It's a Wrap!

Wow, a lot has been happening since our last post so we are going to wrap up last year with a summary of the recent highlights. We got caught up in another country for 6 months which has contributed to a delay in our updates here. But the WIRED stake pool continues to operate seamlessly. As an early Christmas present we also dropped our variable fees to 0% for the holiday period extending into the beginning of 2022!

Now onto the news. Firstly there was the awesome Cardano Summit 2021 back at the end of September. You can check out their dedicated website for all the content and videos but highlights include:

• Charles Hoskinson's Opening Keynote detailing his vision for the future of Cardano, and getting solutions to those that need it the most. Always impressed how his values for doing the right thing come through so strongly when he speaks. Quite a difference compared to the rest of the Cryptocurrency ecosystem.
• The DISH Announcement was pretty huge with Cardano going mainstream with a landmark partnership with DISH Network and Boost Mobile. They aim to bring together the world of global telecoms and the blockchain space announcing plans for a digital ID solution for Dish's multi-million user base.
• We especially enjoyed the Jeff Pollack keynote, who is the new Input Output Chief Financial Officer with a pretty amazing background (and contacts) in traditional finance on Wall Street. He has come out of retirement with a renewed sense of purpose and discusses the IO strategy to extend fiscal power and identity around the world.
• We also saw Grace make an appearance, the AI robot coming to Cardano that is designed to revolutionize global healthcare. She is developed by Awakening Health, a joint venture between Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET.

Secondly there has been a lot of focus on bringing on more developers, providing development support, and producing tools and libraries that make development much easier on the Cardano network.

• A big education push in Africa, for example the Haskell programming course launched in Ghana. This builds on the work and partnerships already underway such as with the European Business University of Luxembourg, which aims to make education accessible for everyone in developing countries.
• The Plutus Application Backend (PAB) is getting closer to be released which aims to help developers create and test DApps, before deploying them to a live production environment. The Plutus team recently released the new version of the PAB which will be released for further testing.
• There was a lot of misunderstanding in the wider community about Cardano's EUTXO ledger. This mainly came from "developers" who knew another blockchain technology and didn't bother to learn how to best design their DApps to make use of Cardano's superior EUTXO ledger. Lot's of existing developers came to help educate, including SundaeSwap who wrote this excellent article on Concurrency, State & Cardano.

Finally, there has been awesome progress on the AGIX ERC20 converter which recently hit the testnet and provides the first live ability where someone can migrate ERC20 tokens from Ethereum to Cardano. While targetting AGIX specifically, this is core functionality that will enable many Ethereum projects to more easily migrate across to the superior Cardano blockchain.

And with that, we hope everyone has been having a great holiday break!