Catalyzing Change in the Ecosystem of Digital Finance and Contracts
Jan 28, 2024
Brian, Epoch, Jenny, Lido, Block Jock, Noodz
Prepare to have your mind expanded as we navigate the thrilling landscape of Project Catalyst proposals, where Dmitri, Sergio, and Eric—titans of finance and technology—reveal their groundbreaking projects set to disrupt the blockchain and financial sectors. Block Margin emerges as a beacon of hope for leveling the playing field in the interest rate market, promising secure, private trading with an innovative twist using Marlowe for smart contract automation. Meanwhile, Eric paints a future where AI and smart contracts merge on the Cardano blockchain to foster AI-driven NFTs and service rentals, marking a new era of ethical AI interaction.
The pulse of the episode quickens as we move to the forefront of decentralized finance, where the Peer Hive masterminds are carving a niche at the confluence of blockchain and trade finance. With their eyes set on transforming SME lending, they're scripting a new narrative that intertwines trustless blockchain technology with the traditional financial world. Not to be outshone, TXPipe's proposal unveils a bounty system based on peer-to-peer Marlowe contracts, aiming to resolve trust issues between software developers and project contributors—a step that could redefine the economics of software development.
As the episode draws to a close, the spotlight turns to the robust Cardano community, highlighting the plethora of innovative Fund 11 project proposals. We explore strategies to showcase Marlowe's prowess beyond the Cardano faithful, delving into the need for cross-pollination with other blockchain ecosystems and the instrumental role of community engagement in promoting real-world Marlowe applications. Our heartfelt appreciation goes out to our monthly podcast supporters, with a warm invitation for listeners to champion these visionary ideators as they ride the Catalyst funding wave toward reimagining the blockchain's potential.
Prepare to have your mind expanded as we navigate the thrilling landscape of Project Catalyst proposals, where Dmitri, Sergio, and Eric—titans of finance and technology—reveal their groundbreaking projects set to disrupt the blockchain and financial sectors. Block Margin emerges as a beacon of hope for leveling the playing field in the interest rate market, promising secure, private trading with an innovative twist using Marlowe for smart contract automation. Meanwhile, Eric paints a future where AI and smart contracts merge on the Cardano blockchain to foster AI-driven NFTs and service rentals, marking a new era of ethical AI interaction.
The pulse of the episode quickens as we move to the forefront of decentralized finance, where the Peer Hive masterminds are carving a niche at the confluence of blockchain and trade finance. With their eyes set on transforming SME lending, they're scripting a new narrative that intertwines trustless blockchain technology with the traditional financial world. Not to be outshone, TXPipe's proposal unveils a bounty system based on peer-to-peer Marlowe contracts, aiming to resolve trust issues between software developers and project contributors—a step that could redefine the economics of software development.
As the episode draws to a close, the spotlight turns to the robust Cardano community, highlighting the plethora of innovative Fund 11 project proposals. We explore strategies to showcase Marlowe's prowess beyond the Cardano faithful, delving into the need for cross-pollination with other blockchain ecosystems and the instrumental role of community engagement in promoting real-world Marlowe applications. Our heartfelt appreciation goes out to our monthly podcast supporters, with a warm invitation for listeners to champion these visionary ideators as they ride the Catalyst funding wave toward reimagining the blockchain's potential.
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Speaker 1:
And we have a very unique experience today that we're going to be enjoying a buffet of ideas for people proposing in Project Catalyst, with respect to Marlowe looking to Things, and we do have 10 seats at this breakfast buffet table and we're going to try and cram them all in in a 25 minute slot, so we're going to kick it off and I would open it up to anybody. We're going to do about two, two and a half minutes each person. If you'd like to give us a quick pitch run down on your team and what it is that you're building for this round, we can start with anybody here On this amazing Thursday edition of Cardano over coffee.
Speaker 2:
Hello everybody. I can go first, if that that works for everyone.
Speaker 1:
Let's kick it off. I love it.
Speaker 2:
Hey, hey, everybody. So so you got here today, myself, dmitri, and you got Sergio uh, viva, sergio is his handle. We are financial professionals, have decades of Experience in the industry and we are pitching to develop an idea into a product for large financial institutions and retail customers, such as homeowners and small companies. It has to do with dealing in financial products linked to interest rates the interest rates that are that are set by the central banks. Um, in the current financial landscape, small companies and retail customers face Significant challenges in accessing and participating in the industry market, the largest financial market in the world, where players place bets on direction of interest rates, similar to stock market, but where things traded on stocks but interest rates. Traditional financial institutions dominate the space, leaving small players with limited options and no ability to negotiate prices. Recent interest rates increases have underscored the risk associated with the setup, leaving customers without adequate tools to protect against interest rate increases. Just imagine if you could buy protection against a mortgage rates going up and do so in your browser using a crypto wallet. So that's where our solution comes in Block margin.
Speaker 2:
We aim to democratize the interest rate market by leveraging the capabilities of blockchains as smart contracts through three pillars. The main one is we want to be able to do low cost daily margining by Simulistically, by seamlessly integrating daily margin into blockchains and significantly reducing operational capacities, making it cost effective for small businesses and individuals to participate. The single biggest reason why small players have difficulty in accessing this market is because of not having the operational capability to post and receive daily variations in collateral that these contracts require, and we want to fix that. The second, the second pillar, probably the more obvious one, is secure and private trading, using blockchain for security and potentially leveraging midnight for privacy when released, and then and then Third one, to automate, using small contracts power, powered by the Marlowe's my contract language, to streamline trading and settlement process. So we have deep knowledge of these products, gained over decades working in the industry and tech companies, and we have 100 delivery track record on previous cats proposals, having delivered three proposals since fund eight.
Speaker 3:
Um, you can find out some comments.
Speaker 2:
Uh, thanks for listening. Uh, a product is called block margin.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing. It's pinned up at the top. If people want to check it out, I have your pin tweet there With the idea scale link for all people. Thank you, dynamic, for coming through and giving us a quick pitch lowdown On what it is you're building. We are going to try and rapid fire this to our next guest, so I'm curious to know if there's anybody else on the stage who would like to hop in next to get us the Lowdown on what it is that you're cooking for. Catalyst fund 11.
Speaker 4:
Hey, I'm eric here. Can you confirm if you hear me?
Speaker 1:
Loud and clear. Happy thursday Welcome.
Speaker 4:
Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, americ have been building projects on cardano for around 18 months now, focusing a lot on digital identity and ai projects. This project is about ai's. Ai's are now capable of performing tasks in either a semi autonomous or even sometimes fully autonomous way. With several hundred thousands of open source ai models accessible to anyone, it is becoming critical to assess their quality and ethical value, starting with two critical requirements First, assigning a digital identity to an ai. Second, establishing a proof of each particular ai capability and output. The path of blockchain and ai's are joining together. As digital entities, ai will soon live on some blockchains. I propose that cardano becomes the leading blockchain where ai's get their identity, are able to perform tasks, including executing smart contracts, leave a trace on chain of their capabilities and assign their creations to other entities on chain, either humans or also other ai's. This project builds upon a decentralized platform of open source ai agents already in production at opensourceaicom.
Speaker 4:
The next step is to move ai's on chain with an identity. Last year, I was part of the Atala Prism cohort and the project I submitted was ranked in the top three and was presented to Charles On Cardano. Thanks to Atala Prism, ai will benefit from a deed digital identity and will obtain verified credentials. In addition, the use of simple Marlowe smart contracts opens the path to rent the service of an AI in confidence of its ability and ethical value, as they will be provable on-chain. I have submitted two projects in Catalyst, both contributing to this bigger goal of having AI's live on the Cardano blockchain as autonomous and ethical entities. In short, a first SMOJ project will allow AI's to automatically generate NFT collections on-chain and assign the benefit of the collection to its owner. The second larger project is for putting AI's on-chain with a digital identity and an ability to rent their services.
Speaker 4:
You can follow me on Twitter and you will find a link on both projects. I'm not exactly sure how I will put them here. If somebody can help me, I will do it. If you're interested to know more, you can connect with me. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Thank you, eric. Awesome, very great distillation into your ideas. I did pin it up at the top from your personal profile over there, so give them a follow if you want to follow along. Ai, very interesting proposition. We're going to keep rolling along because we do have eight more guests that want to tell us about other cooking and project Catalysts, fund 11. So I'm going to open the floor up and invite any and all people to take the mic next.
Speaker 6:
Hey everyone, Can anyone hear me?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, we can, loud and clear. Happy Thursday. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 6:
Hey, all right. So yeah, hello everyone. I'm from Malaysia, so what I'm doing right now is my company is Peer Hive. It's basically a P2P landing protocol. So what we do is basically facilitate the lander and also the SME. So when we talk about SME, it's talking about small, medium enterprise company that actually requesting financing to operate their day-to-day businesses. So what Peer do is basically we actually make sure that the SME have the capacity to repay back the money wherever they want to invest the fund and we allow the lander to hold stablecoin like USDC or USDT or USP Any stablecoin that they give to the blockchain to actually invest in a real-world asset. So basically, you're actually investing to a company that actually generated money in the real world.
Speaker 6:
So our aim is basically bringing the money that on the stablecoin back into trade finance and from the trade finance they do repayment, so bringing back the money back into the crypto world. So we want the facility that will call ourselves a real-file. So basically we want to make decentralized finance and also trade finance together. So this is our aim as a PI. So we've been bootstrapping for a year in different ways in a lot of chain like Polygon, cardano, and right now we are looking at how do we actually write contract in Marlowe. So that's what PI do and yeah, I link it in the comment. Yep, so yeah, that's all from me.
Speaker 1:
Thanks, thank you so much. I love it, and thank you to Marlowe, our friends over there, for helping to co-curate this amazing experience. It is pinned up at the top from the comments there. Do you want to just make a suggestion for our friend here, crypto Mike? You should open up your account because I tried to find something and you're talking to go private to it. Follow you. So thank you so much for joining us today. My friend and we're going to keep rolling because we do have a short film breakfast. We have not heard yet Santiago joining us as well. My friend, how are you?
Speaker 3:
I'm good. Thank you for having me. Can you hear me okay?
Speaker 1:
Loud and clear. Happy Thursday. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, no problem, so I'll go ahead with my with a pitch for my proposal. I'm from TXPipe team. At TXPipe, we develop open source software tools for the Cardano ecosystem and, in particular, for me. Developing open source is great. It's a great way to make software. The most interesting part, and at the same time the most complicated part, is to interact with this multitude of developers from all over the world, different countries, different languages, different time zones. And some of these developers, when they contribute to open source, maybe they are there just for the benefits of whatever they are contributing to the project. Some are there just for the glory of contributing to some larger project and others are there to make a living and, in essence, there is a key economy formed around open source contributions, free, less contractors that work on short-term geeks that jump from one project to the other, and this is very interesting but, at the same time, very complex to manage. That is why bounty systems appear. There are several platforms that they all try to solve the same thing, which is connecting maintainers and contributors so that maintainers define a task, define a payment or a reward for that task and then contiguous coming, fulfill the task and get paid. Now there is a problem with this platforms, which is that they need to trust each other. Each party the maintainer of the project and the contributor needs to trust between each other. The maintainer needs to make sure that the computer is going to Give them the code that was asked for and, at the same time, the contributor needs to know that the maintenance going to pay for that. So how can we fix the trust problem? And that's where our catalyst proposal comes in. We have developed a prototype of a bounty system that uses peer-to-peer Marlowe contracts so that every time a bunch is created, a new contract is created between the maintainer and the Contributor.
Speaker 3:
So this is a mouthful and with a little bit more time, I can unpack a little bit the journey of all of the actors, but I just want to highlight that there are several benefits to this approach. First of all, each party only needs to trust the smart contract, so there is no more trusting between each other. Second, this is a real-world use case for blockchain we always talk about. How can we find real-world use cases? Well, here for the first time, and it's very refreshing we are working on a product where blockchain is just an implementation detail is behind the scenes. And Third, in this way we can promote ADA as a currency for software development gigs.
Speaker 3:
So, all around, this has a lot of benefits and we believe that it's a great thing, not only as a proposal and as a prototype, but also as something that we would use ourselves the X-pipe to keep growing and developing our projects. Now Marlowe has been an essential Component in this prototype. Actually, the on-chain part was the easiest part of all the prototype, so we're very glad you have decided for Marlowe to fulfill that. That work within the project and the catalyst proposal since we already have a prototype is to grow this into a full-blown product. For more information, you can search for TX pipe and idea scale. You will see this proposal, which is called gig honey, and you will also find other proposal for TX pipes which I invite you to search and then look.
Speaker 1:
Amazing, much as much as Santiago, my friend, for joining us this morning. On your ideas are pinned up at the top. We've got it up there from the Marlowe account. Again. Thank you for your co curation this lovely, lovely Thursday. Awesome to hear we're gonna get into our fifth now. I do believe we have not yet heard from Eric Romero joining us here in the conversation as well.
Speaker 7:
Hi everybody, hi from Brazil. Thanks, dominica Cardano over over coffee for sharing this space and let us share our ideas on this amazing space. So, um well, I will go with my idea, right? I'm drinking my coffee as we go, so we can be tuned. I would like to share some exciting news about what we are cooking here with the Marlowe team. We're making something cool and it's going to change the way we interact with its smart contracts.
Speaker 7:
In Cardano, our secret tool is Marlowe. Right, and this tool that is, we did Marlowe, called TypeScript SDK, is gonna let us make and integrate those smart contracts quickly and cheaply, but they are still really trustworthy. We then put these contracts into easy to use web apps so you can interact and chat without any trouble. Think about it like making top quality stuff, but without taking ages, taking edges or causing a fortune. It means we can quickly give what you need, solving real problems without any hassle. Our platform is all about making these contracts easy and fun to use, just like your favorite applications. We're keeping things simpler and clear, so you don't have to be techy savvy to get the hang of it. It's like having a helpful body who knows all about blockchains, making sure you are comfortable every step of the way.
Speaker 7:
With Marlowe. We are ready to keep out with all these different things you guys need and even get ahead of the game. We are here to make blockchain a real part of everybody's life, not just something for techies. A cherry on top of this, right, we are packing all these contracts with really sound and handy features like open roles and localizations. Open roles it's all about flexibility. You can think of them like open seats that anyone can feel, making the contract super adaptable. Mercatization while it sounds a little bit techy, it's our way of handling big, complex stuff without slowing down the contract. It keeps our contract slides on the feed and efficient. We can make the future with smart contracts easy and common, ascending a text. That's the main idea. It's democratizing smart contracts for real use cases and using the Cardano blockchain. Thanks all for listening.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much for joining us. It is pinned up at the top and people want to check it out there. Thank you again, marlowe, our friend, for co-curating this lovely Thursday. You can see up there for TXPy tools that they're cooking up in the kitchen. I also pinned up a tweet from Mr Charles Hoskinson, not sure if you've heard him. He's an up-and-coming developer in Cardano, I guess, but he says that he loves the Marlowe types here at SDK. He's got a cool video for you to check out as well, if you want to get into it. I'm looking around at people in the conversation. So far, we've done a rapid fire round of five different ideas People cooking up on Catalyst Fund 11, and all of those ideas are pinned up at the top. Not sure if we have other voices joining us, marlowe, or if the remainder of these ideas are from people already here in the conversation.
Speaker 8:
I can see we have agro-technology with us. It's another catalyst proposal. Do you want to guys go next?
Speaker 1:
I'll be up as speaker. I don't see them. I see BlockJoc, santiago Dynamic. I see CryptoMikes up here Eric and Eric, two Eric's, one with a C, one with a K. But if anybody else is in the room that wants to join us from this cohort of individuals there, we go, hit that request button and you join our conversation up here. We would love to get you into the kitchen and hear what you're cooking. Hello, hello, yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. Agro-technology, cardano. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Happy Thursday, hello everyone, good morning. I would like to start thanking you for this space.
Speaker 9:
Let you know who I am. I'm Juan Vargas, from Agro-technology. I'm the CTO of the company and we're going to talk about two amazing proposals that we have. At the end, you will see that they are both a big part of a big idea that we want with Cardano and agriculture industry, where we think Cardano could be a pioneer in the agro industry. So the first one it would be we would like to tokenize agriculture for the future. We would like to tokenize agriculture for democratizing the industry. We seek to tokenize agriculture assets to enable sustainable farming investments.
Speaker 9:
We are leveraging, with an AI-assisted chatbot, the data collection of people that is around this industry the farmers and all the people in the chain. With this data, we are going to do predictions and with the Cardano blockchain, we are going to do secure, immutable and transaction records and we design smart contracts for automated processes. This initiative will grab farmers broader market access and enhance profitability. This Cardano usage is in concept and we are seeking 100K data. The second one it's a bit more advanced. We have been working in this longer. We are rolling out a sophisticated IoT sensor network that will give us the real-time state of the farms. With this, we will have AI-driven analytics that will let us do automations within the crop. We will use the blockchain to ensure this immutability and traceability for the process that are being done in the farm.
Speaker 9:
Our team is armed with robust engineering and scientific expertise. We are eager to bring this technology to the agro, to this part of the world. I didn't mention it, but we are from South America and we produce a lot of food and products that definitely will be used abroad, all over the world, for the Cardanico system. This project is promised to increase the number of transactions that are being done in the blockchain and will help to show a solid use of practical, real-world usage and impact many, many people around the world. In summary, our technology Cardano we don't only want to merely improve agriculture methods. We are spreading a new era where agriculture and economy can be taken worldwide. And yeah, that's pretty much what we wanted to share and the two proposals that we have.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing. It's pinned up at the top from our friends over here, marlo, co-hosting up our curation of content and ideas today Pinned up there you can check out. Agro is the account. You can give them a follow there. On the timeline, we do have, I believe, four more individuals who will be building on Marlo with this project, cadalyst Fund 11. So if you're down in the chat, do hit the request button. We'll get you up here in the conversation. We'd love to see it. Very exciting thing a range of different ideas that people are cooking up. So I'm not sure, marlo. Do you see any other of our slated guests that joined us this Thursday?
Speaker 8:
Yeah, I'm looking at the list of participants. I actually believe that these were all that requested participation in this space. Unfortunately, one project had to decline due to some other clash, so I think that, as we have just a few minutes left, maybe there are questions to our wonderful catalyst proposers.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, we do have a few minutes left and that's very awesome to have gotten it all in in terms of this rapid fire round. And I do want to just really quickly direct people's attention and let them be reminded that we do have a number of pinned tweets at the top where you can check the direct links, all these catalyst proposals that are going on with the idea scale over there. There are the accounts tagged as well, that you can follow along if you like these ideas. And yeah, we do mostly have co-proposers up here on the stage, but I also do have BlockJoc with us If you have any questions. Blockjoc, my friend, if you're around at the mic.
Speaker 5:
I'm curious for Dominica. So as far as your experience working with projects that are coming on the Marlo, is the learning curve been pretty quick or have you found some struggles there in the beginning with groups and projects in their CTOs learning some of this stuff?
Speaker 8:
So what I can tell for sure is that we are working with our friends and family from Cardano community to get feedback on their user experience with Marlowe, and we're trying our best to improve it. As you may know, recently, for example, we released our TypeScript SDK, which is essentially a library of TypeScript and JavaScript code for regular web developers so that now they can integrate and run and start their contracts and integrate in regular React applications without prior knowledge of web-free and all the intricacies of blockchain or installing things like blockchain indexer and all the very complex stuff. So we are definitely working towards improving this user journey and making it more and more accessible to everyone. We also released recently a series of short videos. I can also send them again in the chat. It's a playlist that covers each step on how to integrate Marlowe contracts and run them using TypeScript SDK. So I believe this should be now much easier for everyone to use Marlowe. And also, of course, we do have our playground for people that want to start with Marlowe. They can go there and play with blockchain.
Speaker 5:
And one short follow-up Nudes, if that's all right. The one short follow-up I would have is as far as marketing and getting the word out there that Marlowe is available. We are currently using TypeScript, so we've really opened the channel. It's a much wider lane as far as who's capable of coming in and actually working with Marlowe. What exactly outside of the Cardano bubble? Obviously in Twitter, everybody sees it, but we're talking to the choir getting that out there into the wider crypto space and Web2. Where exactly are you marketing or promoting Marlowe?
Speaker 8:
It's a very fresh launch to us, so we're still in the phase of exploration and new partnerships, but definitely open to any proposal.
Speaker 5:
So you're not advertising or putting anything out there, other than if Charles is talking about it in a tweet or something like that. I figured the best way to get the word out is so people know about it, especially those, let's say, you have CTOs of other projects in Ethereum, let's say, for example and then they have their developers that work underneath them, and some of them they might be one or two or three years in, but they also have aspirations to also build their own project, and this might be the perfect opportunity for them to branch out and remove themselves out from under a larger project and work over here in Cardano, because they have the skills necessary in order to do that, and it feels to me like that's the way to go and be able to reach those people. How would you do that? And I'm just curious if you guys have thought about that.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely great suggestion. I think one of the ways to do that is also through different projects that want to utilize Marlow, like our today's Catalyst Proposers. So we hope that also community, as we develop open source software, we hope that community also comes with ideas and spread the word out there and show what are the kinds of use cases for Marlow. We've got plenty of great projects here really today talking about like real world use cases. So I believe this is one of the ways to go for us as well.
Speaker 5:
I could agree more and I congratulate all the presenters today. You did a great job. It's a rather daunting thing to do very, very quickly, and each one of them express themselves in a way that I understood exactly what they're doing. And good luck to you going into the Catalyst Round. I know for us with USDM. We had some success there and if there's anything that you need, please reach out and we'd love to be able to help in any way we can.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely. Thank you everyone again for participating and for agreeing to pitch today to the community.
Speaker 10:
Thanks for listening to this special episode of Cardano Over Coffee and thanks everybody who's building on Cardano. Check out their fun 11 Catalyst proposals. They're live now for voting. We want to give a big shout out to our monthly podcast supporters. The Wizard, tim, discovercardano, bookio, project, camo, linda from StakepoolTicker, malu, twisted Gears, meehan, enigma, stakepoolticker1, monsterstakepoolticker, mn, str, epochsec and Psycho is the Cardano card game. We appreciate all your support. If you'd like to have your name or business mentioned in future podcasts or have your logo and links displayed in the description of our podcast, click the support button now.
