How The Cardano Deal Can Grow the COTI Ecosystem - Some Personal Thoughts

5 min readApr 22, 2021

Hello Everyone,

Following Cardano’s recent announcement on their venture’s fund investment in COTI, many people have asked me how this will affect COTI’s growth and potential future projects with Cardano?

As a start, let me say that we anticipate that the full range and impact the Cardano’s investment in COTI will have on the COTI ecosystem will only be fully revealed in the weeks, months and years to come. This is more than just a partnership — Cardano buying COTI’s shares is a full alignment of interests.

It is important to understand the motivation behind Cardano’s decision to invest in COTI. In order to do that, we should take a look at what Cardano and IOHK founder, Charles Hoskinson, wrote on that subject:

And so, to quote Mr Hoskinson, COTI’s work has Cardano’s respect and the past experiences of Cardano and COTI partnerships have all been successful and fruitful.

I’m happy to share below some points of my insight into what we can expect from this partnership in terms of collaboration and opportunities:

Cardano’s ecosystem is rapidly growing:

Cardano is, by far, one of the best known, respected and well researched chains out there with a market cap notching 40 Billion dollars.

In terms of technology development, a lot of advanced capabilities have recently been deployed or are in the making through Shelley Mainnet, the Alonzo fork or planned smart contracts. The growth perspective for Cardano is immense, with native assets on top of the chain, Stable coins, Defi, NFTs and much more. Shelley Mainnet also introduces On-Chain Native assets, which means that tokens issued on ADA have the same level of security and stability as ADA (unlike the relationship between ETH and ERC20 tokens).

COTI aims to be right in the center of it all, with its finance-on-blockchain technologies, ready to support this growth.

Cardano is serious about adoption, building projects with Governments around the world, Cities, Charities, Tech giants, universities and many more.

COTI, with its robust blockchain finance infrastructure, fits into this vision by a tight collaboration with these potential partners, notably by helping Cardano solve payments in its ecosystem. COTI’s technology is what can be defined as a CCCI — Cardano Commercially Critical Infrastructure, technologies that Cardano will use to achieve mass adoption. This is massive.

There are endless possibilities for COTI to partner in large scale projects:

Merchants partnerships

ADA Pay is the go-to solution for merchants wishing to accept $ADA. We have recently shared a video describing just that. There’s a growing global demand for merchants wishing to use ADA Pay, including Hotels, Software companies, Fashion, Restaurants and even Construction companies.

We expect this trend to continue and grow as we are offering more potential partnerships around NFT payments. As an example, think about a company like Coca-Cola, issuing unique NFTs as a coupon or voucher as part of a marketing campaign. ADA Pay, by COTI, could easily be used as the payment gateway for this as well as for the settlement layer.

Donations and Not-for-Profit organizations partnerships

There is a huge demand for using ADA Pay to perform donation payments originating from ADA’s large stake pools. Specifically, there are half a billion USD worth of ADA in staking pools,

donation payments are made to organizations like the African Water Project and Save the Children.

Governments partnerships

Governments that are working on national projects with Cardano may also need a payment system that supports ADA and native assets minted on the chain. Imagine a European country issuing its own digital national currency (CBDC) and COTI’s technology being implemented in their designated payment gateway, as an example.

Ecosystem partnerships

As Cardano’s ecosystem grows, we see more and more projects migrate from Ethereum and other chains to it. Some of these projects need a payment gateway to allow a utility for their token. While these projects had various options for a payment gateway on the Ethereum network, ADA Pay stands out as the exclusive solution over the Cardano ecosystem now, pushing a lot of new opportunities towards COTI.

To conclude, there are millions, or even possibly billions of transactions to be made. COTI being in the right place at the right time and having the right technology is the reason it has been deemed a promising investment by Cardano, making it the first company Cardano’s ecosystem fund has invested in.

Cardano knows our value. Now you do too!