EMURGO: Looking Ahead to 2023

Table of Contents

EMURGO’s new Cardano $USDA stablecoin waitlist is open to the public
New Yoroi developments for a better user experience; integration with the Cardano USDA stablecoin can be expected for 2023
A rebrand to Cardano Spot: more content and better features to come
EMURGO strengthened its leadership to drive Cardano’s Web3 adoption
Thousands of new Cardano developers enter the ecosystem through EMURGO Academy
Additional financial investments into Cardano ecosystem projects
Enhanced community engagement
Follow EMURGO to get up-to-date information

2022 was a great year for EMURGO and the Cardano blockchain, with many important strides taken to improve the Cardano ecosystem.

These strides include the launch announcements of USDA, the first fiat-backed stablecoin for the Cardano ecosystem, and Cardano Spot, a social media and content platform enabling the Cardano community to create, share, and monetize all types of Cardano content, amongst many other developments.

EMURGO is a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain and has established Fintech, Venture Capital, Media, and Academy units to support the development of a rich and diverse Cardano ecosystem.

In this year-end review, we will go over what the Cardano community can expect from EMURGO in 2023.

EMURGO’s new Cardano $USDA stablecoin waitlist is open to the public

$USDA is the first fiat-backed stablecoin in the Cardano ecosystem.

At Cardano Summit 2022, EMURGO Fintech Managing Director Vineeth Bhuvanagiri announced the upcoming launch of $USDA, the first USD-backed stablecoin for the Cardano ecosystem and a native Cardano asset.

USDA is the first product from the Anzens suite of fintech products and is scheduled to be available in Q1 2023.

As a 1:1 fiat-backed stablecoin, EMURGO has partnered with a regulated financial services company based in the US to custody cash deposits, assuring the stablecoin is fully compliant and adheres to regulatory guidelines.

Upon availability, $USDA can be used via Yoroi Wallet to further the experience using various dApps in Cardano’s ecosystem.

Interested users can go now to https://www.anzens.com to join the USDA stablecoin waitlist and be ready for its arrival.

New Yoroi developments for a better user experience; integration with the Cardano USDA stablecoin can be expected for 2023

Getting-to-a-Future-Ready-Yoroi-Wallet — Yoroi Wallet is an open-source Cardano ADA light crypto wallet.

EMURGO launched Yoroi Wallet to the Cardano community in 2018 as the first light wallet for ADA cryptocurrency holders.

By 2020, the team had doubled in size and then experienced changes in leadership and other difficulties at a time when Cardano’s user growth was exploding.

This year, under new leadership, a seasoned chief technology officer, and a dedicated technical team on board, Yoroi and EMURGO have been able to reimagine and carefully re-engineer our product architecture, user experience, and development process.

The best way to lay out the approach is to use a Good-Better-Best (G-B-B) framework.

It’s a practical framework for Yoroi’s improvement progression and how we get to a future-ready Yoroi Wallet.

Yoroi Wallet users can expect continued development using the framework to deliver a great user experience and quick integration with the USDA stablecoin in 2023.

A rebrand to Cardano Spot: more content and better features to come

Cardano-Founding-Entity-Launches-Cardano-Spot-Social-Platform — Cardano Spot is a social network and information platform for the Cardano community.

Cardano Spot, a social network and information platform for the Cardano community, announced its beta launch at Cardano Summit 2022

Cardano Spot provides a user-generated interactive platform specifically designed for investment in, distribution, consumption, and monetization of Cardano content. Cardano Spot’s platform solves the issue of fragmented content in the Cardano ecosystem by aggregating valuable, quality content from reliable sources in the Cardano ecosystem to give up-to-date developments in the Cardano ecosystem.

In 2023, Cardano Spot will scale and further develop its platform to onboard more users, and host more useful Cardano content for consumption and monetization.

To join Cardano Spot’s beta version, sign up at https://cardanospot.io/landing

EMURGO strengthened its leadership to drive Cardano’s Web3 adoption

EMURGO added to its senior management team to fortify EMURGO’s global business units to drive Cardano adoption worldwide.

In June 2022, EMURGO named Rio “Popeye” Inaba as Group COO to oversee EMURGO’s global business operations and strategic growth.

Rio brings more than 25 years of experience in senior leadership roles at multinational conglomerates, where he led digitalization and digitization initiatives. Most recently, Rio was Chief Innovation Officer of AEON Co., Ltd., Japan’s largest retail conglomerate with over $80 billion in annual revenue.

In addition to Rio, EMURGO also named Vineeth Bhuvanagiri as EMURGO Fintech Managing Director to oversee its Fintech suite of products including the Anzens platform and $USDA Cardano stablecoin, and Yoroi Wallet.
Sebastian Zilliacus was named EMURGO Media Managing Director to spearhead its products’ development and launch, including Cardano Spot.

Thousands of new Cardano developers enter the ecosystem through EMURGO Academy

EMURGO Academy is the education unit of EMURGO and offers a variety of curated and certified blockchain courses to technical and non-technical students.

There are tailored courses on blockchain and Cardano development for developers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and the general public.

To date, EMURGO Academy has:

Taught and certified 2,500+ certified learners, including 2,100 for Cardano-specific courses to-date

Collaborated with 18+ universities to provide blockchain learning to students

Taught students from 21+ countries around the world

Expect to certify 2,000+ new blockchain learners in 2022

Created an organic community of 1,000+ in Discord

Launched a DeFi university course with the University of Nicosia and nearly 100 registered in its first cohort

With growing interest in blockchain careers and surging demand for blockchain developers, EMURGO Academy will continue to roll out more courses and certify new students to get blockchain-related jobs in 2023.

Courses are on a rolling basis. For more information, please visit here.

For those with questions, please contact education@emurgo.io

Click here to learn more about EMURGO Academy’s courses

Additional financial investments into Cardano ecosystem projects

EMURGO-Ventures-Middle-East-Africa — EMURGO Ventures and EMURGO Middle East & Africa are the investment arms of EMURGO.

EMURGO’s investment arms EMURGO Ventures and EMURGO Africa launched in October 2021 as part of a new Cardano ecosystem investment vehicle.

EMURGO Ventures invests in Web3 startups and middleware companies that build or provide Web3 solutions interoperable with Cardano. EMURGO Africa invests and supports Africa-based Web3 startups looking to build on Cardano.

Over the past year, EMURGO Ventures has invested in a variety of Web3 projects including DoraHacks, the world’s most active multi-chain Web3 developer community with over 300,000 multi-chain developers and experts and organizer of large-scale hackathons for different blockchain ecosystems, and AID:Tech, the first company in the world to deliver international aid using blockchain in 2015, among others.

EMURGO Africa partnered with notable fund Kepple Africa Ventures to find potential investment opportunities and continued to make several investments via Adaverse, an Africa-based Cardano accelerator.

Earlier this year at Asia’s largest blockchain conference, TOKEN2049, EMURGO announced its plans to invest $200 million into the Cardano ecosystem over the next three years with $100 million going towards Africa in an interview with industry news leader CoinDesk.

According to the UN, “Africa has the youngest population in the world, with 70% of sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30” and combined with Africa’s status as one of the fastest-growing continents for crypto adoption, underscores the vast potential for the African blockchain industry to flourish in the years to come.

Enhanced community engagement

EMURGO-Fintech-Community-Lead-Tyler-Wales-Cardano-Blockchain-Yoroi-Wallet-NFT-DeFi — Tyler Wales is Fintech Community Lead for EMURGO.

In October 2022, EMURGO named Tyler Wales as its new Fintech Community Lead for its Cardano Web3 products & services including Yoroi Wallet.

As EMURGO Fintech Community Lead, Tyler addresses user concerns, provides general support to the Yoroi Wallet community, and enhances the visibility of development work undertaken on EMURGO Fintech’s products and services, as part of the goal of driving EMURGO Fintech’s community engagement efforts.

In 2023, EMURGO will host more user engagement activities with the Cardano community on our social media channels so please be sure to follow EMURGO on our social media channels listed below.

Those with questions, ideas, and other feedback about Yoroi can directly reach out to Tyler.