Cardano partners with 2 industry leaders in Web3 – Will it drive ADA price to $2?

• Cardano’s commercial arm EMURGO announced investments in OAK Network and SubQuery protocol to expand its footprint in the Web3.
• The total number of smart contracts built atop the Cardano blockchain has surged by 300 percent year-to-date.

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As developments in the Web3 space have been happening at a very rapid pace, the Cardano ecosystem is quite eager to be a part of it. As a result, Cardano is expanding its footprint by making key acquisitions in the Web3 ecosystem.

On Tuesday, November 29, EMURGO Ventures, the investment arm of the Cardano blockchain’s official commercial arm EMURGO, announced two major investments into OAK Network and SubQuery Network to further expand its fast-growing Web3 portfolio. 

#EMURGO Ventures, the investment arm of the #Cardano blockchain’s official commercial arm EMURGO, has announced that #EMURGO Ventures has made two new investments to add to its fast-growing #Web3 portfolio.@oak_network@SubQueryNetwork pic.twitter.com/TLe4rn0sOF

— EMURGO (@emurgo_io) November 29, 2022

The OAK Network functions as a Web3 hub facilitating trustless, automated decentralized finance (DeFi) and digital payments. They also allow the execution of transactions through specific event signals such as price, time, and smart contracts state change. 

EMURGO also noted that the Web3 solution offered by OAK Network has the potential to improve the overall network efficiency of the Cardano blockchain. OAK Network’s interoperable and automation infrastructure is capable of improving the Cardano network’s operational efficiency.

Another major investment by EMURGO Ventures is in the SubQuery Network. This is an open-source blockchain and a universal Web3 data indexing toolkit. It provides developers with provides fast, flexible, reliable, and decentralized APIs to power leading multi-chain apps.

Being an infrastructure builder itself, the SubQuery Network can support the Cardano blockchain by providing APIs to various Cardano ecosystem projects including Cardano DeFi, Cardano NFTs, Cardano wallets, etc.

The development in the Cardano ecosystem

The solid development team of the Cardano blockchain has been rigorously working on several aspects for improving network efficiency. One key area where Cardano is showing fast improvement is the number of smart contracts hosted on the Cardano blockchain.

As of November 27, there were a total of 3,811 distinct smart contracts running on Cardano’s Plutus smart contracts platform. At the start of the year on January 1, there were 947 smart contracts running on Cardano Plutus. This means that there’s a 300 percent jump in the total number of smart contracts running on the platform.

As per data collected from #Cardano Blockchain Insights, the total number of smart contracts based on Plutus, a smart contracts platform by Cardano, stood at 3,791. The value represented a growth of 300% or 2,844 in 2022 after recording 947 smart contracts on 1 January.

— 🟩 Dr Martin Hiesboeck (@MHiesboeck) November 28, 2022

On the other hand, the Cardano network also ranks among the top three blockchains in terms of development activity. Earlier this week on Monday, a total of 555 commits were pushed across 64 GitHub repositories.

Marlowe-Cardano, an implementation of Marlowe built atop Cardano Plutus, has 53 commits. Marlowe refers to the building of financial smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. The Cardano node had a total of 31 commits. Additionally, Cardano’s Layer-2 scalability solution Hydra, received a total of 28 commits. With Hydra 0.8.1, the scalability platform has received some fresh updates including several fixes and an extension of replaying server outputs.