. Let's say someone has $ 100, 000 worth of crypto assets and they're using that as collateral for their loan. They can borrow $ 50, 000 and their loan to value ratio would be 50%. Now, the important thing to know here is what happens when the value of that crypto asset falls. And this is the risk that people take when borrowing against their crypto assets.

9:11 If the value of that $ 100, 000 worth of crypto assets falls, drops from $ 100, 000 to $ 80, 000, but their value of their loan is still at $ 50, 000. That means their loan-to-value ratio is now at 62.5%. And let's say their crypto assets drops even further to $ 60, 000 worth of value. Their loan-to-value ratio is then at 83.3%. So it's going even higher. Now, at some point, that LTV will get too high, and you'll either have to add more collateral into your loan or repay some of it. If that doesn't happen, then some of your crypto assets would have to be sold to cover the loan and protect the lender. So this might be really useful to someone that wants to access liquidity without selling their crypto assets. But if you're the

9:57 type of person that is relying on their crypto assets as savings and you can't add in more liquidity to that particular loan, this might not be the option for you. Now Nexo Australia has a product called CreditLine that works around this structure that I've just described and it's available to customers on their loyalty program. If you want to read more about how this all works, I've got links down below in the description so you can learn more about Nexo Australia and how their credit line product works.

10:27 Now with that out of the way, let's get back to the main program. Thank you so much to Nexo for sponsoring. Links down below if you want to learn more about their product credit line. And of course, please talk to your accountant or financial advisor to see if this product is suitable for you. Now, RealFi have been making waves within the Cardano ecosystem in providing real APY in regards to their stable coin that they've issued within the Cardano ecosystem on RealFi.

10:53 And this is really good.

10:55 If you have a look at this post here, they're currently ranked sixth highest APY out of all 319 yield bearing assets on Token Terminal. So if you kind of have a look here on the graph, it's kind of hard to see, but that's them there. It kind of stands out above a lot of the other ones there. So if you're interested in learning about how that works, I will put links down below for you guys. I haven't done a tutorial or anything about RealFi and how to move assets back and forth on there to actually get the SUSDRF.

11:28 But if you're interested, links down below for you.

11:31 Now, the team there at RealFi have been pushing the boundaries here, forming new partnerships. And this brand new one here with Pulse Wave Dapp, This one's quite an interesting thing here. So let me just read out exactly what this is. Pulsewave is a privacy-focused communication platform for Cardano and Midnight Wallets. Currently in beta, users connect via callsign, message privately within community spaces, and keep conversations encrypted in the browser.

11:58 So this is pretty cool.

11:59 So I guess there's a bit of communication that is going through the RealFi platform and having this integration in, I guess, benefits the users. So I'd love to see how that one works as well. currently in beta testing. So I think I have to join the community to learn a little bit more. But again, links down below for you guys if you want to learn more about that one. Now this news update here from Intersect is around Dijkstra and this is the next hard fork that is coming for Kodano. DijkstraNet was upgraded on the 2nd of November and this is basically a testnet area for the next major upgrades of the Kodano ecosystem.

12:35 So this is really important.

12:37 The next upgrade that will see the next major hard fork will include Laos. And Laos brings scaling to Cardano. We'll see more transactions per second. It's always been a criticism of the Cardano network.

12:51 It's slow.

12:52 It's kind of like Bitcoin. And there's a lot of benefits in that. But because it isn't as fast as other chains such as Solana, the user experience is a little bit clunky. And now to have a protocol that is a lot faster in general, that user experience is generally faster, we'll see more users deploy dApps on there that are a better user experience. So I can't wait for this. This is one of the key things that is needed to upgrade on Cardano to bring that user experience to make it a lot better. And with all these other dApps that are coming on board with alpha growth, with all the stuff from Draper as well, we're going to see a really cool ecosystem grow. So can't wait for this one to come into play. I've already upgraded

13:39 my notes to the latest versions that I can.

13:41 At the moment.

13:42 So as soon as Protocol version 12 is made ready for mainnet distribution, I'll be upgrading there as well and will be one step closer to scaling solutions for Kodano.

13:53 So I can't wait for this.

13:55 If you want to check out the development and progress of Layoffs, You can check out the documentation here and there is a layout dashboard that you can look at as well. Again, links down below for you guys. Now, one project that has been absolutely killing it on Cardano is StrikePerps. They've been going from one major milestone to another, hitting more and more TVL, bringing in more partners, more liquidity, everything that you need to grow their platform. This new partnership that comes with Conflux Network. This one's quite interesting.

14:26 Let me read this one to you. Strike is gaining... Fiat off-ramps via Conflux BitUnion, meaning you can transfer your money directly to your app to global banks.

14:38 Brilliant.

14:39 Now, Strike Lottery, a daily rewards incentive system for using our protocol, includes airdrops of their native token, CFX. So two major upgrades there. First off, that off-ramp to many major banks around the world, and then daily extra rewards when you use Strike Lottery. within the app and Strike Lottery is launching next week and Fiat Off-Ramps are launching later this month. So major upgrades there for the Strike platform.

15:09 Now it doesn't just end there. This other one here, they're working with Enzo BTC. So this brings the total to $ 450, 000 worth of liquidity.

15:18 More details about this announcement really soon.

15:21 Now this last major headline from Strike that I'll point out is the amount of trading volume on their platform at the moment. It is now approaching 2 billion in all-time trading volume. This is super exciting. I think Striker is one of the fastest growing platforms on the Kadana ecosystem ever. They've gotten so much trading volume through their platform since launch, especially in a bear market. It's been really good to see. So whatever they're doing, keep doing it.

15:50 I met Shan in Singapore earlier this year. So he did a pitch at the UTXO PitchFest. And I missed out on his presentation, but I did get to meet him there as well. So I got to shake his hand, congratulate him on all the good work that he's doing.

16:06 So keep an eye on this guy. Keep an eye on this team. They're doing some really cool things.

16:10 Now, not to be left behind, the Atlas team are also bringing perpetuals to Kodano and they have just launched on mainnet. They've been in testnet for most of this year, gaining momentum, building their community, ironing out their bugs, but Congratulations to the team that they finally have launched early this week. And they're already at a total vault value of 58,713 USD in their platform. So that's a really good starting point guys. So congratulations to that. Now, if you do want to play around the platform, you can get to discord notifications on your orders, et cetera. So I thought this was quite useful, especially if you are a power user on discord, you can see your position open confirmed.

16:52 Et cetera, et cetera. So that's really cool too.

16:54 Now a little bit early in this video, I mentioned that there are dApps launching on Midnight at the moment, and this is Ascend Markets. Let me read this announcement for you guys. A new era of prediction markets begins on Midnight Network. We're excited to announce prediction perps are now live on Ascend Mainnet. For the first time, traders can leverage positions on possibilities, bringing perpetual future mechanics to prediction markets. Developed in collaboration with Dimes, we're bringing you an entirely new way to trade what the world believes happens next. Our private mainnet groups get first access, full public access to follow next. So this is quite interesting because it combines prediction markets with perpetuals itself. So essentially

17:42 leverage prediction markets. So it's pretty cool. It's pulling together two of the really hot things that are going on at the moment, perpetuals and prediction markets. Why not combine them and have a prediction perps within the ecosystem? Combine that with privacy as well. And I think you got a winner here. So I haven't played around with this one yet. I'm not a part of the private testnet groups or anything like that. When I get access, I will play around with it and I'll give you guys a little bit of a demo on how it all works. Now, a few more stories here, a few more shout outs to other platforms that are building within the Cardano ecosystem and starting to gain traction again. So this one here

18:22 is Revutu. I did an interview with X from the team way, way back. You'd have to search the archives to find that interview, but they're basically a subscription management app. So you have your app with your crypto assets on it and you can create virtual debit cards and you can manage your subscriptions through that. So each one of your subscriptions might have a new debit card, You can fund it, and if you want to disable something, you can.

18:46 So disabled by essentially having no money in it, so it can't be used. So I thought that was quite an interesting concept of how that all works. Expand this over to Solana and a different ecosystem where there are more users as well will help grow the app. So that's a big plus for the Katana users that are already on there, as well as Solana users that are looking for a solution like this. So congratulations to the RUTU team for getting here. And they mentioned here, Alongside standard wallet features, the wallet will connect to the fiat wallet via USDC for crypto on and off ramps to USD or Euros.

19:22 So that's pretty cool.

19:23 Now for this last news story, I want to give a shout out to WingRiders. They're one of the OG teams that have been in the Kadana space for a long time, continuously building, always delivering new features, new UI and new experiences for Kadana users. And this is the brand new revamp of Wing Riders decentralized exchange. This is what it looks like at the moment. So I've always liked Wing Riders because it was quite simple and easy to use. i actually didn't like the green branding that they had it was kind of like a dull darkish green and i do like this black and white look with the highlights yellow so in terms of like visuals pretty cool guys i like this little effect in the background too kind of nice but anyway If you haven't

20:06 checked out Wing Riders or it's been a while, check them out as well. Links down below for you guys.

20:10 All right.

20:12 That's all I got for this particular news update. There's quite a bit in this one here. I'm coming down with a bit of a cold at the moment, so hopefully I can keep up with these news updates. Anyway, guys, if you've got something out of it, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. Check out my X feed as well. I've got some new updates there. Give me a couple of likes.

20:29 I've wrecked my algorithm on there and it's not doing too well. So a couple of likes and retweets, reshares, whatever it's called these days would be really appreciated. And other than that, I've got YouTube memberships down below. I've got buy me a coffee links. Great way to support the channel. If not, just hit that thumbs up. Stay positive and I'll see you in the next video.