Social encounters

The Cardano Foundation — in line with its goals to help shape governance and standardization policies — joins Global Digital Finance (GDF), an industry membership body. The Foundation has completed GDF’s thorough assessment, a rigorous process applied to all members, before joining.

The Cardano Foundation became a member of a number of GDF working groups — Custody, KYC/AML/CTF, Stablecoin, Security Token, Market Integrity and Tax Treatments — thus, contributing to the improvement of market and conduct standards for crypto asset and digital finance participants.

The collaboration between the Cardano Foundation and GDF will strengthen ongoing efforts to create best practices and sound governance policies. Effective policies will help the crypto asset market further develop through establishing robust codes of conduct for the sector amid increasing importance of ethics in blockchain and DLT industry.

The London-based GDF developed a comprehensive code of conduct and overarching principles in regards to token sales, token platforms, funds and fund managers as well as rating websites which their members must comply with to be officially recognized as a working member.

About GDF: The London-based Global Digital Finance promotes the adoption of best practices for crypto assets and digital finance technologies — through the development of conduct standards — in a shared engagement forum with market participants, policymakers and regulators.

This week, we can see lots of great activity in the community. There has been a host of videos created to help other people set up their self-nodes across a variety of platforms. Here are a few they’ve spotted. Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels and on the testnet website.

>> Here’s eVoPDX on Reddit with his video guide 14 on how to set up a self node on Linux.

>> Last week Cardano featured EllieFromTheLastOfUs and his Windows set up video. this guide 17 was also created for all you MacOS and Linux users out there.

>> David Arayan has set up a project running on Docker using an Alpine Linux image. He has open sourced the code under the MIT license for anyone to have a play around with Check out his post 2 to find out more.

>> ScofflawPirate challenged his 13-year-old to build a self node on his Windows 10 desktop using an Oracle Virtual Box VM, Ubuntu 18.04 and snappy package. Check it out here.

Plutus, Marlowe, and the future of smart contracts in Israel.

Daniel Friedman was in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago with IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson for a workshop and meetup with the Israeli developer community. Israel has a long and glowing history with blockchain technology: zero-knowledge proofs were co-invented by an Israeli-American computer scientist, and the region is home to several innovative blockchain projects already.

The first part of the event was a technical workshop covering Plutus and Marlowe, IOHK’s smart contract platforms, including talks from several members of the IOHK team: Manuel Chakravarty, language architect, Lars Brünjes, director of education, Polina Vinogradova, a formal methods software engineer, and Alexander Nemish, a functional compilers engineer. The morning began with some theory about the design and implementation of IOHK’s smart contract approach, and after lunch it was time for a hands-on workshop and Q&A.

The attendees themselves were from a range of backgrounds, with developers, businesspeople, and blockchain enthusiasts in the mix.

Then there was a broader industry-wide meetup with almost a hundred attendees. Special guests from local blockchain companies were in attendance, including the CEO of Tel Aviv-based blockchain company COTI, Shahaf Bar-Geffen, as well as guests from Algoz and Endor. After Charles’ keynote about current Cardano developments, there were panel discussions about business in a smart contract-driven economy and how blockchain innovations are set to put Israel at the forefront of that market.

The Cardano Foundation recently attended the Asia Blockchain Summit in Taipei where they participated in a panel discussion at the conference, and also hosted an Inaugural Cardano meetup with local community members.

Also at the Summit, Nathan Kaiser, chairperson of the Cardano Foundation, had an interview with Joeri van Geelen from iBlock TV. In this interview, Nathan shared updates from the Foundation and the vision for the Ambassador Program.

An Interview with Eric Ma, Community Manager of CoinMarketCap.

Nathan Kaiser, Chairperson of the Cardano Foundation, had an interview with Eric Ma, Community Manager of CoinMarketCap, on the sidelines of the Asia Blockchain Summit in Taipei. At the gathering in the Taiwanese capital, Nathan participated in a panel discussing about designing compliance in relation to sanctions, AML and custody.

The informal interview touched up important questions for blockchain industry and regulations in Asia and beyond.

In his interview responses, Nathan argued that rigorous academic research should be conducted to grow this young and yet-to-mature but fast-changing blockchain industry into a more transparent and healthy way.

When asked for advice to the regulators, Nathan suggested that watchdogs should broaden their vision to oversee the fields and areas that blockchain has an impact on.

Upcoming events

On August 19 Manuel Chakravarty from IOHK will be speaking at ICFP2019 about functional programming for blockchains. He will use both Cardano and Plutus as running examples of how and why we should use functional programming.

Below are the new Cardano Meetup groups: