According to Cointelegraph, Ken Kodama, the founder and CEO of Emurgo, one of the three entities governing Cardano, has discussed the company's plans to fill 21 categories they believe are missing from the Cardano ecosystem compared to other leading blockchains. Emurgo is shifting its approach to a venture studio model, either building solutions themselves or investing in them. Some of the gaps highlighted by Kodama include decentralized identity (DID) for enterprise adoption and layer-2 sidechains.
Kodama emphasized the importance of decentralized identity in blockchain protocols and noted the lack of DID applications built on Cardano. Additionally, while Cardano has a scaling solution called Hydra, Emurgo is also exploring layer-2 solutions, zero-knowledge rollups, and optimistic rollups. Kodama mentioned that they are looking to invest in these technologies and have conducted a hackathon with these themes.
One pressing issue hindering adoption is the developers' experience, as building on Cardano requires understanding programming languages Haskell and Plutus. To address this, Emurgo is supporting Aiken, a toolkit and new programming language for developing smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. Kodama expressed high expectations for Aiken and other programming languages that can be embedded into Cardano, allowing builders to create smart contracts using different languages.
