Here’s What Happened at the Cardano Summit 2021

• The Cardano Summit 2021 took place in six locations around the world between the 25th and 26th of September.
• Charles Hoskinson held a keynote at the start of the summit. 
• Cardano announced major partnerships to fast forward their new development after the Alonzo upgrade.

Blockchain is rapidly evolving, and the promise of a new blockchain generation is eagerly awaited. The Cardano Summit 2021 has rendered a new image of the Cardano ecosystem. After successfully implementing the Alonzo upgrade, Cardano network capabilities grew to match those of Ethereum after transitioning to the Goguen Era.

The Alonzo upgrade served to bring Cardano’s network functionalities closer to the industry standard by enabling smart contract deployment. In addition, during the summit, Cardano announced two key partnerships to kickstart the development of new smart contract integrated features.

Chainlink was one of the key partnerships announced for the Cardano ecosystem. The Oracle network will help feed quality data and help developers build accurate and feasible DeFi smart contracts. Input-Output (IOHK) noted that market price feeds will be the first ones to be accessible to developers. Moreover, developers will then have access to:

As mentioned in a previous article about the event, COTI, which Cardano has backed up, will issue its first native stablecoin, Djed. Thus, DeFi can be a frictionless operation for users and individuals as it will mimic existing protocols on other chains. 

Furthermore, EMURGO, the global blockchain solution provider, will allocate $100 million in the Cardano ecosystem to hasten DeFi and NFT education in the space. DeFi and DEXs are already being developed and perfected on Cardano as new development and updates are rolled out on the ecosystem.

• Cardano faced criticism during the last testing phase for its concurrency issue.
• Cardano’s slow development process is hindering its adoption process.

Cardano illustrated the versatility of its network by expanding its network usability across a multitude of industries. In addition, the ecosystem announced Dish Network would integrate with the blockchain. Specifically, Cardano will create a system for digital identities for Dish consumers.

Additionally, Cardano expanded into the world of esports. They partnered with Rival, an esports platform, to help develop an agnostic NFT marketplace that will expand in an ever growing market, where businesses or users can create, redeem, or transact digital goods in the form of NFTs.

What’s more, the Cardano summit was also held in a virtual world, which gives a small precedent for where Cardano wants to focus its resources. Cardano also announced their emergence into the world of AI through Grace, a robot designed for the healthcare industry.

As a final remark, Cardano introduced the UTOX Alliance to help expand and grow collaborations between developers within Cardano’s UTOX ecosystem. Thus, Cardano seeks to advance the network’s possibilities by relying on the collaborative nature of developers as well as researchers. 

The summit gathered every moving piece from the Cardano ecosystem, started with a keynote from Charles Hoskinson, and showcased the network’s current capabilities while forecasting a new development trajectory as smart contracts have become native to Cardano.

The Hydra Layer 2 scaling solution is the next step forward for Cardano; however, the network needs to showcase its smart contract work before beginning new use cases in the ecosystem.