It’s been over 1 week since the Cardano Summit 2021, and there have already been several interesting news coming from the most capitalized Proof of Stake blockchain: the establishment of EMURGO Africa, the Veritree ITO and a gold-backed stablecoin.
Cardano and EMURGO Africa
Last week we covered EMURGO’s announcement of the $100 million investment fund to support DeFi projects and NFT solutions.
One of the entities created with this fund is EMURGO Africa.
Yesterday, 5 October 2021, EMURGO outlined its vision and plans to harness Cardano’s technology and establish a standard tech infrastructure for the African continent. It will do so by supporting 100 local startups in the next 3 years.
The overall mission of EMURGO Africa is three-fold.
- First, to establish a sustainable growth model for African startups that balances commercial viability and social impact.
- Second, to build financial infrastructure on Cardano to promote innovation and bridge African traditional finance with blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi).
- Third, to connect various African and Asian industries to mutually share business resources.
CEO of EMURGO Ken Kodama said:
“Through EMURGO Africa, we are especially dedicated to delivering financial and educational empowerment opportunities on the continent by providing the capital and strategic partnerships necessary for local startups to scale rapidly and bring new solutions to Cardano. Our partnership with Adanian Labs and Everest Ventures provides us with a great framework to launch in Africa”.
CEO of Adanian Labs John Kamara commented on the partnership:
“As the startup that builds startups, we apply lean start-up principles in processes, learning, iteration, scaling and innovating solutions. This partnership with EMURGO will allow us to forge more efficient collaborations that will enable us to build quicker, scale faster. and optimize capitalization, creating a win-win benefit to all our partners in the sharing nature of our growing ecosystem”.
Cardano Forest: Initial Tree Offering (ITO)
Cardano is referred to as the leading “green” blockchain in the crypto space. Thanks to its sophisticated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism it manages to be a secure, decentralized and environmentally-friendly alternative to the power-hungry blockchains like those of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
But it doesn’t end there, the Cardano community is going a step further and is participating in the ITO (Initial Tree Offering) launched by Veritree in collaboration with the Cardano Foundation.
In an exclusive conversation with Coin Rivet, Frederik Gregaard – CEO of the Cardano Foundation, explained the effort behind delivering a carbon neutral Cardano blockchain:
“Data collection and network surveys from the Climate Neutral Cardano Group suggest that if we achieve our goal of planting one million trees we will help reduce our carbon footprint by an estimate of over four times. The initial planting sites may consist of mangrove trees in Madagascar and, depending on donation volume, extra restoration efforts could be made in Kenya and south-east Asia. We are wholly committed to supporting a carbon neutral Cardano as network activity scales”.
A gold-backed stablecoin on Cardano
During the City A.M crypto summit held last week, MELD, a decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity protocol on Cardano, announced a three-way partnership with Tingo Holdings, Nigeria’s largest mobile network, and Ubuntu Tribe, an ethical crypto company that tokenizes natural resources.
Announcement from @MELD_labs and Tingo Mobile looking to bring 9m customers across Nigeria to Cardano.
As part of this partnership, there will also be a gold-backed stable coin to the protocol.#CityAMSummit @CityAM_Crypto #Cardano #CardanoCommunity @tingomobileng #Blockchain pic.twitter.com/G6zqggzBLF
— DT (@I_Am_DTaylor) September 30, 2021
Chairman of MELD Ken Olling said:
“Our goal here is simplicity and clarity. Gold will be stored in a vault, tokenized and then fractionalized and divided so we can sell it. It’s a simple idea, but incredibly powerful because you can count on it”.
Tokenized gold is nothing new in the crypto space. Ethereum is already home to Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’ PAXG, hence it was only a matter of time before similar solutions emerged on Cardano, especially following the Alonzo hard fork that added support for smart contracts.
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