Digest: August 21, 2023: Collaboration Between Cardano Foundation & Demeter, Developer Blog with W3:Ride, A Spotlight on Stake Pools

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Focal points of the week

Empowering Cardano Developers: A Collaboration Between Cardano Foundation & Demeter

DemeterRun - 1688859041286508544.2

The Cardano Foundation has recently entered into a partnership with Demeter, aimed at significantly enhancing the Cardano developer experience. This dynamic collaboration introduces an exciting development: Demeter is rolling out a FREE tier on their cloud hosting platform, Demeter.run, generously supported by the Cardano Foundation.

Through Demeter, developers gain access to a comprehensive array of pre-built extensions, seamlessly enabling interaction with the blockchain. Furthermore, Demeter offers a diverse selection of starter kits, serving as illustrative code samples for your projects or for educational purposes. Additionally, it provides cloud-based Workspaces that facilitates coding within a virtual Visual Studio environment, seamlessly connected to the blockchain within a five-minute span.

This collaboration not only holds the promise of accelerating development endeavors but also contributes significantly to rendering the process of building upon the Cardano platform more accessible and user-friendly. source

New Developer Blog: W3:Ride

W3:Ride is revolutionizing cycling fitness through gamification, fostering an engaging community. Through an aray of achievements, challenges, and progress tracking, the team is aiming to make cycling enjoyable and healthier. The app encourages global connections, while a unique reward system promotes cycling over driving. Personalized virtual bikes and avatars enhance user identity, and charitable partnerships empower cyclists to ride for meaningful causes.

Find out more about this exciting project as we delve into more details with co-founder and CEO, Romain Pomarelle. Read the full interview here

Meet Hazelpool: A Heartfelt Cardano Stake Pool

Stake pool operators (SPOs) play a crucial role in the Cardano ecosystem. They not only run and secure the network, but also contribute in various ways, such as updating libraries, creating open-source tools, and even influencing the network’s evolution through Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs).

Our “A Spotlight on Stake Pools” series reflects this importance by highlighting some of the diverse participants within the Cardano community. It also allows us to provide some insights how the Cardano Foundation delegation has contributed to the SPOs operations. In each installment, we introduce a different pool, showcasing their projects, work, and their approach to open source. In our most recent edition, we had the pleasure of interviewing Nils, the operator of Hazelpool. Hazelpool stands out by fostering abandoned cats, supporting no-kill shelters, and empowering users through the popular HAZELnet Discord bot. To read the full interview and explore the world of Hazelpool, you can read it here.

Other Cardano Related News

  • Finally, staking $ada on Ledger is now Live. Twitter source
  • Frederik Gregaard the CEO of Cardano Foundation on why enterprise blockchain is dead and what from his position Cardano’s long-term vision for its blockchain platform is? Youtube
  • Register to vote phase for Catalyst F10 has ended → Voting will start on August 31st
  • A 21-year-old student’s passion for Cardano once again highlights the significance of community participation. The student rediscovered a potential smart contract and NFT exploit, collaborated with the community, and promptly engaged the IOHK team on GitHub. Together, they resolved the issue! This change will be a part of the upcoming Conway ledger era. Source
  • EMURGO announced as the headline sponsor of the Cardano Summit 2023.
  • Winners of the largest-ever Cardano hackathon organized by EMURGO have been announced!
  • USDC was bridged successfully from Arbitrum to Cardano using the Wanchain bridge. Source
  • IOG has published the official website for the CIP-1694 testnet that has the fitting name “SanchoNet.” Note that SanchoNet is about introducing the Cardano community to governance features from CIP-1694 in a controlled testnet environment.
  • Aiken: a modern smart contract platform for Cardano version: 1.0.14-alpha
    Release v1.0.14-alpha · aiken-lang/aiken · GitHub
  • Ogmios: a lightweight WebSocket/JSON-RPC bridge interface for Cardano version: v6.0.0
    Release v6.0.0 (rc1) · CardanoSolutions/ogmios · GitHub
  • Kupo: a fast, lightweight & configurable chain-indexer for Cardano version: v2.6.0
    Release v2.6.0 · CardanoSolutions/kupo · GitHub

Cardano Reddit Top 10 Most Engaged Topics

Below are the most engaging topics on Reddit

Cardano Forum Top 10 Top Referred Topics

Topics that have received the most clicks from external sources. (last 10 Days)

Topic | Views

Recently held Meetups

Other meetups around the world:

  • 19 July 2023 |UZH + Cardano Foundation meetup. More Info
  • 26 July 2023 |Cardano Blockchain Meetup in Hanoi, Vietnam. More Info
  • 29 July 2023 |Eastern Town Hall Meetup: IdeaFest Reels. More Info
  • 30 July 2023 |[Cardano Hub Jakarta] Meetup: NFT Projects in Cardano. More Info
  • 19 August 2023 |[Meetup] Eastern Town Hall - IdeaFest Reels. More Info

Bi-weekly CIP editor Meeting on Discord

Are you interested in attending CIP editor meetings? Join the Discord channel to learn more about this interesting community where ideas and recommended changes are all discussed.

Bi-weekly CIP Editor Meeting Summary:

This week, @RyanW gives us a glimpse of the most pressing matters:
Triage

  • CIP-0030 | Stipulate namespaced extension endpoints
    The author (myself) presented the topic for discussion.
    A suggestion was put forth to encourage authors to employ namespacing while avoiding its enforcement. The intention is to accommodate instances of clashing names for patches and fixes (see KtorZ comment).

  • CIP-0050 | Translations: fix Spanish metadata, remove Chinese
    A discussion revolved around the Revision header field contents when no commit hash is available.
    The consensus reached was to permit the use of the last known translation date.
    Robert will amend CIP-01 to incorporate this allowance for translated CIPs.

Review

  • CIP-1694 | Semantic changes after the Edinburgh workshop
    Debate surrounded the classification as “semantic changes.” The suggestion was given to the author to separate the semantic modifications from other changes into a distinct pull request. This would facilitate focused deliberation on the broader changes.

For a comprehensive breakdown and more details, please visit the Forum.

Catalyst Proposals

Below you will discover a selection of Catalyst proposals originating from various community members, which have piqued our interest. Please note that by featuring these proposals in our Community Digest, we are not expressing explicit support for any single proposal. We strongly encourage each voter to conduct their own due diligence before making any voting decisions.

Proposal #1: dRep Recruitment, Training, and Ethical Code Development Workshops

A global workshop series will introduce the role of both Catalyst DReps and Cardano DReps, engage potential DReps, and create a good framework to properly support them off-chain. Read More

Proposal #2: Accelerate Atala PRISM learning and adoption in Universities

We will work with universities in our network to deliver the Atala Prism V2 course in the local language. as mainstream subject, support students to write their apps using Atala Prism. Read More

Proposal #3: AdaStat Cardano Explorer for Pre-prod and Preview test networks

Explorers are an important part of every blockchain ecosystem. Cardano is no exception. Since none of the Testnets explorers is perfect and each has both advantages and disadvantages (for example, some don’t show account rewards, others may display non-real-time data, i.e. display cached data, etc), it is very important to give developers and users the opportunity to choose which explorer they will use for a particular request. Our team has already developed the AdaStat.net Cardano Explorer for the mainnet, and now we want to do the same for the both Pre-prod and Preview testnets. In addition, as far as I know, none of existing Testnet Explorer has a public API. AdaStat will have the public API for both Pre-prod and Preview testnets. Read More

Spotlight for Community-built Tools

The Developer Portal was created to foster a home for developers who are dedicated to building tools and services on Cardano. The platform allows developers to not only collaborate on projects but also to showcase their works.

The Developer Portal aspires to become a credible source where users can search for tools to fit their needs.

Community projects already running on mainnet are encouraged to add their projects to the Developer Portal.

  • Summon Platform: A DAO creation and governance platform on the Cardano blockchain.
  • Yaci DevKit: Create your own local Cardano devnet with ease! It includes an Indexer, minimal Explorer interface, and support for Cardano Client Lib or Lucid JS library’s Blockfrost provider.
  • MazzumaGPT: Generate smart contract code in Plutus using AI.

Network insights

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