2021 was a huge year for the cryptocurrency market, with huge strides in growth and adoption of digital assets, NFTs,
and blockchain worldwide. It was also an incredible year for Moonstake as we rose to the top rankings of global staking
providers, reaching a total staking assets of $1.8 billion thanks to the support of our users and partners worldwide. As
we begin the new year 2022, Moonstake as well as our strategic blockchain partners have many exciting news and programs
in store for you as our platforms scale and evolve. To welcome our user community into the exciting new year, we're
creating a series of articles in collaboration with our strategic partners on what you need to know about them in the
year 2022, starting with Cardano (ADA).
Since August 2020, Moonstake has been a strong staking provider for ADA staking, Cardano's native cryptocurrency, as a
strategic partner of EMURGO, the official commercial arm of Cardano. Recently, the group leading Moonstake's
development, Infinity Blockchain Group, was acquired by EMURGO to strengthen EMURGO's strategic resources & accelerate research into the interoperability of Cardano with other blockchains.
As for Cardano, last year the blockchain underwent tremendous development updates and accomplished many great
milestones. The network became fully community-governed and operated in April and launched public support of smart
contracts and thus, DeFi applications in September with the launch of Plutus and the gradual rollout of the Alonzo
update. In this article, we will be interviewing our partner EMURGO about what is in store for the Cardano ecosystem and
its user community in 2022.
Q1 Which 2021 achievements are you the most proud of?
As mentioned, 2021 was a tremendous year for EMURGO and the Cardano ecosystem, with highlights such as the successful
rollout of smart contracts to Cardano's network, a big increase in Yoroi Wallet adoption, and plans to release new
EMURGO products such as Yoroi's dApp Connector which will greatly facilitate Cardano ADA user interaction with Cardano
ecosystem dApps such as DeFi and NFTs.
In particular, EMURGO is proud of establishing a $100 million Cardano ecosystem investment vehicle comprising two
entities - EMURGO Ventures and EMURGO Africa - to invest into early startup and growth stage companies that will build
Cardano-based solutions.
EMURGO Ventures focuses on developed markets outside of Africa to facilitate the building of solutions and services on
Cardano with seed investments into a variety of Cardano-focused startups and middleware solutions companies, including
those building decentralized financial services (DeFi), non-fungible token (NFT) projects, blockchain developer
education tools, and other decentralized applications.
EMURGO Africa's goal on the other hand is to ultimately support more than three hundred African startups through seed
funding and incubation, and have Cardano's blockchain adopted as the technological platform standard in Africa for
socially impactful solutions. For its launch to achieve this goal, EMURGO Africa partnered with Adanian Labs, a
successful venture building studio operator in Africa, to support impact driven startups expanding the Cardano ecosystem
across the continent; and Adaverse, a Cardano-focused joint accelerator program in Africa.
EMURGO's new Cardano investment vehicle will greatly enhance and support the development of socially impactful solutions
utilizing Cardano's green blockchain technology, ultimately providing benefits to both developers and society.
For more information, please feel free to reach out to info@emurgo.io
Q2 What measures are you going to take in 2022 to further increase adoption of Cardano?
EMURGO has many exciting things in store for 2022, including the official release of Yoroi's dApp Connector, and more
cool features for Yoroi to enrich the Cardano ADA user experience in a rapidly expanding Cardano dApp ecosystem.
We are also highly looking forward to cultivating the Cardano NFT ecosystem and community with the launch of our own
Cardano-based NFT marketplace, Fiborite, scheduled to come soon in early 2022.
Artists and musicians are encouraged to pre-register for the launch of Fiborite by going to the official site here (http://www.fiborite.io/) and follow Fiborite on Twitter at @FiboNFT.
As a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, EMURGO's Cardano NFT marketplace Fiborite is uniquely positioned to
offer the Cardano community and global artists the chance to easily mint, buy, and sell NFTs using Cardano ADA directly
on the marketplace. Those unfamiliar with NFTs will be able to easily use Fiborite's simple and user-intuitive UX to
either mint, buy, or sell NFTs of their choosing.
Additionally in 2022, EMURGO will also provide DeFi services built on Cardano directly through Astarter, including
decentralized exchange (DEX), IDO launchpad for token projects building on Cardano, and more to come. This will provide
more liquidity and utility for Cardano ADA users and make it easier for projects to utilize Cardano.
Q3 What can users expect from Cardano in 2022?
Users can expect Cardano to continue its consistent development with new dApps and technical upgrades now that Cardano
has become fully decentralized with staking rewards given and smart contracts supported. Cardano is also looking to
introduce Layer-2 scaling solutions such as Hydra to increase throughput and allow easier mainstream adoption of
Cardano's scalable, sustainable, and interoperable third-generation blockchain. Users can follow Cardano's development
roadmap with status updates at https://roadmap.cardano.org. EMURGO will also continue to support the development of Cardano's ecosystem through solutions development, Yoroi
Wallet feature upgrades, developer education courses, and investments. Please follow EMURGO on Twitter @emurgo_io to
always receive the latest news.
Moonstake is proud to be strategic partners of EMURGO and the Cardano blockchain. We will continue to maintain strong
support for the ever growing and developing Cardano ecosystem and hope to bring even more great value to ADA and crypto
users worldwide in 2022 to help accelerate adoption of the Cardano and Moonstake ecosystems together.