For the January edition of the Spotlight Article, we interviewed James Dunseith, Co-Founder of Gimbalabs.

Can you introduce yourself

My name is James Dunseith. I met Juliane Montag and Roberto Carlos Morano during Fund 1 of Project Catalyst, and we founded Gimbalabs with a Fund 2 Catalyst proposal.

Before getting into this work, I taught high school in New York City, and I trained teachers at BetterLesson and MIND Research Institute.

Can you tell us more about Gimbalabs and the problems you are addressing?

Gimbalabs is building community spaces, technical infrastructure, educational programming, and open-source code, making it more likely that Cardano will actually change the world.

We know that the potential of Cardano is exciting, but the world won't change just because some new technology exists. We founded Gimbalabs because we want to increase the likelihood that the ideals of Cardano will happen.

To start, we focused on two things: technical infrastructure and developer education. Our technical infrastructure is called Dandelion. We provide education through "Project Based Learning" (PBL) courses. Along the way, we have created a community where people meet, and projects are launched.

Our goal is to build systems as robust as the Cardano protocol. A network requires infrastructure and people who know how to use it to be robust and resilient. We are building Dandelion so that anyone can deploy critical infrastructure for interacting with the Cardano protocol. We are building Project-Based Learning courses so that people get first-hand experience using Cardano and sharing decision-making power.

Can you introduce yourself

I go by Allusian, and I have served as a Core Contributor at ADAO since October of ‘21, after listening into spaces its earliest founder hosted and frequented in the community in the wake of the Goguen era. My main focus has been on the upkeep and design of the Discord server, onboarding new members, writing and editing documents, articles, and outreach via social media, as well as scheduling and organizing guest speakers for ADAO’s educational “Roundtable” Twitter spaces hosted every Saturday.

Thomas DiMatteo is a community organizer, crypto researcher, entrepreneur, and front-end developer, with a keen interest in decentralized finance and governance on Cardano and other blockchain ecosystems. He has six years of experience as a small business owner serving customers throughout the state of Florida, several years as an investor in blockchains, and a participant in decentralized finance and autonomous protocols.

Hey guys, happy to connect today and learn more about ADAO. Can you tell us more about the mission of ADAO and how you are trying to achieve it?

ADAO’s mission is to build open-source tools, educational and supportive resources to empower robust, decentralized systems of collaboration and governance, starting with Cardano. We are achieving this by attracting talent from various disciplines and walks of life who share our passion for building systems that enable, empower and facilitate new ways of organizing. Some of ADAO’s major contributions to the ecosystem include the RoundTable multi-signature Wallet DApp, the ADAO Staking Portal, and the Agora Protocol, which we have partnered with Liqwid Labs to develop.

What is your role in the company?

My name is Ashish Prajapati, and I'm one of the co-founders of strica.io, a Cardano blockchain-focused development company.

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

We are building products that enhance user experience using Cardano and enhance developer experience building on Cardano. Cardanoscan and Typhon Wallet are our well-known projects, and an upcoming project flac.finance is focused on processing payments and is being built on Cardano.

Can you introduce yourselves?

We’re a group of long-term Cardano enthusiasts with a mix of different backgrounds that has been contributing via Guild-operators (widely known in Dev - and especially SPO community - you may have heard of CNTools, gLiveView, the short 1-epoch community-owned Guild Network, topology Updater, etc) - we have been making immense contributions to the ecosystem without any additional marketing or financial cost requests. I’d say each one of us, while having different opinions/expertise, are firm believers in Open Source frameworks (which often get mixed with hosting code publicly) and decentralisation.

While we do not believe to be restricted to a small group (and hope it extends further via community engagement), to list out the initial core members:

• Damjan
• Homer
• Markus
• Michael
• Ola
• RdLrT

What is your role in the company?

Hi! My name is Nicolas Arqueros. I’m one of the co-founders of dcSpark and also a core contributor to the Milkomeda Protocol.

Hey, Nicolas Arqueros, happy to connect today and learn more about the Milkomeda project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?

Following Metcalfe's law, tech products primarily accrue value based on the size of their network. This means that superior technology can give a slight edge but does not in itself guarantee a definitive win against established competitors. Promising cryptocurrency projects are part of this set of tech products, thus it is necessary to achieve a critical adoption growth trajectory to come out ahead over the long term.

Milkomeda is a protocol that gives EVM capabilities to non-EVM Blockchains. In practical terms, it allows the deployment of smart contracts from Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart-Chain, and multiple other chains, to chains that wouldn’t support it. Developers are at the core of making the visions of these businesses possible, and as such, having access to a large pool of developers is one of the vital points for ecosystem success.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.