Cardano DeFi Projects are PUMPING! - Cardano ADA News Update, Strike, Indigo and more

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]The majority of markets are red at the moment.  This is when you look at the stock market in general and crypto, it's not doing too well, but  these Cardano native projects building on the Cardano ecosystem are doing well. They're doing  exceptionally well and absolutely pumping at the moment and people are very excited about it and  people are wondering what on earth is going on here and Cardano projects are certainly getting  the attention. So, let's have a look at what's going on guys. Hi everyone, my name's Peter.  If it's your first time here, hit that like button down below. Hit subscribe, notification  bell. I'll keep you up to date with everything that is happening in the Cardano ecosystem and  crypto in general. Now, let's have a look at what on earth is going on here. You can see from these  charts here. This is from Tap Tools, a really good platform to check all these stats and movements  of various native assets on the Cardano ecosystem.

[00:00:55]got Atlas, Surf, Ascend, Strike, Surge, Bedga,  Memecoin, Nike, Pulse, and they're all doing exceptionally well. Look at what Atlas and Surf  have been doing recently. They're absolutely surging over the last 30 days. And it's because  they're building and doing some really exciting stuff. And I'll go through all these protocols and  you'll see what they're actually trying to deliver on the ecosystem or already have. So, that's the  really exciting bit here. And we'll start first with what is happening with Strike. And they are  a derivatives platform. They do perpetuals if you haven't heard. They're doing really well. I got  into the platform maybe about a year ago trying and playing around with the platform in general,  but they hit that 100 million market cap on their token and they h they're doing so so well. Every  every week they're releasing brand new features and it's making everyone very excited about  it. And let me go through some of the stats and details here. So the V2, version two of their  protocol, brand new smart contracts, has hit 30 million in volume. And this is about maybe a month  old. So that's doing really well. We're seeing 88, not 80, that's where they want to get, 80 million,  they're at 8 million daily volume at the moment.

[00:02:11]This isn't anywhere near the same amount as  Hyperlquid or any of the other really big perpetual platforms out there, but it is getting  there. It is certainly getting the attention and this is the type of protocols that people are  excited about at the moment. This is what's gaining most of the retail attention. So, Strike  is doing very well with their perpetual platform.

[00:02:32]Now, they have a recent treasury proposal that  is being put on chain and they're asking for a 7.5 million ADA deposit into their treasury to  help fund the liquidity on their D5 protocol.

[00:02:47]The really cool thing about this is that if we go  into the proposal itself, a lot of this stuff is essentially a way to get the treasury to fund and  boost their ecosystem, but everything goes back to the treasury in the end. So let let me go through  the snapshot here to give you the overview.

[00:03:08]So 7.5 million ADA duration 12 months it's  to it's to structure productivity liquidity deployment treasury treasury ownership treasury  retains ownership throughout the deployment yield model estimate 1.35 ADA equivalent annually under  conservative assumptions. So that's how much ADA is supposed to be returning back in addition  to the requested amount of ADA. So midpoint distribution so yield will be returned at the  six-month mark and obviously at the 12-month mark and final return full principle plus remaining  yield return at end. So this is a pretty good investment for the Cardano treasury. So  this is government controlled withdrawal authority plus public reporting. So that's  the oversight side of things. So essentially, Strike Finance is asking for a 7.5 loan for  treasury deployment from the Cardano Treasury over to the Strike Finance Treasury and that  would earn the yield from the platform taking in all the fees and all that stuff and have an  estimated return of 1.35 million which be put back into the Cardano Treasury. So this serves  two purposes. one, it will help spearhead and push strike finance further along because it has  more liquidity on the platform. It can facilitate all the trading and perpetuals and all that stuff  that is happening on the platform. Then the second big impact is the yield that it gets back. All  the fees that it takes will go back into that deposit deposited ADA from the treasury and then  be returned back to the Cardano treasury at the end of it. So, this is a win-win for the Cardano  Treasury and for the platform itself. Hopefully, we see more of this in the future and we see  more protocols leaning into this. Of course, you need to have a good track record and show  that there is a lot of activity and excitement and focus on the chain and that you're delivering  stuff. So, if you can show all that stuff, then the Treasury side of things is kind of a  no-brainer and it's more of and it's less of a risk for a lot of the people that are interested  in funding this type of stuff. So, overall, I think this is a really good treasury proposal and  hopefully we do see this one go through on chain.

[00:05:29]Now, Strike doesn't stop there. They've also  working with a company called Unifold and I'll talk about that in a moment. But Unifold allow for  the onboarding of fiat directly onto the platform.

[00:05:43]So using your credit card, using Apple Pay, Google  Pay, whatever it is that you're linked and hooked up with. Having this makes it so much easier to  use the platform. So you're on Strike Finance on the mobile side of things. You're using your  phone. and you're flicking through it and you go, "Okay, here's a good trade opportunity." You open  up your mobile wallet. You can then deposit in via Apple Pay, your credit card, and you have some  extra fee on there to make your long or short or whatever you're doing on the platform. So, that  is a really exciting aspect that they're bringing into the platform. And I've been talking to the  Unifold team about their solution, and I'm pretty excited about it. They're actually a Y combinator  startup and they are making inroads into many of the ecosystems and especially Cardano. So I've  been working with them, not working with them, but getting some advice from them for integrating  in their credit card platform onto my own stuff.

[00:06:42]So I'm building this bounty platform here. I call  it web 3 bounties. And this platform allows you to post up various bounties. So tasks that you can  get the Cardano community to do. As you put in the bounty, you can actually choose how you want to  fund this. And I am trying to focus this bounty platform primarily on USD stable coins in the  Cardano ecosystem. And if we have something like USDCX and then you can fund that via your credit  card, then we can see more liquidity come onchain, fresh liquidity from different ecosystems,  whatever it might be, but then being funded via credit card payments through something like  UniFold. So I'm trying to work with the team there to get this all integrated in so that fresh  liquidity can come in and help facilitate onchain activity within the ecosystem. So, this platform  here, Bounties, is in test phase at the moment.

[00:07:37]Um, I'll put a link down below in the show notes.  So, if you are interested in helping out testing, you can. I've got this little report and issue  button down the bottom. And this integrates with our GitHub repo and you can put in the details.  If you find anything or you suggest improvements, please do. I've seen quite a few suggestions  already, and I have implemented quite a few of those. If you can, if you do have the  time, check out the bounties. Check out bounties.learncardano.io where you can find this  at the moment on testnet. Connect up your testnet wallet or even hook in your Google wallet which  I have done here and then you could be able to try out the platform and give me some feedback.  So that would be absolutely awesome that if you can the unifi team here are doing some really  cool stuff with on-ramps and onboarding users onto web 3. Now, Surf is another project that I'd  like to mention and they do DeFi loans and you can see here from the charts, they are gaining a lot  of attention as well. They're up quite a lot this week. They're one of many borrowing and lending  protocols on the Cardano ecosystem alongside Fluid Token and also Liquid Finance as well. Two OGs in  the ecosystem that are also doing exceptionally well at the moment. But Surf is definitely the  outlier here with the biggest gains this week. Now they have a announcement that they had and this is  a treasury injection into their protocol. So there is a initiative called the DeFi liquidity budget  and these guys have formed a group where they have been allocated a large chunk of the Cardano  treasury and they'll be using that to be deployed out to various different DeFi protocols and Surf  happens to be one of them. So there's another seven here and I can see that Strike was one of  them. Unfortunately, C swap wasn't and it seems that liquid finance is another one as well for  liquid labs. So, they're three of the protocols.

[00:09:39]I don't know what the other four are. So, it  hasn't been revealed yet or leaked on this thread, but Surf is definitely one of them. So, when  they these protocols have more DeFi liquidity allocated to them, they have more opportunities  for people to borrow that that liquidity, etc. So, it makes those protocols stronger  and better to use. So really cool stuff to see what is happening there with Surf as well.  Now looking into the stable coin side of things, USDM is that that homegrown stable coin that is  built in the Cardano ecosystem and they have done a lot with very little funding and it goes to show  how dedicated they are to building up the Cardano ecosystem. Now this is a big update from them.  They have now integrated in Pith network the a tier one oracle into their ecosystem and this  is to have transparency of reserves. So it's a part of their aum transparency data and pith is  now providing the oracle data on their platform itself. So you can see the price feeds etc etc.  Now this news article here is about USDM changing their Oracle feed provider. So previously they  used to use Charlie 3 and I'll talk about them in a moment but they now have upgraded to using  Pith. So there's two major projects that I know of now that are using Pith and it seems like this  critical integration that was done by the Pentad seems to have a a big effect because projects  are picking it up. So, the other project was by Indigo. I'll talk about them in a moment, too.  But this is an unfortunate changeover. And I would have loved to seen Charlie 3 continue and operate,  but it seems that Charlie 3 is ceasing operations or slowly winding things up due to a lack of funds  and being unprofitable. But now they're switching over to the Pith side of things. And hopefully we  see more projects pick it up as well because more pe people and projects that use Pith more likely  that they'll stick around as well. Otherwise, we're going to lose some data feeds and we need  oracles within the ecosystem. Now, as I mentioned, Charlie 3 is pausing operations at the moment  and they've had a really good run. 1,36 days of uptime on the ADA USD price feed and you know,  many projects have been using this. It's just that it's costly to use and some of these other options  that Pith have make things a little bit cheaper especially if you're calling and trying to pull  data all the time. So there's different methods of doing this. They have push and they also  have pull oracles and a lot of the ecosystem is moving to pull oracles getting the data when you  actually need it as opposed to constantly pulling the chain all the time. So that is one of the  main differences here and it makes a lot of cost optimizations. Now this is really unfortunate and  you can see from the comments here what was a core reason of closure and failure and this came from  one of the C node the Charlie 3 node operators and he said essentially it's not financially  sustainable. As a C3 node operator, I lost a bit of ADA. Price feeds were aggregated onchain,  so the cost per transaction didn't make sense over time. We would pay on ADA and get rewarded in C3.  I still ran it to support the ecosystem, but lost out. And that's really unfortunate. A lot of these  stateport operators such as BBHMM are dedicated to the ecosystem, and it's unfortunate that it didn't  turn out the way that it should have. price of ADA and everything else. It just just makes things  a little bit difficult. Anyway, unfortunate to see Charlie 3 pause and most likely cease all  operations if they can't work out what to do next.

[00:13:27]But it was been a good run so far. I'll put up the  full message to the Cardano community in the show notes for you guys. So, if you want to check it  out, it will all be on my website, Learn Cardano.

[00:13:37]Now, we talked about USDM and the potential of  getting more USDC into the ecosystem thanks to the works of like UniFold for example and what Strike  Finance are doing. But if we have a look at how much USDC is being minted on other ecosystems  just this week, 500 million minted on Salana, we we aren't even seeing anywhere near that. I saw  a post a little bit early today and I'll put up on screen if I can find it, but it mentioned that  another 7 million USDCX was minted on Cardano.

[00:14:12]That's a tiny fraction tiny percentage of what's  being minted on other ecosystems. 7 million is great for what Cardano in in the grand scheme of  things how big Cardano is, but we need a lot more of that. as more and more opportunities and more  ways to on board and more ways to get liquidity on is enabled, we're going to see more of it. And  hopefully the team at Unifold can work their magic and do some better UX so that we can find more  liquidity coming on chain. So fingers crossed we do see something there or maybe they can start  working with USDM and doing some cool things there as well. Now the next protocol I want to talk  about is liquid finance. very similar to surf and what fluid tokens are doing all borrowing and  lending but they are moving to their next phase of transparency on their platform and for a long time  their smart contracts have been closed source but they're moving to make them more transparent so  you can look at the code see that open defy that is what they're going to call it and then you can  verify for yourself what that smart contract is doing and it's going up for a vote at the moment  It's a a governance proposal on their platform and I guess they didn't want to just make the call and  make it all public and then scare off all their holders and whatnot. So, they put it on chain for  vote. It's got 147 votes. Ends in about 3 hours from now. But I can see that it's most likely  will be going as a yes vote to make this open and transparent so everyone can have a look at it.  Now, all the hardcore developers in the ecosystem will be grilling it and checking it themselves  to make sure that everything is uh all in line, have all their ducks in order, and that the smart  contract is in fact good and valid. But this has all been on chain for quite a long time now. I  don't know when they actually released Liquid V2, but it's been battle tested and millions of  ADA and USD have been flowing through their platform and has been working very well. So, we  know it works. we now will be able to check and verify that it all works as well. So, really good  stuff. Liquid, really good move for the ecosystem, too. Now, another project that just launched, it's  V3. So, this is a big upgrade. I talked about this early in the week, and I kind of teased out maybe  we'll see it by the end of the week, and we have Indigo have been working their butts off to get  V3 Live, and this will open up a whole new market of synthetic assets on the Cardano ecosystem. a  lot of things that were holding them back was the opportunities for the people that were providing  collateral on the platform. So to create a brand new synthetic asset, you need to provide ADA, you  need to provide stable coins, whatever it might be. But what was the incentive there? And the  incentive was the Indigo token. And if they kept on opening up more and more different types of  synthetic assets, that means more and more of the Indigo token, the Indie token would be released  into the ecosystem and will drive the price of Indie down to essentially nothing. So now they've  worked out a better way where whatever synthetic asset that you're minting such as maybe I AUD,  Australian dollar, that will be the reward for it. So that way you're not minting and diluting  the indie token. You're rewarding the user in the token that they're providing collateral for. And  that kind of makes sense. And this now opens up and unlocks a whole new opportunity, a whole new  asset class market on the Cardano ecosystem. So Indigo is definitely something to watch. They've  changed the protocol. They've changed the design.

[00:17:51]They've changed the reward system. And I see  that the incentives really line up now. So, let's see what happens next and see if it  actually attracts more users to the platform and opens up a whole new asset classes on the  Cardano blockchain. We'll see I gold, I silver, I oil, you know, all these different commodities  on chain all back through collaterized assets. So, really cool stuff. Indigo, congratulations  on this major milestone. Now, Ascend Markets, they have more they have their smart contracts  on mainet for midnight. They're the first ones to launch a smart contract on midnight from from what  I know. I I believe it's that's the case, but they have a closed beta for mainet side of things. So,  you can sign up for this Google form here. Sign up with this Google form. Apply to be one of the ones  that are trying it out. You can see the contracts are on chain. This is the 1 a.m. Explorer. If  you didn't check out my 1:00 a.m. dust generation tutorial, links down below as well. It's at the  time now where we do need to generate dust and use it as the uh transaction feed to actually do  things on the midnight blockchain. So, do check out that tutorial. But the smart contracts have  been deployed. You can see them on mainet here.

[00:19:12]Very exciting stuff. So, congratulations to the  Ascend market scene for getting this far. But if you want to be a beta tester and get on chain  and start using on mainet sign, fill in that form.

[00:19:23]Fill in that form and become one of the scent  send markets testers. For those that don't know, they do prediction market with perpetuals.  So it's combining two gambling aspects, predicting on an outcome and perpetuals going  long and short on those outcomes, too. So really, really interesting. And I think the privacy  aspect behind it as well, being able to keep that all private, hide who's doing what transactions  thanks to the privacy privacy chain Midnight is their big selling point here. In comparison, just  so you know, other prediction markets such as Poly Market are absolutely massive. It's unregulated  at the moment and some countries are bringing on in some regulations behind it, but Poly Market is  absolutely huge. But it's all public. You can see the wallets. you can see how much money people are  making. This privatizes all that. It hides it. It obscures it. And I think that's really appealing  for a lot of people. So check keep an eye keep an eye out on markets. All right. So they're the  major projects. I think I've covered over pretty much all of them. Yep. I didn't talk about Atlas,  but I've got an interview with them coming up next week. And I did a previous interview with them  as well. Talked about Surf, Sand, Strike, Surge I didn't talk about, but they're they're doing some  upgrades at the moment. and bodega I didn't really talk about as well but their prediction market  built on Cardano and they're doing very well too but the main ones there I have spoken about with a  couple more with indie and liquid finance and all that but if you want to check them out I I'll make  sure I'll put links to all these other projects down below as well but I want to talk about some  other things that is happening at at the moment and the first one here is also my documentation  around setting up a Cardano node at home so there's a lot of benefits in setting up your own  node One of them is that you can configure your wallets that you're using the Cardano ecosystem  to pass through your own node. So you're not relying on thirdparty infrastructure and that  way you can ensure that your transactions are getting on chain as fast as possible and you're  avoiding congestion times. So as the chain gets busier and busier that third party infrastructure  may may see some bottlenecks and having your own infrastructure that bypasses those bottlenecks  is really advantageous especially if you want to get your transaction on chain as quickly as  possible. So home node awesome stuff now I run the home node because I'm a state poolool operator  so I'm reducing my state pool costs and having the node at home is a big benefit there I also run  some other additional pieces of software on it.

[00:21:55]I run block frost icebreaker. The icebreaker well  block frost is a subscription service where you can that you can use essentially it's a node but  you can use block frost to submit transactions to and that's what all the wallets out there use.  They use block frost oros and uh you can submit transactions to it. You can write transactions  you can delegate to state pools all through their API platform. So if you're a web 2 developer  using the API, great. Block Frost is fantastic.

[00:22:26]But I am a icebreaker which is essentially their  decentralized network of nodes that they use push out those transactions and as a result I get some  ADA for doing that. So I run some software such as the icebreaker to make my node profitable at home.  I also run aquarium software. So, Aquarium is a piece of decentralized code that is written for  the fluid tokens ecosystem. And fluid tokens do borrowing and lending and they do liquidations.  And the aquarium code there, I they've got a special name for it, but aquarium code allows you  to batch those transactions and also run through the liquidations. And there I also receive some  fees for doing that too. So I've made this as a income making machine running little bits  of software to help decentralize the Cardano platforms and protocols that I'm building. I also  get a bit of return on my investment and time and running the software. So I'm running essentially  three bits of software on there. The Cardano node, the icebreaker, and the aquarium side of things  so I can earn some revenue. So that's why I run a home node. And it's pretty cool. I have to say  it is profitable especially when you are running from home. This here is a full tutorial on how I  have set one up at home. It goes through the let me just load it up. I forgot to put the link. Keep  on forgetting to put the links in. But it goes through the tutorial has a video here that I did  a full year ago. This is on my tutorials channel.

[00:24:02]Crypto tutorials guides and courses. So if you're  not subscribed to that one, please subscribe to that one as well. But it's got the full video.  It's got the audio and all the notes that I did, all the command prompts that I copied and pasted  so you can step through this entire thing. Follow it and set up your own node at home as well. Okay,  so hopefully you find that resource useful. Next shout out I want to do is one for the Discover  Cardano UK meetup. This is run by Dave invalid UTXO is his username. He's running this meetup  and I think it's open to about 30 or so people and they're doing uh the event to talk about  governance, what's happening within Intersect and giving everyone a big update around all those  different aspects. And it's pretty good because learning about these things, connecting with  people in person is far better than doing it on X or online. You build those connections, you learn  a lot more. you can ask the questions that you need to ask. Now, I'll be chiming in as well with  a live stream. I'll be talking to everyone here mainly about the government's Treasury proposal.  It's part of the Intersect budget about Cardano content creators and helping fund us as well.  So, I've got this uh Treasury proposal up. I'm working with some other brilliant Cardano content  creators in the ecosystem, namely myself, Linda, Big Pay, Cardano, Paul, Dave, and also La Petit.  We are all working on this one here to try and get some funding to keep our content creation going.  So hopefully we do get it through. I'll put a link to this proposal in the show notes as well, so you  can check it out. Now, I am a DREP. I have to vote on all these proposals. A lot of these proposals  I have conflicts of interest in. I'll try and put that all online as well, but you may need to move  your delegation, guys. You may need to move if you want to support me here. I may not be able to  vote on this one. You may have to move somewhere else to someone that is voting for it. And I  also have conflicts of interest across almost all of the proposals that are being put up. So,  something to keep in mind. Anyway, do check out these events and also check out my proposal there.  Now, another event. This is for the local Aussies, the Australians, especially the ones on the Gold  Coast here. Mr. Baggy Pants or Joyst, the man that you see around various events around the Cardano  ecosystem that wears this awesome homemade, not homemade, but um custommade spaceuit. So,  all the events that he goes to, trying to find a better picture of him, but he flies around to  various different crypto events. He's a creator of a online metaverse called Carder Station and he's  built that. A lot of people have used it over the years. He's built custom setups and virtual spaces  in there for myself and other content creators and other projects within the Cardano ecosystem. So,  it's kind of really cool to actually see that all in play. But the whole metaverse thing isn't as  popular as it used to be during the co times. But really cool overall. and he'll be coming out to  Australia on a bit of a tour. Be hitting Perth, Sydney, Gold Coast, and Melbourne. So, um, if  you're in any of those cities, you'll be able to catch up with him because we're doing little  mini meetups everywhere. But the Gold Coast one is in Broad Beach. We just can't decide if we're  going to have it at the Loose Moose or the Lucky Squire. I'm leaning towards the Lucky Squire. It's  a little bit more casual and it doesn't have all these really expensive beers. So, probably  the Lucky Squire, guys. We'll see you there.

[00:27:32]It is on the 8th of June. It's a Monday night.  It's a school night, I know. But this guy coming over from the US. So, please come along, meet  him, and talk about what we've been building and general Cardano stuff. It'd be uh really good to  see you all there. Now, the very, very last thing I want to talk about, and I do have an interview  with these guys coming up. I had a chat with Santi from TX Pipe, and they're building out this brand  new protocol called TX3. And this is a machine readable interface for UTXO blockchains protocols.  And you know what does that mean? Essentially they've put in a standard for AI agents and any  developers out there to actually build against.

[00:28:16]So when you go to any of these protocols, you  go to Indigo, you go to Strike Finance, VIFI, all these different platforms that are building  on Cardano, you need to learn how to interact with their smart contracts. Every single smart contract  is different. you they have different inputs, they have different outputs, they have different bits  of information that needs to be included within that transaction. Not everyone builds exactly the  same way. And because of that, it's inconsistent.

[00:28:41]And for any developer that's coming in and wants  to build a new bounty platform and then integrate in with a borrowing and lending protocol, it's  really confusing cuz you don't know where to start. What they are building is a standardized  API, an application programming interface with a standard way to communicate with all of these  platforms. So you have it all documented here. You have the set of instructions of how to do it. It's  all written in the same way. It's all semantic.

[00:29:08]You can understand what you're looking at. You  know what to put in and you know what you'll get out. So that way a developer can come in and  start building on top of these and start composing really cool and crazy things all together. So  this will be the general flow. You get your credit card. You buy some have some fiat and you buy ADA.  From ADA you may want to get some USD and then you convert ADA to USD USDM for example. Then USDM you  will then use that as collateral to borrow strike tokens. Then you get the strike tokens then stake  it onto the strike finance protocol. So that's a five-step process and to do that would take a lot  of time. But here with intent based and with the instruction set with an API, you can do that all  in one step. You can use an AI agent just say, I want to stake strike tokens and leverage that  as much as possible and here's my credit card and it will go through and do all that for you  automatically. That's the future here and that's what TX3 here can do. That's crazy stuff. Anyway  guys, let's leave it there. That's probably long enough. If you got something out of this, make  sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I've got YouTube memberships  down below. I have buy me a coffee bing link there as well. So, love that support. But if  you can't do that, totally cool. Just hit that thumbs up on your way out. Stay optimistic,  guys. And I'll see you in the next video.