In brief
- Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson hinted that there are "many DeFi things going on right now" at IOHK.
- He revealed that IOHK partnered with Emrugo to launch an algorithmic stablecoin that will "be significantly better than MakerDAO."
- The company plans to officially announce its DeFi efforts "a little bit later."
IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson revealed details of the company’s plans to move into Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) space in a YouTube video yesterday.
During an ask-me-anything session, Hoskinson said that he has become “very obsessed with DeFi lately,” which resulted in “hundreds of pages of reports, lots of interviews and discussions.” He added that IOHK is also researching some “most popular DeFi things” and some of it already “starting to leak out”—despite the company’s best efforts to keep it under wraps—for now.
“For example, we’ve partnered with Emrugo, and we're right now working on the logistics of a stablecoin with them that we're going to be building first on Ergo to verify everything works correctly, and then we'll pull it over into Cardano and this is going to be an algorithmic stablecoin,” said Hoskinson, adding, “We think it'll be significantly better than MakerDAO.”
And this is “just one of many DeFi things that are going on right now,” Hoskinson hinted, although adding that the company will not announce anything yet.
Since the DeFi space is currently booming—and the total dollar value locked on various DeFi platforms is nearing $8 billion—there is a lot of competition. Yet, this is not really a challenge but more of an advantage for Cardano, according to Hoskinson.
“The reality is that the first-mover advantage is actually a disadvantage. Those network effects were ephemeral and often covered with mistakes and scars and explosions. You actually want to be in the imitator, the second-mover category for DeFi. And I think we'll have a lot, lot more luck than the first-movers did in the space.”
One of the reasons for this lies in the fact that the first-mover architectures and designs were “just too inflexible” while Cardano is “much better suited as a platform,” Hoskinson added.
“That’s what 2021 is going to be about. There’s gonna be a lot of that fighting, a lot of that pushing. We’re in it to win it, guys,” he summarized.
As Decrypt reported, Cardano has launched its long-awaited Shelley upgrade in late July—alongside network staking capabilities. On August 23, seven million ADA ($831,000) were already distributed as rewards, exceeding the company’s expectations. Now can that momentum surge into DeFi?