In our previous blog, we detailed the current barriers to accelerating Cardano’s commercial adoption. Our Cardano Commercialization Workshops in Japan have been designed to foster a better understanding of the current circumstances and raise awareness for our partners’ proposal to boost Cardano’s commercial adoption, especially to the Japanese community.
In this blog and a subsequent one, we will outline some of our partners’ proposed solutions to the current challenges in commercializing Cardano, particularly the hurdles related to its DeFi ecosystem.
How to Address Cardano’s DeFi Limitations
As noted in the previous blog, maximizing the functional efficiency of Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem is a critical first step to accelerating adoption and proving Cardano’s commercial viability to the market. It then sets the foundation for Cardano to expand its commercial offerings into other areas and for more participants to bring capital and assets into Cardano.
For a quick summary, Cardano has a relatively underdeveloped DeFi ecosystem due to a variety of factors:
- A lack of significant liquidity
- Limited DeFi activities due to insufficient liquidity
- Lack of involvement with key external participants such as exchanges and third-party market makers
- Lack of key Cardano ecosystem token listings to bring external liquidity.
So what do our partners propose to solve this?
First brought to the community as a proposal proposed by “Elder Millenial,” a Cardano community member, this proposal intends to create an Ecosystem Liquidity Fund. This proposal focuses on utilizing the Ecosystem Liquidity Fund to inject more liquidity, enabling Cardano DeFi dApps to receive that liquidity and thereby provide more yield to users.
Increased liquidity will decrease the slippage for traders and DeFi users, enabling larger transactions and higher volume. This creates a better market-making environment for external parties to conduct arbitrage trading. Market Makers also need centralized exchanges and more decentralized exchange liquidity to benefit from potential arbitrage opportunities. This increased volume and liquidity leads to more listings for Cardano Native Tokens on top tier centralized exchanges by demonstrating their demand and transaction volume.
More Cardano native token listings, especially stable tokens, will be a corridor for external liquidity to come into the Cardano ecosystem. This can increase even more when $USDA and $USDM trading pairs are established against USDT/C.
Deeper stablecoin liquidity also has the potential to attract more real-world asset (RWA) projects to Cardano, as regulated RWA products won’t be able to onboard without higher volumes of transactions involving stablecoins.
Setting the Commercial Foundation: What Comes Next?
A commercially successful and more widely adopted DeFi ecosystem demonstrates market acceptance, viability, and further potential to outside organizations, institutions, and other stakeholders looking to deploy capital. It then sets Cardano to continue to expand its DeFi offerings while also positioning it to better onboard RWA tokenization.
EMURGO strives to bring a versatile group of diverse RWA tokenization partners into the Cardano ecosystem by supporting and partnering with builders such as OpenEden, Haus, DigiFT, and others that offer compliant tokenization technologies for accredited investors and institutions. Partners such as exchanges to provide regulated secondary marketplaces for RWAs and necessary liquidity are also highly important. This can diversify and grow Cardano’s RWA ecosystem with tokenized US government bonds, tokenized private credit, insurance factoring, tokenized real estate, and an exchange marketplace for RWAs, while opening up Anzens and other partners to other chains, thereby driving further commercialization of RWAs.
Flowdesk
Who they are:
Flowdesk is a blockchain liquidity provider and asset management platform. The company offers institutional-grade trading solutions for token platforms, exchanges, and other institutions.
In March 2025, they finalized a $102M equity financing round with participation from HV Capital and BlackRock-managed funds.
How the requested funds will be used:
Flowdesk seeks to address two core problems in the Cardano ecosystem:
- No Cardano project has a top-tier market maker apart from Snek and Iagon.
- No Cardano Native Token is listed on top-tier centralized exchanges (CEXs).
Flowdesk has proposed a budget of $1,563,000 (3,126,000 ADA) to support the listing of three Cardano projects on Tier 1 and Tier 2 exchanges.
The proposal aims to streamline the listing process for prominent Cardano-native projects while also providing market-making services to ensure sustainable liquidity
During the listing process, Flowdesk will not directly receive any ADA from the budget. They’ll act as facilitators and guides to make sure the listing applications are successful for Cadano tokens.
What benefits will be delivered to the Cardano ecosystem?
Unlike Solana and Ethereum, whose native tokens are easily listed on centralized exchanges (CEXs), Cardano native tokens struggle to secure listings, with only a few exceptions, like SNEK, which was listed on Kraken just recently after significant community advocacy. This lack of presence on major CEXs restricts liquidity, limits external capital inflow, and reduces trading volume for Cardano’s assets and DeFi ecosystem. It also hinders Cardano projects from gaining broader blockchain market exposure and attracting outside investment.
GovTool proposal link for further details:
Ecosystem Exchange Listing and MM service pool
Anzens
Who they are:
Anzens is the issuer of $USDA, a new fully-reserved, secure stablecoin for the Cardano ecosystem, backed by the US dollar and dollar equivalents. It is supported on the operational and compliance side by seasoned institutional-grade trading desk Encryptus.
How the requested funds will be used:
Their proposed budget will be used in the areas of stablecoin liquidity, wallet support for native Cardano assets, exchange availability, and fiat on/off-ramps.
Encryptus is developing on-ramp capabilities and alternative payment solutions on the Cardano blockchain to increase liquidity, accessibility, and adoption of Cardano’s DeFi and real-world use cases. This will allow Cardano to connect traditional finance with blockchain-based payments and simplify access to ADA and native assets.
What benefits will be delivered to the Cardano ecosystem?:
The benefits will focus on four major areas:
- Wallet support for Cardano Native Assets
- Increase availability of $USDA and Native Assets on exchanges, OTC desks, and NEO banks
- Drive $USDA adoption with remittance companies, real estate developers, and other payment companies to unlock real-world utility
- Widen access to Fiat on and off-ramps by building relationships with local payment rails.
GovTool proposal link for further details:
Expanding Stablecoin / Cardano Native Asset Support / Fiat Ramps
FUKU AI
Who they are:
Fuku is a multi-chain, AI-powered DeFi trading infrastructure project that has been building aggressively across ecosystems like Solana. Fuku now proposes to build the most comprehensive AI and DeFi (DeFAI) infrastructure natively on Cardano.
Their proposal introduces AI-driven, interoperable tooling built to unlock the next wave of DeFi growth on Cardano and boost TPS, improving accessibility and strengthening the ecosystem’s long-term foundation.
How the requested funds will be used:
Fuku’s goal is to redefine user interactions on Cardano by deploying an AI-driven on-chain agent that acts as a personal DeFi concierge. The complexities of constructing transactions, the UTXO model, and parameter optimizations occur behind the scenes, all managed by the AI agent in the backend. FUKU AI will enter the Cardano ecosystem with four products for the average user:
- AutoFuku: Collaboratively select a token with AI and build automated buy/sell strategies.
- HunterFuku: Ape newly launched tokens based on AI-defined conditions (top holders, dev wallet percentage, Twitter, GitHub, buying volume, etc.).
- HyperFuku: Leverage trading on Hyperliquid using a proprietary AI algorithm.
- DataFuku: Eliminates the need for running full nodes, ensuring scalable performance, global availability, and enterprise-grade reliability.
What benefits will be delivered to the Cardano ecosystem?:
FUKU AI will be a major driver to increase on-chain activity. This will result in more transactions and fees paid to the Cardano network, increasing its Treasury. The benefits will be seen around six major categories:
- Mass User Onboarding: On-chain trading via Telegram or FUKU AI’s platform.
- Cross-Chain Interoperability: Bringing activity from Solana, Abstract, and other blockchain ecosystems.
- Alignment with RWA and AI crypto narratives: Take Cardano to the forefront of the development narratives in crypto markets.
- Increase TPS and network activity: Automated tools will increase the transactions and fees paid on-chain.
- Treasury replenishment: The more fees are generated, the faster the Cardano Treasury grows.
- Ecosystem collaborations: Integrate with Cardano dApps such as Minswap, SundaeSwap, MeshJS, and others to maximize the growth of the ecosystem.
The APIs for developers are open and can be used to access on-chain data for queries or to be used on other projects.
GovTool proposal link for further details:
Comprehensive A.I. and DeFAI Infrastructure for Cardano – FUKU AI
Antler
Who they are:
Antler is the world’s most active VC and leading AI investor. In 2024, EMURGO partnered with Antler on their new Ibex platform, an investment initiative to assist corporations in transforming their approach to technological development by fostering collaborations with Web3 startups.
How the requested funds will be used:
While Cardano projects are technically strong, they face challenges in scaling and achieving commercial viability, including a lack of focus on VC commercial viability, insufficient access to venture capital (VC) funding, low visibility, and limited access to large enterprises for proof of concepts (PoC).
Their proposal aims to address these challenges by creating “The Cardano VC & AI Launchpad Program.” Powered by Antler, it will support high-potential projects at the intersection of Web3 and AI building on the Cardano blockchain.
What benefits will be delivered to the Cardano ecosystem?:
This initiative will drive significant value for the Cardano community by focusing on:
- Increasing the number of VC and AI-ready projects on Cardano.
- Enable potential VC funding and introductions for enterprise PoCs to facilitate faster scaling and market adoption.
- Generating new intersect members from the startup and VC communities, enriching the Cardano ecosystem with valuable expertise and connections.
- Creating marketing/PR opportunities to boost Cardano’s visibility and credibility in the VC and AI sectors.
- Developing an AI/VC playbook for Cardano companies that can be reused and continuously educate Cardano founders.
GovTool proposal link for further details:
Cardano VC & AI Launchpad (Powered by Antler)
Bondex
Who they are:
Bondex is a Web3 talent network and marketplace, partly owned by its users, that prioritizes connecting the best talent with the right work opportunities. Some of its key milestones include:
- The Bondex App 1.0, launched in July 2023, has reached 5 million downloads, with an all-time high of 1.5 million active users and 2 million completed profiles.
- The Job Portal, launched in January 2024, which has been used by leading Web3 enterprises, including Binance, CoinMarketCap, Rarible, and more.
How the requested funds will be used:
Bondex proposes to integrate a Web3 Talent platform with a wallet that would enable their Bondex ID and Reputation score to be a login option across multiple Cardano dApps.
The platform would offer Cardano users:
- Business Digital Card on Apple/Google Wallet
- One tap to share Telegram QR code Natively built into Telegram for Web3 networkers
- Exchange business cards in chat with bio connected to the Bondex Profile Mini CRM for contact management
What benefits will be delivered to the Cardano ecosystem?
Bondex will function as an interoperable online identity/passport for Cardano users, allowing them to access economic opportunities based on their reputation. Additionally, users will be able to earn rewards from the dApps they engage with the most within the Cardano ecosystem.
More controlled by users who choose what information to share via their Bondex ID, their data will be logged into the platform when the wallet is connected, allowing developers the ability to better understand their users.
GovTool proposal link for further details:
Join EMURGO’s Webinars to Connect and Learn More From Our Partners
EMURGO will be hosting a total of four webinars, two on April 21st and also on April 23rd for community members in Europe and in Asia.
The tentative times are as follows:
- Webinar 1 – April 21, 2025; Europe Time Zone 1 – 17:00 – 18:40 (CEST). Click here to register.
- Webinar 2 – April 23, 2025; Europe Time Zone 2 – 17:00 – 18:40 (CEST). Click here to register.
- Webinar 3 – April 21, 2025; Japan Time Zone 1 – 19:00 – 20:40 (JP). Click here to register.
- Webinar 4 – April 23, 2025; Japan Time Zone 2 – 19:00 – 20:40 (JP). Click here to register.
For more information on the webinars, follow EMURGO on X.
About EMURGO
- Official Homepage: emurgo.io
- X (Global): @EMURGO_io
- YouTube: EMURGO channel
- LinkedIn: @EMURGO_io
Disclaimer
You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained herein shall constitute a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by EMURGO to invest.
