There is a lot of news this week in the Cardano news update.

Project Catalyst Fund 6 Results Have Been Released

The results from Fund 6 of Project Catalyst have been released with many new projects being funded. A few that I had interviewed over the past few months were also included in that group of projects that got funding.

Our own projects, Cardano Automated Phishing & Scam Detection received funding to scale up the solution to help protect the Cardano ecosystem.

You can read all of the Fund 6 results on the Cardano forum.

Pending Transactions but Not Failing

Over the weekend we saw a few large NFT drops. Whenever these NFT projects are released, there is a buzz of activity on the blockchain and the network is bombarded with transactions. In this experimental test, the creator of Crypto Knitties experimented with the speed of a regular transaction on the network during this peak time.

In total, it took 30 minutes for the transaction to go through rather than the 30 seconds which it normally takes to register on the blockchain and return a valid response.

The Twitter thread talks about what might be done to improve network speeds during times like this to reduce network congestion while mass drops are done.

Bitcoin ETFs are Released in the United States

How Does a Bitcoin ETF Work?

Before we look at the potential benefits and risks of a bitcoin ETF, let's back up a step and go over what a bitcoin ETF is and how it works. An ETF is an investment vehicle that tracks the performance of a particular asset or group of assets. ETFs allow investors to diversify their investments without actually owning the assets themselves.

For individuals looking to focus only on gains and losses, ETFs provide a simpler alternative to buying and selling individual assets. And because many traditional ETFs target larger baskets of names with something in common—a focus on sustainability, for instance, or stocks representing the video game industry and related businesses—they allow investors to easily diversify their holdings.

A bitcoin ETF is one that mimics the price of the most popular digital currency in the world. This allows investors to buy into the ETF without going through the complicated process of trading bitcoin itself. Moreover, because holders of the ETF won't be directly invested in bitcoin itself, they will not have to worry about the complex storage and security procedures required of cryptocurrency investors.

Why Not Just Invest in Bitcoin?

If a bitcoin ETF merely mirrors the price of the cryptocurrency itself, why bother with the middle man? Why not just invest in bitcoin directly? There are several reasons for this. First, as indicated above, investors don't have to bother with the security procedures associated with holding bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Further, there is no need to deal with cryptocurrency exchanges in the process—investors can just buy and sell the ETF through traditional exchanges and markets.

There is another crucial benefit to focusing on a bitcoin ETF rather than on bitcoin itself. Because the ETF is an investment vehicle, investors would be able to short sell shares of the ETF if they believe the price of bitcoin will go down in the future. This is not something that can be done in the traditional cryptocurrency market.

Read more about Bitcoin ETFs from Investopedia.

Australian Crypto ETFs

Australia’s corporate regulator has given the green light to a range of cryptocurrency-related ETFs, which could see Bitcoin and Ethereum-backed investment funds trading on the ASX in the coming months.

On Friday, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) released a set of guidelines and requirements relating to crypto exchange-traded products, or ETPs, after a series of consultations the regulator has been undertaking since June.

Read more about the Australian crypto exchange-traded products.

Tokhun The First Marketplace to Implement Smart Contracts

Tokhun have announced that they have successfully implemented smart contracts on their marketplace allowing for smooth none escrow transactions between peer to peer for the sale of NFTs. This now ensures a fast and safe market experience for buyers and sellers of NFTs on the Cardano blockchain. Congrats to the Tokhun team.

A full tutorial can be found on their website to understand how to go through the process.

MatrixSwap & CardWallet Partnership

CardWallet is a multi-asset wallet that is built on the Cardano blockchain. The wallet came out of the Occam Razor platform and have released their MVP recently.

They have teamed up with MatrixSwap and will integrate their decentralised exchange with CardWallet.

Matrixswap is a decentralized virtual-AMM-based perpetual swaps trading protocol deployed on the Polkadot and the Cardano and Polygon [Ethereum Layer 2] blockchain.

This partnership will see multi assets across multiple blockchains with auto swaps between them all.

Find out more about CardWallet and MatrixSwap.

MinSwap Tax Issues

MinSwap has been doing great things in regards to their progress with their DEX. One of the events they held recently was a token sale where they raised several hundred million to fund the development of their platform. They have they're for setting an initial price for their Min tokens and as a result, there may be unforeseen tax implementations for delegates that are staking for Min tokens on their partner pools in the Fair Initial Stake Pool Offering. If you're delegating

Ardan Complete a 10M Funding Round including Cfund

Ardana is one project I'm watching closely. Unfortunately, I've missed out on their first initial token sale and their next token sale at the end of the week is via Occam's platform and is being done in Eth which makes it a little harder and more costly but their team have managed to raise 10M in initial investment funding through their first rounds of fund raising.

The Cardano-powered platform, whose founding team features tech veterans from Apple, Microsoft, Barclays and Cardano, won support from DeFi Capital, Mechanism Capital, Kronos Research, mgnr.io, Morningstar Ventures amongst others in a round led by Three Arrows Capital, CFund and Ascensive Assets.

Notable angel investors included David Post (Managing Director of Chainlink Labs), Taiyang Zhang (Founder of Ren Protocol and KeeperDAO) and Justin Sun (Founder of Tron) among leadership within Cardano.

Find out more about Ardana.

Bondly Integration with Cardano

The official bridge allows NFT creators to choose an eco-friendly alternative for their NFTs, which is four million times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin.¹

Cardano blockchain also offers creators price predictability and stability
for NFT creation and transfer.

Read more about the collaboration on the Bondly blog.