• Cardano’s trading arm, EMURGO, announced investments in the OAK Network and the SubQuery protocol to expand its presence on Web3.
• The total number of smart contracts created on the Cardano blockchain has increased by 300 percent year to date.

Since the developments in the Web3 space have been happening at a very fast pace, the Cardano ecosystem is eager to be a part of it. As a result, Cardano is expanding its presence by making key acquisitions in the Web3 ecosystem.

On Tuesday, November 29, EMURGO Ventures, the inversion arm Cardano official trading arm of EMURGO blockchain, Announced two large investments in the OAK Network and SubQuery Network to further expand its rapidly growing Web3 portfolio.

#EMURGO Ventures, the investment arm of the #Cardano EMURGO, the official business arm of blockchain, has announced that #EMURGO Ventures has made two new investments to add to its growing #Web3 briefcase.@oak_network@SubQueryNetwork pic.twitter.com/TLe4rn0sOF

—EMURGO (@emurgo_io) November 29, 2022

The OAK Network functions as a Web3 hub that facilitates automated and trustless decentralized finance (DeFi) and digital payments. They also allow the execution of transactions through signals of specific events, such as price, time and the change of state of smart contracts.

EMURGO also noted that the Web3 solution offered by OAK Network has the potential to improve the overall efficiency of the Cardano blockchain network. OAK Network’s automation and interoperable infrastructure is capable of improving the operational efficiency of the Cardano network.

Another major investment by EMURGO Ventures is in the SubQuery Network. This is an open source blockchain and universal Web3 data indexing toolkit. Provides developers provides fast, flexible, reliable and decentralized services API to power leading multi-chain applications.

Being an infrastructure builder itself, the SubQuery network can support the Cardano blockchain providing API to several Cardano ecosystem projects including Cardano DeFiCardano NFTsCardano wallets etc.

Development in the Cardano ecosystem

The strong Cardano blockchain development team has been rigorously working on various aspects to improve the efficiency of the network. One key area where Cardano is showing rapid improvement is the number of smart contracts hosted on the Cardano blockchain.

As of November 27, there were a total of 3,811 distinct smart contracts running on Cardano’s Plutus smart contract platform. At the beginning of the year, on January 1, there were 947 smart contracts running on Cardano Plutus. This means that there is a 300 percent increase in the total number of smart contracts running on the platform.

According to data collected from #Cardano According to Blockchain Insights, the total number of smart contracts based on Plutus, a Cardano smart contract platform, stood at 3,791. The value represented a growth of 300% or 2,844 in 2022 after registering 947 smart contracts on January 1.

— 🟩 Dr Martin Hiesboeck (@MHiesboeck) November 28, 2022

On the other hand, the Cardano network is also among the top three blockchains in terms of development activity. Earlier this week, on Monday, a total of 555 commits were pushed across 64 GitHub repositories.

Marlowe-Cardano, a Marlowe implementation built on top of Cardano Plutus, has 53 confirmations. Marlowe is referring to building financial smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. The Cardano node had a total of 31 confirmations. Additionally, Cardano’s Layer-2 scalability solution, Hydra, received a total of 28 confirmations. With Hydra 0.8.1, the scaling platform has received some new updates including various fixes and an extension to the replay server outputs.