DApps and Cardano DeFi Alliance

Opens December 27th 2021 to rebut Silicon Valley and Ethereum trolls claiming Cardano has no DeFi ecosystem, showing what is on the horizon.

Shows the Cardano Cube ecosystem map of meme coins, stablecoins like HUSD and Djed, oracles, identity, payments, marketplaces, lending, and DEXes like SundaeSwap, MuesliSwap, and ADAX, plus NFTs since May.

Reads the Cardano DeFi Alliance Medium post, founded by DeFi developers and infrastructure providers to communicate, educate, and innovate, setting an industry standard through open-source libraries and best practices.

The CDA's public and internal components with cooperative competitiveness where members do not disrupt competitors, and membership open to all Cardano DeFi projects.

Lists founding members MinSwap, SundaeSwap, MLabs, Ardana, Charli3, Gero Wallet, Optim, and Liqwid, and says he will attend a CDA meeting in 2022.

The Cardano CIP repo has 30 improvement proposals, many about making Plutus a viable development ecosystem, with over 127 projects building on Cardano and DEXes launching on mainnet imminently while Cody progresses on Djed.

A February hard fork combinator event brings Plutus enhancements and the June event brings improvements the CDA and Plutus developers recommend, an essential window for commercialization and light wallets.

Interoperability moves into mainnet with Milkomeda operational, the EVM and Yella side-chain testnets activating in the first half, plus Mithril, Hydra, pipelining, and input endorsers in that time horizon.

Community groups like the CDA and stake-pool groups are forming, with micro-summits bringing DEX, oracle, and other categories together for best practices on a four-month upgrade cadence.

Two million assets have been issued since May 2021 with possibly 10 times more by year end due to the NFT revolution, many becoming DeFi tokens funded via Catalyst and the ISPO model.

Introduces the ACIDIC acronym for their developer strategy: developer acquisition, collaboration, incentives, application deployment, and curation, with people assigned to each letter.

The ecosystem takes time but has strength with two million people and 120-plus applications in flight, though Plutus is only four months old on mainnet.

He wants the Plutus Pioneers program to start a cohort every two months, having trained about 3000 people, with the tooling maturing rapidly in 2022.

Points to the developer Discord with 10,000 members and the Cardano Stack Exchange with dedicated people fielding extended UTXO, Plutus, and side-chain questions.

The Mastering Cardano book author fell ill so they will find a new one to publish in 2022 as a capstone text like Mastering Bitcoin or Mastering Ethereum, plus Catalyst-funded tutorials.

Is frustrated by disrespectful FUD reflecting poor journalism, since the ecosystem publishes great content daily and would happily provide KPIs and usage data comparing extended UTXO, Mithril, and Hydra.

Recalls his 2014 TED Talk on transforming Africa with economic identity, saying those seeds finally sprout in 2022 with RealFi across Africa, a near-decade quest.

Over 10.5 billion dollars of DeFi hacks and scams occurred in 2021 mostly in Ethereum, and Cardano is discussing certification standards and a public-private standards body to stop them.

Cardano's protocol design via Ouroboros targets 30 to 50 years, and with pipelining, input endorsers, Hydra, and side chains it will scale to millions and billions of users.

Many projects run on a hope and a prayer while Cardano did the science, simulations, and a graceful HFC upgrade path preserving security, so many projects will not survive the great extinction in five to ten years.

2022 brings Basho and Voltaire plus Goguen and Shelley enhancements, voting centers, Mithril, light wallets, Djed, Prism integration, and contingent staking, with more developers than ever.

The biggest challenge is transitioning from custodial entities to a fully inclusive open-source project like Linux, where over 800 developers across 100-plus companies including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft collaborate on the kernel.

He is tired of tribalism and maximalism, calling for collaboration since their NIPoPoWs work helps Bitcoin and smart-contract certification helps Ethereum and ConsenSys.

The burden is on the ecosystem to be inclusive and on the industry to mature past factionalism, calling crypto the financial stem cell and 2022 a watershed moment defined by the community's labors.