IOHK Announces Next Cardano Project Catalyst to Begin in June: Details

As reported by IOHK, Project Catalyst Fund9 is expected to kick off on June 1, according to the team's announcement at the catalyst town hall. This comes after a successful Fund8, with the winners already announced.

The upcoming Project Catalyst Fund9 expects over 1,000 proposals to be submitted, with $16 million worth of ADA already earmarked for grants and ecosystem rewards. Project Catalyst is a collaborative effort between the Cardano community and Cardano's parent company, IOHK, to encourage Cardano network development.

The community provides challenges across a range of Cardano-related projects during each funding round. The community then responds to these concerns by presenting plans that define concrete solutions. The community votes on the proposals and chooses which ones will be funded.

In its weekly development updates, IOHK shared statistics regarding network growth on a chart. Currently, 943 projects are building on Cardano, up from 925 previously. A total of 85 projects have recently launched on Cardano, while the number of NFT projects has risen to 5,656. For the week, Github connects totaled 3,132, while Cardano native tokens stood at 4.8 million. Also, the number of Plutus scripts was 2,714.

The Vasil Hard Fork, scheduled for June 29, hopes to bring significant improvements to Cardano and its smart contract platform, Plutus. A suggested road map has been provided by IOHK ahead of the Vasil Hard Fork event. The end of May is set for the closed public testnet phase, while Vasil is expected to launch on the Cardano testnet in early June. Also, the mainnet hard fork proposal deadline has been set for June 29.

IOHK states in its latest weekly development report that the node, ledger and consensus teams are continuing to prepare for the Vasil Hard Fork.

Cardano's price action

Cardano fell to lows of $0.39 in the past week as the crypto market experienced a sell-off. Cardano is presently consolidating while attempting a rebound.

Cardano is trading at $0.52, down 2.35% in the last 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap data. The crypto asset is up 3.53% in the past week.