- Solution aims to solve fragmentation in the crypto space, bringing blockchain closer to mainstream adoption
- Partners will explore how to scale the solution sustainably to incorporate traditional financial and NFT markets
- Partnership aims to provide a single, non-custodial point of access for crypto traders for all of the major crypto exchanges
23 June, 2021: A new trading platform has been created to offer crypto traders a ‘one-stop-shop’ where they can access multiple exchanges in one decentralized platform, tackling the current fragmentation across the space. Leading blockchain engineering company IOHK and decentralized finance platform Orion have partnered to integrate the market leading blockchain, Cardano, into Orion’s trading terminal. The industry-first terminal allows people access to all of the major crypto exchanges, without needing to undergo the extensive KYC and AML checks required to sign up to each individual platform – while ensuring the best price for every trade
A first for Cardano users, this will provide a decentralized gateway to the digital asset market, allowing them to buy and sell assets on Orion via the Cardano blockchain later this year.
By using Cardano’s energy efficient ‘Proof of Stake’ mechanism, a technology pioneered by IOHK, Orion will also achieve more sustainable growth through this partnership, an alternative to the widely criticised Proof of Work system employed by Bitcoin and the majority of other blockchains, which uses more energy than the whole of Switzerland. By comparison, Cardano uses the equivalent energy of a family home. Meanwhile, this integration will bring a significant volume of transactions to the Cardano blockchain via Orion’s solutions.
Orion’s goal, longer term, is to combine access to both the traditional financial markets and NFT marketplaces. This requires a strong, scalable blockchain, one of Orion’s reasons for partnering with Cardano. NFTs have enjoyed a huge rise to prominence in 2021 with the National Basketball Association alone making $230million from its ‘top shot’ NFT products.
Romain Pellerin, CTO at IOHK, said: “We believe that industry collaboration is crucial in order for blockchain to achieve mainstream adoption, which is why we have always taken an open source and patent-free approach to building Cardano.
As a result, we are always looking to partner with projects like Orion, which are crucial in order for blockchain to achieve its ‘bluetooth moment’, where users have a seamless experience when using blockchain networks, regardless of which platform they are using.”
Timothea Horwell, CMO at Orion said: “Scalability is of critical importance to Orion in order to achieve widespread adoption: to become the single point of access to the digital asset market, we need a robust, scalable infrastructure that can effectively and efficiently handle the transactions that occur on such a platform. Engineered for efficiency and scalability, the Cardano ecosystem is developing into the most complete and most useful blockchain ever constructed.
“As the market races towards the solution for the leading alternative to Ethereum on which to build a blockchain-based financial future, Cardano is primed to take that spot as the first and largest proof of stake blockchain, solving critical areas such as cost, latency, efficiency and scalability. With Orion’s goal of making the digital asset market inclusive and accessible, Cardano’s inclusive and open-source method is a perfect fit.”
About IOHK
IOHK is an R&D and product engineering company, committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the 2 billions people who don’t have them.
We build blockchain based products for governments, corporations and academic institutions and upskill people across the world, empowering them to solve the most pressing problems faced by people in their countries.
We have core beliefs in decentralization, privacy, economic identity and financial empowerment for everyone, and stand opposed to centralized control and bureaucracy.
For more information, visit: https://iohk.io/ and follow @IOHKMedia on Twitter.
For media opportunities or potential interviews, please contact [email protected]
About Orion
Orion is a chain agnostic protocol building the decentralized gateway to the digital asset market. The market is incredibly fragmented across assets, exchanges, and blockchains. Currently, the industry is still too siloed to evolve to a state of full-interoperability without a solution that sits across the entire market.
Orion Protocol is building the first decentralized gateway to the entire digital asset market – aggregating liquidity across decentralized and centralized crypto exchanges and swap platforms in one, decentralized platform. In doing so, Orion seeks to solve the fragmentation not only of crypto markets, but NFTs marketplaces, and assets from traditional finance by eventually aggregating them into one decentralized platform for traders.
From inception, Orion has paid close attention to its predecessors and identified one of the major causes of failure is the lack of substantial revenue streams: focusing on one solution, one product, and one audience. A mature Orion Terminal will aggregate different assets across different exchanges and different blockchains, from crypto to NFTs to stocks and commodities.
However, Orion Protocol is not just a trading terminal. Orion is building over a dozen solutions on its liquidity aggregator for blockchains, exchanges, and crypto projects, resulting in over eighteen revenue streams on the protocol that benefit ORN holders.
About Ouroboros
Ouroboros is the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol, and the first blockchain protocol to be based on peer-reviewed research. Ouroboros combines unique technology and mathematically-verified mechanisms – which, in turn, combine behavioral psychology and economic philosophy – to ensure the security and sustainability of the blockchains that depend upon it. The result is a protocol with proven security guarantees able to facilitate the propagation of global, permissionless networks with minimal energy requirements – of which Cardano is the first.
At the heart of Ouroboros is the concept of infinity. Global networks must be able to grow sustainably and ethically: to provide greater opportunities to the world while also preserving it. This becomes possible with Ouroboros.
Ouroboros’ scalability solution is called Hydra. Hydra is an off-chain scalability architecture that addresses three key scalability challenges: high-transaction output, low latency, and minimal storage per node.
Hydra introduces multi-party state channels, which offers parallel transaction processing to dramatically improve Cardano’s transaction-per-second (TPS) output, and instant confirmation of transactions. Reflecting the implementation’s namesake, the paper refers to off-chain ledger siblings – state channels – as heads, which makes the ledger multi-headed.
Ouroboros Hydra enables Cardano to scale horizontally, increasing performance by incorporating additional nodes, rather than vertically, through the addition of more powerful hardware. Early simulations show that each head is able to perform up to 1,000 TPS. With 1,000 heads, this could be as high as 1,000,000 TPS. Once implemented, Ouroboros Hydra will allow Cardano to scale to unrivalled levels – to the level of, for example, global payment systems.
While Hydra is being designed in conjunction with the Ouroboros protocol and the Cardano ledger, it may also be employed over other systems, provided they share the necessary characteristics with Cardano.
