Cardano PRIME Reveals Its First 9 DeFi Teams

0:00 Okay, guys, we've got some news around Cardano Prime and some projects have now been selected as part of the first cohort for the whole Alpha Growth program. So for those that aren't caught up, Alpha Growth had a massive treasury withdrawal earlier this year. And the idea here is that we're going to now allocate that capital or that ADA that was taken from the treasury withdrawal, and then allocated to various projects to fill in the gaps that are missing within the Cardano DeFi ecosystem, and then put the rest of the capital to work to attract more liquidity to the chain itself. The idea here is to try and hit the $ 200 million increase in TVL on the Cardano ecosystem, and Cardano Prime is the answer for this.

0:48 So I'm going to go through the first cohort of projects that have been bought into the program and have a look at exactly what they are going to deliver, what they are, who they are. And I'm going to look into who these projects are and see exactly what type of liquidity they could possibly bring into the Kadana ecosystem.

1:06 So let's get into it guys. Hey everyone, my name's Peter. If it's your first time here, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell on your way in. Let's get into these updates here. So if you want to learn more about Kadana prime and alpha growth, I'll put links down below for you guys, but let's have a look at this announcement here around the first cohort. So the team went through a big RFP process. So they put up the various categories that people were going to submit into and all these projects had their submissions go through. I think it took about a month, month and a half. And now the first cohort, the first group of projects have been selected. There may be more than may not be.

1:43 I'm not too sure about those particular details. But what I'm interested in is regards to what projects had been brought in. Now, a lot of these projects you may know already. So the first one here I'm looking at is Sunday Labs. Sunday has been developing on the Kadana ecosystem since day one. Now, the interesting thing here is you have to remember that there are various things that are missing from the Kadana ecosystem. What those things are, I'm not entirely sure of, but it's things like connectors or interoperability to different DeFi protocols outside of Cardano or wallet connectors and all those things. Things that institutions need to be able to connect to these protocols to deliver and bring in liquidity. From my understanding, that's the main issue.

2:31 And giving a little bit of extra funding to these projects to make those connectors happen is what is needed. And I really hope that the development that is being done via projects such as Sunday Labs is actually open sourced and then delivered for other projects as well. Maybe there'll be a period of time where Sunday Labs sits on it. They're the main ones with the new tech and bridges or whatever is needed, but we'll see hopefully all of that technology and everything else delivered for other projects too. So the first one here at Sunday Labs, Prime is funding a flurry of new core market functions built with the new Sunday V4 smart contracts, unlocking growth Prime is set to bring to the Cardano DeFi. So

3:14 that's essentially why they're funding Sunday Labs. Next one here, Liquid Finance. Liquid Finance is borrowing lending protocol on Cardano. Prime is funding Liquid V3, isolated money markets with curated tools, and public SDK, so anyone can launch and manage their own lending vault. Very useful. So these are all projects so far that have been in the Kadana ecosystem for a long time and have stand the test of time.

3:42 Now these protocols from my understanding have been hacked or anything, and they're pretty much the OG developers. So next one here, Indigo. Prime is funding the Indigo Prime CDP upgrade suite, multi-sig ownership, delegated permissions, debt redistribution, and room for many more collateral types. Awesome stuff. Indigo V3 is pretty exciting in regards to what they're doing as well. Now, this one here is a new protocol. I haven't heard these guys before. Steer.

4:12 Steer runs automated liquidity management across multiple chains and is bringing it to Cardano. with three prime grants. So this is quite interesting. So I will have to look into Steer and find out what they're already doing. So automated liquidity managers, vaults that manage LP positions automatically. Cardano native tokenized vault standard, any protocol can adopt. And just-in-time liquidity framework that puts idle lending capital to work. Okay, interesting. Now, Via Labs, I've met these guys in Singapore and it's pretty cool that these guys managed to get into Cardano Prime.

4:48 From talking to them, their solution is very exciting because it brings in all of the bridging concepts that are needed, the bridging infrastructure, I'd say, that's needed for all this liquidity to flow in and out. So what are they doing for Prime? Prime is funding Any2Any, a bridge swap route aggregator that moves assets from major EVM chains and exchanges straight into Cardano and back in a single flow.

5:14 That's awesome to hear. It's pretty fun hanging out with these guys. They're really cool. All right, next one here is Rebound. Now, this is another project that I haven't heard of either, so I'll be looking into them to find out what they're doing. So Prime is funding the platform's main net launch on Cardano and its first bond already lined up, tokenized medical stop loss. I don't know what that's all about, so I will look into that to find out what that is. Next one here, another new project, and this one I thought was pretty cool, and this is Dialed. Dull turns every phone into a wallet and every wallet into a phone. Okay. By unifying communications and payment infrastructure, Dull is retrofitting the phone system

5:55 to give every phone, telephone number in the world instant access to DeFi. Prime is funding the payment side of that, an open source programmable invoice layer for Cardano. So wallets, DAOs, marketplaces, agents can create and verify and settle invoices on chain. Cool. Okay. One of the big things about DeFi and crypto in general is the accessibility to it, making that really easy as possible. And having your phone number as your point of entry, I think is really important to bring down that layer of that level of accessibility and make it easy for people to join in DeFi and crypto in general.

6:39 You have to deal with seed phrases and all those things. It makes things difficult. And if you lose a seed phrase, you're pretty much stuffed. But your phone number, it's a little bit easier to remember. And it's locked to your phone. And usually you can't transfer that out too easily. There's SIM swapping attacks. But that is a great way of onboarding users to crypto and DeFi in general. But I'll look into Dial to find out a little bit more about what they're up to. Next one here, Midgard. Midgard's been around for ages. This is led up by Phil Desario.

7:11 But Midgard performs human-led AI-assisted smart contract audits for Katana protocols. Prime has engaged them to audit each new build before it goes live on mainnet. That's cool. That's good. Next one here at TX Pipe. These guys are great. Look, this is something that Diego got me at Kadano Summit. It's a little phone holder. I think it's absolutely brilliant.

7:31 I've got it on my desk. I actually use it from time to time. So thank you, Diego, for giving me that. But TxPipe builds core developer tooling for Kadano and run smart contract security audits. Prime has secured a block of audit hours with them. So every grantee ships with an independent security review behind it. So far 19, it's one goal, durable competitive DeFi on Kadano. Pretty interesting mix of projects, mostly OG Kadano projects with very good and strong development skills. with a couple of others mixed in.

8:07 So we've got Sunday Labs here with the DEX, with the V4 smart contracts. We've got Liquid Finance for the borrowing and lending side of things. We've got Indigo there for the synthetic assets and then a bunch of brand new projects that are also working within this to make the liquidity easier to bring into the Kadana ecosystem. So this is just the beginning, guys. If you haven't put in a proposal, if you're building something on the Kadana ecosystem and it has that potential to bring in institutional level liquidity to the chain, make sure you reach out to the alpha growth team. So you can find out if your project aligns with their goals of what they're doing to bring in this massive amount liquidity to the chain. Okay, guys,

8:49 that's all I have for this particular update. I want to keep you guys updated with what these core updates are that's happening within the Kadana ecosystem. So if you're interested in that, hit that thumbs up, like subscribe notification bell, and I'll keep you guys up to date. Anyway, guys, Stay optimistic and I'll see you in the next video.