AI is coming to the Cardano blockchain in the form of Grace, the AI robot developed by Awakening Health, a joint venture between Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET. They have chosen Cardano to ensure that Grace meets the stringent guidelines set out by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework.

Grace has been designed to interact with the elderly and others who have been isolated, whether because of the Covid-19 pandemic or for other reasons. She looks like a healthcare worker, speaks English and Korean, and takes patients’ temperatures using a thermal camera. She can also measure people’s responsiveness and mirror their emotions, helping her not just to come up with diagnoses but also to respond empathetically.

Apart from the inherent security and privacy that it will provide, the move to Cardano will dramatically improve Grace's performance and lead to lower, predictable, and stable costs. Cardano also solves the scalability challenge, meaning Grace’s brain can operate at the highest level and process biodata quicker.

Ben Goertzel, creator of the AI technology for Grace and CEO of SingularityNET, said: ‘While Covid-19 has had a huge impact on physical health, the mental health impacts will echo long after the lockdowns lift.

‘This is why solutions like Grace are so important, to combat loneliness and ease the burden on frontline workers. And with Cardano’s market-leading capabilities, she will be able to scale to meet this global challenge.

‘As we gradually ramp up Grace's general-intelligence capabilities over the next few years, she will be able to serve more and more valuable functions in the elder-care and medical space – learning more and more about humanity and absorbing human values as she goes.’

At the Cardano Summit stage in Laramie, Wyoming, on Sunday, Charles Hoskinson and Shahaf Bar-Geffen announced that the COTI platform would be the official issuer of Djed, a new stablecoin for Cardano.

Djed is based on an algorithmic design that uses smart contracts to ensure price stability. Smart contract programming is also used to ensure that the stablecoin will work effectively for decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions. 

Djed operates by maintaining a reserve of base coins, while minting and burning various other stable assets and reserve coins. It is designed to be used for paying transaction fees on the Cardano network. One benefit of this is to make transaction costs more predictable, so avoiding volatile and exorbitant gas fees for users. 

The COTI development team believes that stablecoins are a 'killer app' that will be adopted by a large number of crypto users for settling payments and covering fees. The company was the first recipient of equity investment from the cFund for Cardano developments. 

Shahaf Bar-Geffen, chief executive of COTI Group, said: 'The stablecoin ecosystem has matured tremendously over the past few years. Blockchain participants are using stablecoins to engage in everyday transactions because they allow monetary value to be exchanged in a seamless manner, regardless of the sender and recipient’s location.

'I believe that adding the Djed stablecoin to the Cardano blockchain will significantly improve how transactions are settled on the platform.' 

IO Global chief executive Charles Hoskinson said: 'The Djed stablecoin could be a game-changer in the crypto space, appealing to an entirely new audience at a time when the industry is already experiencing astronomical growth. Djed shares our commitment to formal verification, proving a robust method of combating price volatility of crypto markets.

'COTI has been a long-time partner of the Cardano ecosystem. It’s great to have them on board with this new venture.'

Check out the Djed website.

A new fund in Africa is investing $6m to finance the most innovative blockchain projects on the continent. The fund was created in recognition of the unique opportunities for innovation in Africa, which has the highest percentage of entrepreneurs of any continent. 

The fund focuses on blockchain technology because the lack of deeply embedded legacy infrastructure means that African governments and businesses have fewer obstacles to adopting next-generation technology than the West. This opportunity can potentially level the global playing field when it comes to offering game-changing blockchain-based products and services. 

The unique fund will offer capital to the most innovative African start-ups wishing to build on Cardano, the third-largest blockchain platform. IOHK will ensure successful projects benefit from teaching, financing, and sustained support in partnership with the fund.

IOHK works across the continent providing education and innovation in formal programming techniques. The company has a strong presence in Ethiopia – and is currently rolling out a system for verifiable education credentials to five million students and teachers in partnership with the Ethiopian government.  

Having been embedded in Africa for five years and in collaboration with investment and education companies on the ground, IOHK will be well placed to ensure that the projects most needed for the region’s development get the funding and support they require. 

John O’Connor, director of African operations, said: ‘Working with businesses in Africa I have encountered the most inspirational entrepreneurial spirit. At Input Output we believe in democratizing opportunity, which means giving equal access to funding to realize these innovative ideas, solving problems across the world.

 ‘This investment project marks a milestone in Input Output’s African development, enabling young ideas to flourish and capitalize on the opportunities provided by blockchain.’

At the heart of the potential of DeFi and RealFi is the use of blockchain-based peer-to-peer technology to build reliable and transparent financial products using oracles and smart contracts. During today’s Cardano Summit, we announced an exciting new strategic collaboration with Chainlink Labs that will help developers build smart contracts for Cardano DeFi applications.

Access to real-world databases will be supplied through Chainlink’s decentralized ‘oracle’ networks which provide tamper-proof, high-quality external data to blockchains, enabling ‘smart contracts’ to execute around datasets such as election results, sports stats, and cryptocurrency rates. Another example that might be quite useful is in the provision of weather data. Chainlink Labs works with several FinTech startups that are trying to enable parametric insurance in sub-Saharan Africa. Secure, verifiable and robust weather data is a key input required for such parametric insurance contracts.

Chainlink provides oracle services to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks enable smart contracts to reliably connect to any external API, leveraging secure off-chain computations for feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, offering global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

As the preferred oracle solution for Cardano, developers using the blockchain will be able to feed Chainlink’s institutional-grade data into their smart contracts – blockchain-based digital agreements that execute automatically once certain predefined conditions are met.

After market price feeds, support for other Chainlink decentralized services will follow: sports data for prediction markets, weather data for parametric insurance products, and verifiable randomness for gaming and digital collectables such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

This collaboration between IOHK and Chainlink Labs will give access to a wealth of secure data, helping DeFi achieve its promise of building a less costly and more inclusive global economic system. Initially, information feeds for real-time market prices will be linked to Cardano. Over time, additional data feeds on sports and weather will follow, for use with insurance, gaming, and NFTs.

IOHK Founder Charles Hoskinson said: “Oracles are essential to making real-world data accessible on Cardano and they support advanced smart contracts, such as DeFi applications.

“IOHK is committed to providing developers with the most secure and robust tooling for building useful solutions on Cardano, making it an easy choice to integrate Chainlink’s market-leading oracle solution.”

He added: “Not only will integrating Chainlink price feeds reduce the go-to-market time for Cardano developers, but it will establish a secure foundation for Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, helping make Cardano more trusted by users around the world.”

Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, said: “We’re excited to leverage our extensive experience and expertise by establishing native support for Chainlink on the Cardano blockchain and supporting its next stage of growth into markets like DeFi and beyond.

“Similar to programming interfaces in web app development, developers building DeFi applications on Cardano will be able to plug-and-play Chainlink price feeds into their smart contracts to quickly gain access to high-quality, real-time price data on a wide range of assets while still maintaining robust security and uptime. Ultimately, this will empower developers on Cardano to build next-generation applications quicker and more securely.”

Niki Ariyasinghe, head of blockchain partnerships at Chainlink Labs, said: “We have a tremendous amount of respect for the Cardano ecosystem. Obviously for the technical team behind Cardano – IOG and so on – but also for the collaborative nature of the community as well."

Ariyasinghe added: "Cross-chain interoperability is another longer-term goal. This is really a framework for enabling bridges between different chains and enabling a multi-chain world. So this is something that we hope to collaborate on with the Cardano ecosystem as well.”

Strait Brands, an Australian luxury spirits company, is embracing a blockchain-first approach to managing its alcohol supply chain. Set to deliver four million bottles before the end of 2022, the business will build its production process around the Cardano platform. 

The partnership will see Strait Brands deploy a tamper-proof software system created by Input Output using Atala SCAN, which can record and store data securely and instantly verify the origins of products throughout the supply chain. 

Philip Ridyard, founder of Strait Brands, said: 'Strait Brands is embarking on large-scale international distribution and, conscious of the challenges the industry faces, we decided to take a blockchain-first approach to production, ensuring industry-leading levels of safety and verifiability in our supply chain.

'Input Output is an essential partner in Strait Brands' pioneering movements in the alcohol industry, protecting the integrity of Strait vodkas, gins, and our new super-premium range, Badger Head.'

Fraud is a growing problem for the alcohol industry. Counterfeited, mislabeled, substituted or diluted products worth upwards of $40 billion a year are making their way to consumers. 

Atala SCAN is reshaping the way the alcohol industry combats counterfeit products. By storing an authentic and secure record of ingredients throughout the production process, it can eradicate the possibility of either counterfeit or hazardous substances making their way onto the shelves.

SCAN is part of Input Output's Atala suite, which is already being used in the biggest blockchain partnership yet seen. The pioneering project with the Ethiopian education industry will provide five million pupils with instantly verifiable digital identities. These will be used to verify grades, monitor school performance and boost education and employment nationwide.