Emurgo will take fresh steps to expand the Cardano blockchain ecosystem, including strategic investments that will see the layer 1 (L1) blockchain fill existing gaps in its adoption by developers and solution architects. Emurgo is the commercial arm of Cardano and serves as one of the three entities governing the project.

These plans were confirmed in a recent interview with Emurgo’s founder and CEO, Ken Kodama, who described intentions of scaling the adoption of Cardano for projects such as decentralised identities (DID) and layer 2 solutions. “We don’t see that much DID application being built on Cardano, so that’s the primary gap that we need to fill,” the Emurgo chief said, stressing a need to embed decentralised identities in blockchain protocols. DID applications are blockchain-powered solutions that enable decentralised digital identities for people, organisations, or things.

Kodama also highlighted a key change in Emurgo’s investment strategy. According to him, Emurgo will now focus on a venture studio model, which allows it to incubate blockchain startups building solutions on Cardano. This approach creates a win-win situation that provides liquidity for blockchain businesses while filling up product and adoption ‘gaps’ on Cardano. “ We [will also] do hackathons or give grants to incentivise Cardano builders to build and fill the gaps,” Kodama said.

Globally, the adoption of L1 blockchain technology is clearly seen in the solutions built on top of them. Bitcoin, for example, increased in global adoption after Lightening Network, a layer 2 solution that solved Bitcoin’s notorious scalability problem, gained popularity. Ethereum also has a good number of L2 solutions that have widened its adoption; this includes Base, a scaling solution powered by CoinBase that is now making inroads into Africa. The Cardano blockchain ecosystem is built to support L2 projects, and part of Kodama’s plans is to have onboard such projects into Cardano. Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups and optimistic rollups are some of the scaling solutions Cardano is looking to support.

As with all tech products, the user experience takes a central position in how users will adopt a product. Kodama shared that a pressing barrier to the adoption of Cardano’s blockchain is the requirement of developers to understand programming languages Haskell and Plutus. The pool of developers with this knowledge is quite low, he said, highlighting Emurgo’s efforts to widen the numbers through Aiken. Aiken is a new programming language for developing smart contracts on Cardano.

Cardano’s long-term goal is to embed Aiken and other languages in a way that allows developers to create smart contracts using different languages.