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.

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 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!

For the July edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed one of the creators of NMKR, Patrick Tobler.

Hey Patrick! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NMKR project! Can you tell us how the project started and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey! Thank you for having me - it’s an honor.
Back then, when Native Tokens first arrived, and Spacebudz introduced the concept of NFTs to Cardano, I quickly realized that there is no simple way for non-technical people to create their own NFTs on Cardano. So I decided to partner up with Fahim, our designer, and together we built the first version of NMKR.io. Our goal was to focus on the User Experience and make the NFT creation flow as easy and accessible as possible.

Dear Cardano community,

It’s finally here! We’re proud to announce the launch of the Cardano Developer Portal. A one stop library featuring, on launch, over fifty articles, vetted by you, the community.

Ready for your thoughts, comments, builds, additions!

Welcome to the March Developer Spotlight 2021. This month, we will focus on both educational content and stake pool tools. Read on to learn about Cardano on the Rocks and JorManager.