ADA Street Bets

ADA Street Bets is a Cardano community group where we discuss up and coming projects on the Cardano network, with many projects from key sectors of Cardano.

ADA Street Bets is a place for the Cardano community to have the ability to come to one location and discuss topics with many of the leading projects building on Cardano. The projects represented range from lending protocols, synthetics, wallets, play-to-earn gaming, Metaverse projects, SPO's, and oracles, amongst many others. ASB gives both a new and experienced person in the Cardano Ecosystem easy access to a wide range of knowledge about Cardano as a whole.

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Wallets

If you’re searching for where to store Cardano, ada, you’ve come to the right page. The best cardano wallet is a hotly debated topic in the Cardano community, and there are many types of Cardano wallet, all listed here, available to users. The only Cardano desktop wallet available is Daedalus, a full node wallet that downloads the complete Cardano blockchain, ~100GB.

By far the most popular type of wallet is a Cardano light wallet and there are many of these for you to choose from. The second most popular type of wallet is a Cardano web wallet. Most Cardano wallets will show the Cardano price, and a few have even the integrated the ability for you to buy Cardano, ada, directly in the wallet!

Almost all the wallets listed above allow you participate in the Cardano staking protocol, Ouroboros, where you can help to secure the network and earn passive income in the form of staking rewards. Many of the wallets listed above will also allow you to search for which pool to stake your Cardano, ada, to right in the wallet itself.

Finally, there are multiple Cardano cold storage wallets for you to choose from. There are five hardware wallets that offer native support for where to store ada, and two of them, the Ledger and Trezor are supported by multiple light wallets allowing you to use your favorite interface to keep your coins secure in cold storage.

Play-to-Earn

Play-to-earn is a term usually associated with blockchain based games, however it can also be a feature of gamified learning systems, although this can sometimes be called learn-to-earn. In play-to-earn games users will typically acquire tokens as they reach milestones or complete tasks in the game. The play-to-earn element of a game can be as simple as earning tokens like XP points for completing task or more complex with earnings tied to large milestones achieved in the game.

The play-to-earn model is put forth as a model that allows people to earn things with tangible value as they play a game, as opposed to the more common XP points that only have in-game value. A player’s earning can be in the form of fungible tokens, NFTs, or a combination of both, it all depends on how the game designer builds these elements into the game. These rewards can then be sold on the open market or, more often than not, they can be used in an in-game ecosystem where the player can trade their tokens or NFTs for in-game items.

Oracle

In the ancient world oracles were people through whom the Gods spoke directly to the inhabitants of earth. In the blockchain and crypto world oracles are a service that provides off-chain data to smart contracts running on a blockchain.

On-chain functions, i.e. smart contracts, cannot access real world data on their own. This is problematic when a smart contract is trying to provide the real-time price of financial assets to users, or when it needs to determine the outcome of a sporting event for a gambling protocol, or even when it has been asked to use something measurable in the real world, such as the temperature or quantity of snowfall, in its calculations. Oracles can feed any real world data onto the blockchain for use by smart contracts.

Data is collect it in a variety of ways: APIs, websites, sensors, etc, and can be manual input by humans. This data is collect by nodes and is then passed on to the oracle service that then supplies the smart contract with the data. Having one node supplying data means a central point of failure, and a high potential for manipulation of the data. As a result oracle services usually use a network of nodes to build a consensus of the correct data point and to prevent the data from being manipulated, thereby helping to ensure trust in the data they supply.

Metaverse

There are many Cardano metaverse projects building on Cardano, including many Cardano metaverse games. These range from earth-like metaverses, to medieval metaverses, and include, fantasy worlds, different periods of history, other planets, and even the moon. Many Cardano metaverse projects are in their infancy and in the process of being built.

We’ve organized the metaverses building on Cardano into 3 categories: Open Worlds, MMORPG, and Items & Real Estate. An open world metaverse on Cardano is one where you can freely explore the whole metaverse and these offers more of a social setting. MMORPGs are Cardano metaverse games where large amounts of users interact with each other to accomplish a goal, often having to clan up along the way; crucially, in these Cardano metaverse games, the game clock continues to tick on even when you’ve left the game.

Lending Protocol

Cardano lending protocols are just one part of the Cardano DeFi landscape. Cardano lending protocols allow you to leverage your ada and other, select Cardano tokens - by using them as collateral - to receive loans. There are various ada lending rates available from the lending protocols listed here and the Cardano lending protocol you hear about most, or the one your friends tell you about, may not always be the best fit for your specific needs.

These Cardano lending protocols allow you to create Cardano collateral loans where, typically, you lock your ada up as collateral in a smart contract to receive, typically, stablecoins as a loan. You can also create Cardano flash loans (typically payable in one epoch), and there are even protocols that allow you to use your NFTs as collateral—commonly called Cardano NFT loans. You can find these protocols here.

The ada lending rate you receive is often algorithmically calculated, and can vary over the length of your loan depending on the utilization rate of the pool your loan came from.

So far we’ve only mentioned using Cardano lending to take out Cardano loans, using your ada as collateral. However, you can also become the bank and put your ada to work in these Cardano DeFi protocols by depositing it into the liquidity pools where Cardano collateral loans are taken from. Each protocol offers a different rate for the lender so make sure to check the rates (and utilization) on offer before committing your ada to a Cardano lending protocol.

Lending

Lending Protocols

Lending protocols in the DeFi world allow people to loan or lend money in a peer-to-peer manner, i.e. without the banking middleman. These loans are secured by the lender over-collateralizing the loan and the terms of the loan being managed in a smart contract. This gives the unbanked or those who have poor credit the ability to take loans, and it gives those with excess capital the opportunity to provide loans in a secure and trustless manner, and to earn income from them.

Over-collateralization means that the person receiving the loan locks up more than the value of the loan to secure it e.g. if they want to loan 100 they must lock up 150. How much they over-collateralize the loan by, and which tokens they use as collateral, depends on the platform. Some platforms only accept stablecoins, and other accept a variety of crypto assets. Typically, an individual uses one asset for collateral and takes a different asset as their loan.

An important factor in all loans is the interest rate and the length of the loan. These vary greatly by lending protocol, and loans can have fixed interest rates and periods, or infinite periods with interest rates that fluctuate throughout the loan period, fluctuating based upon the utilization rate of the pool of funds the loan was drawn from.

Importantly, the receiver of a loan is expected to maintain a certain ratio of collateral to loan, meaning that if the value of their collateral drops below that of their collateral to loan ratio, they need to add more collateral to keep the required balance. If they don’t keep up the collateral ratio they face liquidation and the loss of their collateral.

To "become the bank" those with idle tokens can deposit them into a lending protocol and earn from the interest derived from the loans their tokens are used to facilitate. Usually this deposit requires a lockup period of a certain length of time. Often, the longer the lockup period the higher the percentage return for the depositor.

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