For the April Spotlight Article, we interviewed Long Nguyen, the co-founder of Minswap.

Hey Long! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Minswap project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Minswap is a community-centric decentralized exchange on Cardano. With no venture capital funding or private investment, we aim to become the best DEX for anyone to buy and sell their Cardano native tokens, and earn passive income via yield farming and staking.

Why did you choose to build Minswap on Cardano?

Cardano is simply the most decentralised Proof-of-Stake chain as of now. We are also aligned with Cardano’s philosophy of measure twice cut once, moving slowly and research-driven. Cardano also has an awesome community and that makes it the best place to launch a community-driven, no-VC projects like Minswap.

What are the most important things about Minswap?

We are a 100% community-funded project without VC investment. We have a fairly-distributed tokenomics with more than 70% going to the public. We are also one of the most innovative, builder-centric projects.

Going forward, how will Minswap make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Advocating for Open and Fair ecosystem initiatives like open sourcing that help growing and strengthening Cardano’s technical community, the scalability of solutions, and accessibility for future builders to deploy innovative applications.

We believe that while Cardano has emerged as the most decentralised PoS blockchain network, every effort ought to be made to maintain and advance this level of decentralisation by empowering small and medium SPOs to benefit from the emergence of DeFi in Cardano, while also enabling them to build trust and reputation.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Since Q1 2022, we have successfully launched the testnet. We launched a successful Liquidity Bootstrapping Event with Fair Price Discovery and Transparency, Equitable and Wide Distribution and No front-running by whales.

We launched our mainnet and yield farming as well. We are the biggest DEX in terms of TVL at the moment, having been funded entirely by Catalyst and our community. However, the thing that I’m most proud of is our team that has and will continue to work hard to make Minswap better, and our community that has always continued to support us over good and challenging times.

Why should people choose to use Minswap? What are the advantages over other decentralized exchanges?

We are fast! We also have one of the best UI/UX out there with many user-friendly features like mobile support, price chart, zap-in and real-time yield farming. We have more than 30 languages with community contributors in all parts of the world. We are always looking to innovate by borrowing ideas from successful DeFi concepts on other chains and applying them to Cardano, as well as using some of the features of the Cardano architecture to make DeFi special such as built-in liquid staking of ADA.

What is the future of Minswap? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

We are working hard to add more features and improve the performance, the experience and security of Minswap. The next big thing that the community can expect is MIN staking and Minswap v2.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Minswap?

We are a DeFi passionate global team with members from all over the world. Most of our developers are based in Vietnam, while other members of the Team are in Europe, India and the UAE.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

We are engaged in a lot of partnerships ranging from bridges to trading NFTs in marketplaces with MIN tokens. There are also some strategic partnerships that will benefit mostly the trading experience like integrating Djed Stablecoin that will help provide a convenient unit for transacting. In addition, Minswap will be tapping into the endless possibilities that synthetics offer by partnering with Indigo. Stay tuned for more partnerships!

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

We are always happy if the Cardano community submits ideas, improvement proposals and feedback on our #ideas channel on Discord or on our Forum. We would also like to thank our community and the greater Cardano community for the support they have shown towards us, in the good and the hard times. It is a blessing to build in such a welcoming and active community!

For the March Spotlight Article, we interviewed , the co-founder and Cheif Operating Officer at Lovelace Academy. Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform to streamline your development journey with Cardano and Web3.

Hey Shweta! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Lovelace Academy platform! Can you tell us more about the platform and the problem you were addressing? Where are there gaps in the education space?

Lovelace Academy is a blockchain education platform that aims to make it easier for our learners to navigate the developer ecosystem, understand key concepts and learn best practices while building on Cardano. Currently, no platforms guide newcomers on the "Why" and "How" to build on Cardano. So we are trying to be a one-stop platform to onboard people on Cardano.

What are the most important things about Lovelace Academy?

Blockchain can be a very scary space, especially if someone is from a non-technical background and wants to learn how to code. We are proud of the simple approach to teach our users about Cardano. We are a free Cardano education platform that attracts, inspires, and educates builders and visionaries to build on top of Cardano's game-changing Smart Contracts & Native Assets Platform.

Going forward, how will Lovelace Academy make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

Adoption of Cardano beyond speculators and early adopters can be greatly accelerated by highlighting how real-world problems can be solved using Cardano's safe, elegant and powerful platform for a wide range of industries. Our objective is to create a force of developers who will build great products on top of it.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

We recently released Learn @ Lovelace Academy and got amazingly positive feedback from our users. We feel extremely proud and satisfied whenever we hear that people are using our platform and they are finding it useful. That makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Why should people choose to use Lovelace Academy? What are the advantages over other educational platforms?

Lovelace Academy is a free blockchain education platform that teaches people how to build on Cardano and focuses on why they should choose Cardano over thousands of other blockchains. It focuses on end-to-end teaching in a very basic, understandable approach to even people from non-technical backgrounds.

What is the future of Lovelace Academy? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall platform?

Our vision is to provide certification courses for users learning via Lovelace Academy eventually. This will allow them to prove that they have the said skills.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Lovelace Academy?

• Maria: Chief Executive Officer & Founder. Also operating CARDS pool.

• Keith: Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer. Also operating SAFE pool.

• Shweta: Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer. Also operating BLOCK pool.

  
  

Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

Thank you for having Lovelace Academy on Spotlight Interview. It was a great pleasure. I want to say thank you for this amazing initiative that brings projects of Cardano to the whole community.

For the February Spotlight Article, we interviewed Shahaf, one of the founders and CEO at COTI. COTI is an enterprise-grade fintech platform that empowers organizations to build their payment solution and digitize any currency to save time and money.

Hey Shahaf! Happy to connect today and learn more about the COTI project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Thanks for having me! In a nutshell, COTI is a financial technology company that uses the blockchain to solve traditional banking problems. COTI’s goal is to meet the challenges of both centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) such as fees, latency, global inclusion, risk, clogging, and complexity.

COTI will solve these challenges by introducing a new type of DAG-based base protocol and infrastructure that is scalable, fast, private, inclusive, low cost, and optimized for finance.

What are the most important things about COTI?

The most important thing to know is that we are the only layer 1 solution for payments. The other layer 1’s out there are optimized for other things. And now, with Trustchain 2.0 and the upcoming MultiDAG 2.0, we are going to top our game. Right now, we have the COTI coin, but in the future, we are going to present a new token standard, issuing more tokens, some of them will be created by COTI, some of them will be created by other enterprises and merchants who want to develop on the COTI network.

Going forward, how will COTI make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

COTI has a one-of-a-kind technology. The core of COTI’s infrastructure lies within the Trustchain. COTI is based on DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structure, which works in tandem to drive scalability, processing over 10,000 transactions per second. The Multi-DAG allows enterprises to issue their coins on the COTI Truschain protocol. The Multi-DAG is not only optimized for stable coins, but it’s optimized for all coins and tokens.

Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

Wow, we have had so many big milestones. Where do I begin?

1. We launched our Mainnet (the Trustchain) back in 2019, now processing more than 10K TPS.

2. We developed MultiDAG, which enables issuing tokens on our infrastructure.

3. We launched the COTI bank account and debit card.

4. We just launched the COTI Treasury, an algorithmic and decentralized pool of $COTI, where users can deposit $COTI and be rewarded for their participation.

5. Our partnership with Cardano includes the following developments:

   • ADA Pay- an ADA payment system for businesses, Issued by COTI and allows merchants to accept ADA payments with instant settlement.
   • COTI is the official issuer of Djed - the first algorithmic stablecoin built on Cardano. It will use smart contracts to ensure price stability and maintain a base coin reserve, allowing users to use the stablecoin for DeFi transactions.

6. COTI developed the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI), a VIX for crypto. CVI allows users to hedge themselves against market volatility and impermanent loss.

   
   

   What is the future of COTI? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

   We plan to evolve our offering from payments to a fully-encompassing next-generation financial system, creating value for $COTI holders. What to expect:

• MultiDAG 2.0 - which can lead to a new token standard.

• Djed and its reserve coins.

• Leveraged volatility tokens.

• Impermanent loss protection for CVI users.

• More partnerships, growth opportunities, and a few more things worth waiting for.

  In addition, the fees from our ecosystem will be streamlined into the Treasury as rewards for our users.

  
  

  Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind COTI?

  I don’t want to gloat, but we have an amazing team at COTI. The COTI team includes engineers, mathematicians, economists, marketers, researchers, and veterans from the fintech and banking industries. For instance, Dr. Nir Haloani, COTI’s CTO, is the former co-founder and CTO of a company that IBM later acquired. We are growing rapidly, and our team is getting bigger.

  
  

  Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

  We are fortunate to have some great partners. We have had a great relationship with Cardano over the last three years. Cardano ecosystem venture fund-cFund announced its first VC investment in COTI to accelerate integration and deepen the cooperation between COTI and Cardano. As mentioned earlier, some really impactful things we have done with Cardano are ADA Pay and Djed. Some other partnerships to highlight are the partnerships with, Chainlink, Simplex, Sundaeswap, Lovelace, Constellation, Ardana, and more.

  
  

  Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?

  Thank you for inviting me to do this interview. The last thing I would like to add is that 2022 will be a huge year for COTI. We launched the Treasury to make COTI more decentralized and give our users more opportunities to earn money. We are also moving from a single coin infrastructure to a multi-coin infrastructure and launching the Djed stablecoin built on Cardano. This year, many big things are happening, so make sure you follow us to stay up to date.

  Website: https://coti.io

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork

  Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork

  
  

For the January edition of the Spotlight Article, we interviewed Robert Hever, COO / Co-Founder, and Damon Zwarich, CMO / Co-Founder from Charli3.

Hey Robert and Damon! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Charli3 project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Charli3 is a decentralized oracle solution natively built in Haskell / on the PAB (Plutus Application Backend). We held our Initial DEX Offering in April 2021 and set out to solve the following three problems.

1. General oracle problem: Smart contract solutions need accurate, reliable, secure, and trusted off-chain data that fit their requirements (e.g., for speed). There is a need for aggregation of data to provide a trusted source to the chain (e.g., many single sources with conflicting values).

2. Cardano problem: There are no blockchain agnostic solutions. The current solutions are paired with network lag and high update fees. The barrier of entry to support launching Cardano projects is that the oracles must be built from scratch, natively with Haskell/Plutus code.

3. Decentralization problem: We see centralized oracle solutions, where one party is the governing authority on who gets what data and from where. We see centralization as part of the current financial system’s problem. We hope to solve that problem by being as “hands-off” as possible with our ecosystem solution.

   What are the most important things about Charli3?

• From a team perspective: Most importantly, Charli3 is working towards our company vision, mission, and cultivating a culture that reflects our core values. It is critical that we internalize our core values and reflect them in our actions with the community and our partners.

• From a business perspective: Our specific role as a middleware solution to facilitate the transmission of data between off-chain providers and on-chain Dapp and Defi smart contract solutions comes with the responsibility of ensuring the integrity of the data these projects rely on as their lifeblood.

  Without question, Charli3 prides the accuracy, reliability, and security of the data flowing through our ecosystem as the single most important metric of success for our company.

  
  

  Going forward, how will Charli3 make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?

  Charli3’s team envisions a future of global smart contract adoption that uplifts and betters the world we live in; supporting this vision is of the utmost importance. We believe building on the Cardano infrastructure is the best way to support this vision.

  Dapps and Defi solutions will become available to people across the globe that never before had reliable access to such services in our current financial system. In that regard, supporting the launch and scaling of Cardano is incredibly important to our team.

  
  

  Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?

  The top two most important accomplishments are building our community and team.

• Community: Built and sustained a community of 12k token holders and 45k+ members on Twitter.

• Team: Scaled team from 3 members to 15+; International presence with diverse team members across 4 continents.

• Team success:

  • Contract-on-mainnet: One of the first projects to launch a functioning contract on the main net (9-13-2021, less than 24 hrs after 9-12-2021 hard fork).
  • MVP: The first version of our on-chain Oracle contract MVP completed.
  • Audit: Inaugural project to pass level 2 certification by CertiK through the IOHK certification program.

• Charity: Spearheaded a charitable campaign to pay for clean water sources in Africa through Grow Your Stake stake-pool and charity Drop4drop.

• Data consumers: 16 Cardano projects publicly announcing us as their preferred Oracle solution; 29 Total projects in conversations to be data consumers.

• CDA: Founding member of the Cardano DeFi Alliance.

Why should people choose to use Charli3? What are the advantages over your competitors?

• Competitors are healthy, especially Cardano native ones: Our vision entails multiple solutions, and competition pushes us to improve and innovate to create a better ecosystem; using multiple oracle solutions is prudent.
• Cardano-centric: Our team is working directly with the largest projects in the space, the governing bodies, and we are a founding member of the CDA (Cardano DeFi Alliance).
• Haskell / PAB native: Our solution is built Haskell native from the ground up to maximize Cardano’s benefits, reducing integration challenges and data lag. We see Charli3 as uniquely positioned to support the launch and scaling of the Cardano ecosystem, in particular the large community of Dapps and Defi solutions.
• Aim to provide world-class data providers on launch: As a double-sided marketplace, it is important we bring high-value data sources (as well as reputable node operators).
• Inclusivity and accessibility - Fund7 Proposal: If you aren’t aware, data consumption can be a barrier of entry for developing Dapp and DeFi solutions. As a company, we want to ensure that even the smaller and underfunded projects (especially those being made by entrepreneurs in developing countries) have the same opportunities to build solutions as everyone else. Through our Fund7 initiative, we aim to provide community feeds to get all projects off the ground.

What is the future of Charli3? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?

• Onboard and launch: Initial data consumers, data providers, and node operators.
• Launch community feeds
• Maintain our feeds, heighten security: Ensure we meet KPIs (avoiding breaches, feed issues, etc.) and plan recurring audits.
• Improving UIUX: Make it easier for projects to use our ecosystem (automation and self-service is something we are actively exploring).
• R&D / innovation and increased security: We will look to any innovations to improve the security and accuracy of our data feeds. We’ve thrown around the idea of exploring complementary technology to improve value in our ecosystem, such as integrating machine learning into our pricing models or catching bad actors. However, nothing is planned, but our team sees technological innovation as critical to our future success.
• Migration from Cardano: In the future, we are looking for cross-chain interoperability and facilitating the migration of projects moving to Cardano.

Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Charli3?

Our team is currently at 18+ members, and we are looking to double our team size in 2022.

• Leadership:

  • Damon: CMO and the usual voice of Charli3
  • Jonas: CTO
  • Robert: COO

• Development team

  • Our success is largely dependent on our global team of developers.
  • We also work with an incredible Haskell / functional programming lab that forms one of our key partnerships with our company.

• Community and Marketing

  • We have a team of community moderators, social managers, and graphical/ marketing support.
  • Graphics teams are working behind the scenes too.
  • Tech and marketing advisors for support.

Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?

• Grow your stake and the clean water coalition x Drop4Drop: As we spoke on this before, we have allocated time to creating a coalition of Cardano projects to aid in this humanitarian effort, supporting a cornerstone of the Cardano ethos.

• Data consumers: Approximately 29 projects are in line to launch data feeds with Charli3; Charli3 won’t succeed without their support.

• Cardstarter: An incubated accelerator that was instrumental in our IDO success. Without their partnership, we would not have raised our initial funding or grown our community to the point where we could have accomplished everything we’ve done to date.

• Cardano DeFi Alliance: as a founding partner of the alliance, we see this organization as one of our most impactful partnerships moving forward as we share values and a similar vision.

• IOHK: Although we are not officially partnered with the IOHK, their team from front-lines to the executive level has welcomed our team with open arms and supported us wholeheartedly. We are incredibly grateful for this relationship and see its impact growing parallel to our company’s growth.

  **IOHK is not an official partner of Charli3.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck!

For the December edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Josef from ADApools.

Hey Josef! Happy to connect today and learn more about the ADApools project! Can you tell us more about the founding of the project and the problem you were addressing?

Hi, thanks for the invitation! It started in the early days of ITN when there was no list of pools with their performance and no way to compare. I like to process open data. Such a tool was completely missing on the market. So it was such a logical evolution and fun. Over time, as Jormungandr added more data, ADApools eventually grew into a serious project. So the goal was to create a feature-rich comparison tool, which, looking at it today, has been achieved.

For the November edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Alessandro, the creator of the Nami Wallet, co-founder of SpaceBudz, and Cardano stake pool operator.

Hey Alessandro! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Nami Wallet project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey, for sure! Nami is a browser-based wallet extension with a focus on simplicity and a great user experience. While Nami seems minimal at first glance, it’s very powerful since you can connect the wallet to any website and let the user interact with decentralized applications (dApps). The problem we try to tackle here with Nami is to interact with Cardano in a broader way and onboard users that may not have been in crypto long.

For the October edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed Anthony, the CFO of Tokhun.

Hey Anthony! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Tokhun project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Tokhun is a smart contract-driven NFT platform built on the Cardano blockchain. When creating Tokhun, we wanted to provide CNFT artists with a space to create, display, and sell their artwork.

For the September edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Kate, the senior marketing manager at NOWPayments.

Hey Kate! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NOWPayments project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hi, happy to answer your questions!

NOWPayments was founded in 2019 by the team behind ChangeNOW, a leading crypto exchange service. NOWPayments remains close partners with ChangeNOW but is fully independent and has its own team.

The idea of NOWPayments was to help spread mass adoption by making it easy to use crypto daily. The challenges merchants face when deciding if they should accept crypto are:

• Volatility.
• Lack of knowledge about crypto basics.
• Lack of means to accept on popular e-commerce platforms.
• The need to withdraw to fiat.

We try to help solve each of these by offering a fixed-rate option and supporting conversion to stablecoins. In addition, we continue developing plugins that can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms. We also have a fiat conversion option, although we hope it won’t be needed in the future if everyone can use crypto everywhere. That is why we are targeting all industries: e-commerce, services, traveling, gaming, tech, etc. Crypto is ubiquitous.

For the August edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Adam Dean, the primary developer of Mercury for WooCommerce.

Hey Adam! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Mercury for WooCommerce project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

With Cardano Mercury for WooCommerce, my goal was to make a simple and accessible solution to bridge traditional e-commerce with the Cardano Blockchain. WooCommerce is one of the largest open-source e-commerce platforms in the industry. So it was only natural to create a similarly open-source, fee-free payment gateway to bridge Cardano to WooCommerce. One of the most significant barriers to entry in the cryptocurrency industry is the need to trade back and forth between fiat and crypto. Mercury aims to eliminate that friction point by allowing merchants and shoppers to transact directly with one another with the currency of the future.

Dear Cardano community,

To celebrate the Cardano Developer Portal launch, The Cardano Foundation minted the world’s first Non-Fungible Tokens of Appreciation (NFTAs). NFTAs are NFTs showing appreciation to the ten developers that provided feedback and helped build the developer portal. Think of them as “certificates of participation” when you attend a seminar or an event that they give out to attendees. Only they are digital!