Announcing ADAmatic, Two-Way Bridge From Polygon to Cardano

Built on Polygon with direct partnership with Polygon themselves, ADAmatic is a two-way bridge to bridge your Polygon-based assets to Cardano, and back. Everyone can use ADAmatic independently of MELD, but we are building it to bring more token choices and liquidity into Cardano for MELD users, as well as giving Polygon-based DeFi users on-ramps to the unique, DeFi-based financial services that only MELD offers!

As part of a recent strategic partnership with Vent Finance, the ADAmatic bridge is one of the first products MELD and VENT are bringing to market. This is a much needed addition for not just MELD, but also the greater Cardano Ecosystem.

The objective is to leverage the highly scalable and efficient infrastructure that Polygon and Cardano are providing, to support the creation of business opportunities that will benefit from cross-chain liquidity enabled by the ADAmatic bridge. DeFi projects on Polygon have been growing at a staggering rate and Cardano already has an ecosystem of up-and-coming projects that are ready to roll out as soon as smart contracts are live. We strongly believe that these ecosystems will become the powerhouse of DeFi and are confident that ADAmatic will play a key role in enabling cross-chain functionality for these dApps, like for projects launching on the VentUp Launchpad or the MELDed Assets service.

If you are familiar with using bridges in DeFi, you’ll know that bridges allow interoperability between blockchain networks. ADAmatic merely adds that functionality from Polygon to Cardano. This applies not only to $MATIC, but to any Polygon and Ethereum-based assets. Bridging to other chains is a core interoperability function that will allow the transition towards Cardano, accelerate the adoption of Native dApps, and bring more liquidity to the chain.

More technically, if you need to bridge your $MATIC over to Cardano, ADAmatic takes your $MATIC, locks it on the Polygon blockchain, and mints you mMATIC on the Cardano blockchain in exchange. mMATIC is a "MELDed Asset," i.e. a wrapped version of MATIC that lives on the Cardano blockchain. Our Oracle aligns the price of your newly-minted mMATIC with the price of MATIC. At any given time, you can get back your locked MATIC by burning, to “bridge back” the mMATIC that you minted.

Once you hold mMATIC you can use it to engage with the MELD protocol to do things like:

Access crypto-backed fiat loans and Line-of-credits.
Earn interest by lending in the MELD ecosystem.
Provide it as liquidity to earn yield on trading fees.
Take out a "Genius Loan" – a self-repaying loan only available via the MELD network.

We are massively excited about ADAmatic because it allows DeFi users to bring over liquidity held on Ethereum to the Cardano ecosystem. We built this not only to help MELD users, but to contribute to the improvement of both the Cardano and greater DeFi ecosystems. The core layer will be totally open-sourced, for the community and by the community.

Another benefit is that mMATIC and other MELDed assets can be used in other protocols throughout the ecosystem. This allows MELD users to be exposed to the ETH price, while utilizing any Cardano-based DeFi protocol!

These are just a few of the DeFi-based financial services we’re developing at MELD. Watch this recent interview with our Co-Founder, Ken Olling, to learn more.

MELD - Polygon Partnership

In regards to the actual creation of ADAmatic, MELD is able to provide expertise on the Cardano side of things, where VENT is able to provide expertise on Ethereum. With Polygon themselves as a partner to cleanly tie everything together, ensuring a native and decentralized solution.

Growing the DeFi Ecosystem by Building the Right Tools

Along with ADAmatic, MELD is building additional tools for the DeFi ecosystem, such as Hachi, a suite of auditing tools for Cardano smart contracts.

The Hachi project is being advised by Dr. Nguyen Anh Quynh, one of the world’s leading security researchers. The project has been working on forming the Security Standards for Cardano Smart Contracts, and building the toolings required in the upcoming years.

Check out the GitHub repo for Hachi here, and stay tuned for further announcements!

The Cardano core devs are working tirelessly to launch smart contract functionality on the Cardano blockchain by the end of 2021, as a part of the "Goguen" phase of the Cardano roadmap. Starting with an ADA-backed negative interest mUSD/mEUR service, and the MELDed Assets service to offer all the tokens needed by the users. Then the insurance pool for staking MELD, the liquidity pools, and the lending-borrowing infrastructure afterwards.

Stay Tuned — MELD

We think it’s essential for everyone to gain control of their financial lives and have equal access to financial instruments used by professionals, not just centralized institutions, governments, or the 1%. We want to provide financial freedom and control to the masses, including the unbanked.

We have a long-term goal to enable the $15 trillion that is currently locked out of the global economy, including 2 billion individuals worldwide that are either underbanked or have no access to banking services whatsoever, to access these tools. These are the people that are paying the highest fees, getting the worst customer service, and they are the ones that are having the most problems.

Our vision is to create an ecosystem that empowers individuals to regain financial control by providing them with the tools and services they need to manage their money on their terms. Whether that be creating a collateralized debt position (CDP) with cryptocurrency, earning an interest return for lending fiat to borrowers, or even participating in reward incentive programs, we strive to provide our users with the functions they need to manage their own financial lives.