Driving Blockchain: Cardano Foundation’s Activities Part 12
Foundation updates on the Cardano Summit 2024, ecosystem innovation, and ongoing community engagement
The Cardano Foundation works to further Cardano as a public digital infrastructure, engaging with traditional industries and Web 3.0 stakeholders to support initiatives across key sectors within three distinct verticals: traceability, authenticity, and sustainability. The Foundation recognizes these verticals as critical pillars in the Cardano ecosystem, demonstrating the network’s potential to address real-world challenges. Moreover, they form the framework for high-impact innovation, delivering solutions for enterprises and consumers.
Through its targeted efforts, the Foundation empowers those exploring and building on Cardano, contributing to broader efforts to drive adoption. The Foundation also recognizes the importance of awareness, delivering comprehensive, high-quality education through offerings like Cardano Academy. These initiatives increase public familiarity with blockchain and foster a deeper understanding of its possibilities and limitations. At the same time, the Foundation works to enhance Cardano's resilience and scale its on-chain activities, improving network utility for public and enterprise applications.
Delivering a successful Cardano Summit 2024
Following preparations throughout 2024, the fourth annual Cardano Summit returned to Dubai, hosting over 1,000 industry leaders, 45 sponsors, 60 partners, developers, and blockchain enthusiasts from 87 countries. Participants engaged in two days of main stage, pitch stage, and masterclass discussions, hearing insights from over 115 speakers who contributed to more than 35 sessions on the future of blockchain.
During a much-anticipated session, Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard and Binance CEO Richard Teng stressed the importance of compliance in fostering institutional adoption. The conversation further delved into the role of regulation in contributing to a more resilient blockchain industry. The Summit further showcased blockchain's potential to revolutionize space mission design and efficiency, with NASA Systems Engineer Matthew Vaerewyck presenting virtually on a key use case for the agency.
Don Tapscott, Executive Chairman and CEO of the Blockchain Research Institute, also took to the main stage to highlight blockchain's potential to reshape key sectors. During the session, Tapscott delved into the concept of “pre-distributing wealth" through economic decentralization, which would allow more people to participate in and benefit from wealth creation—transforming enterprises so that shareholders and workers become unified stakeholders.
Bringing attention to Cardano’s technical roadmap, the Foundation’s CTO, Giorgio Zinetti, presented on the Byron phase to the age of Voltaire, emphasizing ongoing research in quantum resistance and post-quantum enhancements. Contributing to the discussion on Cardano’s evolution, EMURGO announced a collaboration with BitcoinOS to extend the benefits of Bitcoin's liquidity to Cardano decentralized finance (DeFi) users. The main stage also featured humanitarian initiatives, with Goodwall and the Cardano Foundation launching the Art Beyond Borders Global Impact Challenge. Notably, the effort will support young artists and displaced people using blockchain as a funding mechanism.
The well-attended event concluded with the Cardano Summit Awards 2024, recognizing excellence across 11 categories following community-based voting using Cardano Ballot. As with previous events, the Cardano Summit 2024 demonstrated the real-world impact of blockchain across various sectors and introduced the blockchain to a broader audience. The Foundation again extends its appreciation to those who attended and supported the Summit—we look forward to continued engagement with the Cardano ecosystem.
Innovative use cases driving adoption
The Foundation continues to foster collaborations that serve as key drivers of blockchain adoption. The strategic partnership with Tokenance, a blockchain and AI software developer, reflects such efforts. Built on the Cardano blockchain, Tokenance integrated its RE-TWIN solution as a feature within the YurekAI platform. The solution provides developers, real estate agencies, and investors with a reliable and transparent system for managing property information.
RE-TWIN offers a novel approach to real estate transaction management through the use of digital twins. These digital representations of properties securely store vital information on the Cardano blockchain, including architectural designs, floor plans, and historical records. As a result, RE-TWIN enhances security, ensures authenticity, streamlines transactions, and increases trust and transparency for all stakeholders. The collaboration expands RE-TWIN's reach to 2,000 real estate agencies in Europe and 40,000 in the United States.
Furthering its support for novel use cases, the Foundation introduced Reeve in November 2024, a product designed to enhance global accounting systems and financial reporting. Reeve empowers organizations to securely record and share critical financial data on the Cardano blockchain, ensuring integrity and verifiability for all stakeholders. This functionality allows enterprises to streamline audits, strengthen accountability, increase trust, and improve efficiency.
For the initial release of Reeve, the Foundation submitted data exclusively through a dedicated wallet address, identified by an ada handle for increased verifiability. This sample release of on-chain accounting transactions aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Foundation's financial activities. Active engagement with the community continues as we gather feedback to ensure Reeve meets the needs of all stakeholders before its public release in Q2 2025.
Making contributions to ecosystem education and sustainability
The Foundation’s first Financial Insights Report marked a significant milestone, reinforcing a commitment to the principles of openness, integrity, and community engagement. The report details the tangible impact made across the Foundation’s core focus areas of adoption, education, and operational resilience. To supplement these insights, we provided on-chain audited financial statements using Reeve, enhancing transparency and accountability within the Cardano ecosystem.
In the realm of education, the Foundation entered a strategic partnership with the SEE Institute, a prominent hub for sustainability education and innovation based in Dubai. The partnership seeks to advance blockchain-powered sustainable solutions, promote the global use of blockchain technology, and improve transparency and traceability in key sustainability sectors. These efforts will support sustainable and ethical business practices using data-driven solutions that address critical challenges as well as contribute to global net-zero emissions targets.
Following the July announcement of making available Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA)-compliant sustainability indicators for Cardano, the Foundation published a whitepaper template for utility token issuance on the network in cooperation with LAWSIDE and STADLER VÖLKEL. The template aims to help Cardano projects navigate MiCA's complexities and support compliance with its disclosure requirements. The whitepaper template has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, allowing its use free of charge. This initiative reinforces a commitment to support the Cardano ecosystem’s compliance with evolving regulations.
Building resilience through experimentation and collaboration
The Foundation continues to support Cardano’s open source development and resilience, engaging with ecosystem projects that promote network longevity. Aiken serves as one example of successful community collaboration, becoming the top smart contract language on Cardano as of November. At the time, Aiken comprised 62% of total smart contract activity, with over one million mainnet transactions—showcasing Cardano’s scalability and growing adoption.
In the same month, the Foundation launched the mempool monitoring project to assess the delay of transaction inclusion in a block. By submitting more than 3,700 canary transactions during this effort, the Foundation confirmed the speed and efficacy of the network. This work constitutes a natural evolution of last year's block propagation monitoring efforts via blockperf, which collects metrics from all nodes reporting to the Cardano Foundation's monitoring project.
Building on efforts to enhance network resilience and open source development, PRAGMA’s launch of Amaru aims to increase Cardano’s decentralization. The Amaru project involves the development of a Cardano full node in Rust, designed to run alongside and be fully interoperable with the existing Haskell node implementation. A necessary building block in the development of Amaru involved a re-implementation of the Untyped Plutus Core (UPLC) machine in Rust. Amaru released its first demo in October, showcasing the initial architecture integration on pre-validated data. Following this milestone, a second demo in December presented Amaru's Hybrid ledger state, effectively solving a notoriously complex challenge for the Cardano node.
After announcing changes to our Project Catalyst F13 voting approach in October, the Foundation shared its complete methodology and proposal selection in December. An interdepartmental group of subject matter experts collaborated to filter over 1,800 proposals, considering the Foundation’s objectives and those of the broader Cardano ecosystem. This commitment to transparency has led to ongoing engagement with the broader community, generating crucial discussions surrounding the future of Cardano’s decentralized governance. The Foundation anticipates these conversations will continue into 2025 as the ecosystem evolves and remains dedicated to supporting initiatives that foster innovation, collaboration, and sustainable growth across industries.