The value of the Cardano token (ADA) on Friday, August 20, rose to $ 2.53, and the capitalization was almost $ 90 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.  Binance Coin, the token of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, whose capitalization is about $ 81 billion, was displaced from the third place by the cryptocurrency.

  Smart contracts and fast transactions

  The decentralized Cardano platform was created in 2017 by the Americans Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, who worked in the Ethereum project as CEO and executive assistant.  The new project was named after the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, whose surname once inspired the inventors of the driveshaft.  Inside the platform, the creators of the project used their own ADA token, which was dedicated to the daughter of Lord Byron and the "first programmer" Ada Livelase.

  The founders also "revived" the stages of the project's development, adding "lyrics" to the figures - the launch of the protocol and two wallets Daedalus and Yoroi took place under the auspices of the era of the poet Byron, then the work continued with the era of the poet Shelley.  Since 2020, the company has been in the era of the American scientist Goguen, which is dedicated to the implementation of smart contracts.  The last stage, as conceived by the authors of the project, will be the "era of Voltaire" and will begin in 2025, when token holders will be able to vote for management decisions on the platform.

  The creators are positioning Cardano as an alternative to the Ethereum blockchain, which they must surpass in scalability, transaction speed and their cost, explains Viktor Pershikov, lead analyst at 8848 Invest.  The value of Cardano's token jumped 22% after Hoskinson announced the Alonzo Purple update on August 10 to enable smart contracts on Cardano that use the blockchain to perform various functions, such as sending information or documents.  Hoskinson also promised to add a decentralized financial application (DeFi) feature for exchanging capital or assets between two counterparties without intermediaries. Cardano and other modern high-bandwidth protocols use a proof of stake algorithm (proof of stake), which keeps investors on their toes trying to guess.  who will be the main blockchain operator for smart contracts, says Konstantin Deikalo, investment manager at Finsight Ventures.  He notes that Cardano is in a race for leadership with several competitors, such as Solana (10th cryptocurrency by capitalization), which this year raised $ 314 million for project development.

 On the third track, according to Deikalo, Polkadot (the eighth cryptocurrency in terms of capitalization), whose founder Gavin Wood, being the co-founder of Ethereum, proposed not to change it, but to create a "fast" technology from scratch.  In addition, Deikalo notes "another hot topic" - small chains that allow you to create smart contacts on any blockchain, for example, Polygon with the Matic token (18th cryptocurrency by capitalization) and Cosmos with the ATOM token (36th cryptocurrency by capitalization)  ...

 Dirty mining and clean investment

 In February of this year, a representative of the Digiconomist platform, created to detect the unforeseen consequences of digital trends, announced on the air of CNBC that Bitcoin consumes as much energy as the state of Chile - 77.78 terawatts per hour.  Hoskinson reminded CNBC of the Cardano token, which consumes 6 gigawatts or 0.006 terawatts per hour.  Not without Elon Musk F.  Cardano surged in May after the billionaire became disillusioned with Bitcoin over the environmental impact of mining and announced that Tesla would no longer accept cryptocurrency.  The environmental issue is important, and its impact depends on how often influencers talk about the energy source for Bitcoin, Deikalo says.  But the "dirtiest" mining was Chinese, because a large number of miners were concentrated near coal mines, however, today the number of environmentally damaging energy sources is decreasing, the expert explained.

 An important factor in the growth of ADA was the interest in the project of institutional investors: on July 1, the largest American crypto fund Grayscale (owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of the CoinDesk crypto exchange) announced the purchase of Cardano tokens, Pershikov said.  Therefore, according to the expert, the ADA token became one of the first assets that successfully won back the fall of the crypto market two months ago, and only in the last month has risen in price by 150%.

 “Digital currencies represent a unique opportunity for investors to diversify their portfolios,” said Edward McGee, vice president of finance at Grayscale.  The Cardano platform scored another victory this year when it received approval to list on Japanese exchanges, which Carnago says have some of the most stringent selection criteria in the world.  The launch is scheduled for August 25th.

 What an investor needs to know

 “The success of cryptocurrencies depends on such an indicator as mass use, which indicates how many places where, relatively speaking, I can buy a carton of milk for my tokens,” says Pavel Fedorov, an independent fintech expert.  “For Cardano to grow well, it is necessary to conclude a contract with a network of the level of Walmart, before that the token will remain a narrow niche, and in terms of mass use it will be, to put it mildly, not among the champions,” he added.

 The company seems to think the same: On July 5, Cardano Foundation CEO Frederick Gregaard shared a strategy for the next five years.  According to him, by 2022 the fund intends to attract 50 partner banks, by 2024 three companies from the Fortune list will buy Cardano tokens, by 2026 the token will be in the wallets of 10 companies, and the number of ecosystem users will increase to 1 billion. However,  in 2020, Hoskinson already ambitiously predicted that "next year, hundreds of assets, thousands of decentralized applications and tons of interesting projects will operate on Cardano," which did not happen, so you need to look at facts, not strategies, added Fedorov

Sincerely, Lyubov Sultanova.  Join the social network Markethive.  Register using the link;

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