Cardano Partners with Orion Protocol to Bring Scalability to DeFi and NFTs

IOHK, the company behind Cardano, has partnered with Orion Protocol, becoming the first liquidity aggregator of the Cardano blockchain. 

Orion has provided a non-custodial gateway to the crypto market by aggregating liquidity from crypto exchanges into a single DeFi platform. The partnership with Cardano comes after a series of integration to other protocols, such as Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Elrond. 

Cardano’s Bridge to the Crypto Market

This partnership provides Cardano with a bridge to the entire crypto market where users can access liquidity from centralized exchanges in a decentralized manner. As per a blog post, Orion and Cardano’s primary focus will be on issues such as scalability and a flexible groundwork for DeFi products and NFTs.

On March 31, Cardano became a fully decentralized multi-asset protocol — a launching long-awaited by the DeFi community. With a multi-layer protocol, the integration of Cardano’s infrastructure will enable far greater interoperability, scalability, and performance of the Orion protocol. 

“Orion Protocol is proud to become the first liquidity aggregator to build on Cardano’s groundbreaking infrastructure, working together to ensure the scalability and sustainability of the DeFi and NFT spaces.” — Reads the post.

NFTs on Cardano

Besides adding decentralized access to liquidity, both protocols will work on a space for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), using Orion’s NFT Aggregator, the first of its kind to bridge all NFTs marketplaces in one platform.

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, and CEO, recently shared his thoughts about the NFT movement. It appears that Hoskinson is keen to work with several marketplaces, hinting that Cardano could support NFTs and their respective marketplaces. 

NFTs are one of the hottest trends in the crypto-community.

Cardano and its Role in the DeFi space

Other communities in the DeFi space have criticized Cardano for not having smart contracts yet, adding that the network is overvalued. Despite critics, Hoskinson revealed the timeline for launching Alonzo, the testnet that will allow developers to build and deploy smart contracts on Cardano’s blockchain.

He also added that Cardano is “overwhelmingly subscribed” despite not having a programmability layer for smart contracts. As reported by CryptoPotato, Cardano is currently topped with a large inflow of DeFi protocols seeking to work with the company.