Amidst the shaky aftermath of the FTX crash, here comes a new stable kid on the block: Emurgo, which is a company behind the Cardano blockchain ecosystem, has announced USDA, a US dollar-backed stablecoin which is set to go out on the market in Q1 2023.
USDA will be part of the Anzens arm and will add to the list of Cardano-based financial services offered by the platform. According to the press release, USDA is fully backed by fiat reserves and is compliant with the regulatory guidelines, thanks to the partnership with “a regulated financial services company based in the United States to custody cash deposits”. Given the latest circumstances and regulators scrutinizing the crypto assets and issuing companies, the market will look more closely at yet another coin aimed at bridging the gap between traditional and decentralized finance.
Cardano chief Charles Hoskinson made another announcement for the blockchain community: Input Output Global (IOG) is releasing a new privacy-focused blockchain called Midnight.
Midnight, which is underpinned by zero-knowledge-proof technology, is one of many side chains now being deployed around Cardano, and will go beyond previous privacy-coin projects by delivering zero-knowledge-proof smart contracts, IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson said during an event at Edinburgh University in Scotland.
“Midnight has evolved privacy-coin technology where everything was anonymous by default, which is what Zcash and Monero did with Snarks and ring signatures,” Hoskinson said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“This is a completely new way of writing and running private smart contracts and private computation. So you can have a private DEX (decentralized exchange) or go mine an anonymous data set or these types of things.”