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· 6 min read
Cardano Foundation

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For the September edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Kate, the senior marketing manager at NOWPayments.


Hey Kate! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NOWPayments project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hi, happy to answer your questions!

NOWPayments was founded in 2019 by the team behind ChangeNOW, a leading crypto exchange service. NOWPayments remains close partners with ChangeNOW but is fully independent and has its own team.

The idea of NOWPayments was to help spread mass adoption by making it easy to use crypto daily. The challenges merchants face when deciding if they should accept crypto are:

  • Volatility.
  • Lack of knowledge about crypto basics.
  • Lack of means to accept on popular e-commerce platforms.
  • The need to withdraw to fiat.

We try to help solve each of these by offering a fixed-rate option and supporting conversion to stablecoins. In addition, we continue developing plugins that can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms. We also have a fiat conversion option, although we hope it won’t be needed in the future if everyone can use crypto everywhere. That is why we are targeting all industries: e-commerce, services, traveling, gaming, tech, etc. Crypto is ubiquitous.


· 5 min read
Cardano Foundation

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For the August edition of the Developer Spotlight article, we will interview Adam Dean, the primary developer of Mercury for WooCommerce.


Hey Adam! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Mercury for WooCommerce project! Can you tell us more about the project and what is the problem that you were addressing?

With Cardano Mercury for WooCommerce, my goal was to make a simple and accessible solution to bridge traditional e-commerce with the Cardano Blockchain. WooCommerce is one of the largest open-source e-commerce platforms in the industry. So it was only natural to create a similarly open-source, fee-free payment gateway to bridge Cardano to WooCommerce. One of the most significant barriers to entry in the cryptocurrency industry is the need to trade back and forth between fiat and crypto. Mercury aims to eliminate that friction point by allowing merchants and shoppers to transact directly with one another with the currency of the future.


· 4 min read
Cardano Foundation

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Dear Cardano community,

To celebrate the Cardano Developer Portal launch, The Cardano Foundation minted the world’s first Non-Fungible Tokens of Appreciation (NFTAs). NFTAs are NFTs showing appreciation to the ten developers that provided feedback and helped build the developer portal. Think of them as “certificates of participation” when you attend a seminar or an event that they give out to attendees. Only they are digital!

· 6 min read
Cardano Foundation

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For the July edition of the Spotlight article, we interviewed one of the creators of NFT-MAKER, Patrick Tobler.


Hey Patrick! Happy to connect today and learn more about the NFT-MAKER project! Can you tell us how the project started and what is the problem that you were addressing?

Hey! Thank you for having me - it’s an honor.
Back then, when Native Tokens first arrived, and Spacebudz introduced the concept of NFTs to Cardano, I quickly realized that there is no simple way for non-technical people to create their own NFTs on Cardano. So I decided to partner up with Fahim, our designer, and together we built the first version of nft-maker.io. Our goal was to focus on the User Experience and make the NFT creation flow as easy and accessible as possible.