Cardano has seen alot of attention lately as most of the market investors believe that this coin has the potential to topple Ethereum and take the #2 spot (possibly bitcoin as well). This is an ambitous goal, but how far fetched is it? Can Cardano really grow to the point where it can topple the giants?
The coin's father, IOHK was founded in 2015 and shortly after began development of what we will know today as Cardano, at the initial time of launch and a few months in the networks lifecycle, the first coin was called "Byron". The company launched their project after two years of development in 2017, aptly naming it after an Italian inventor from the 15th century.
The coin has a great deal of ties to the academical world, not only in its name, but also in its support. Cardano have had several projects with universities in both Georgia & Ethiopia, these were projects to build an identification system and a record keeping system respectively. The mainnet was launched in mid 2020 and caused a surge in the price of the coin. Later on in April 2021, the Hard Mary Fork took place which allows for tokens to be added on top of the Cardano Network, smart contracts are yet to be implemented however.
The crypto's main focuses are scalability, interoperability, and regulatory compliance. These are it's core principles that it focuses on as unlike most other cryptocurrencies, it does not have a white paper. The coin uses a proof-of-stake to validate new coins & transactions, this being a more cost & energy efficient alternative to proof-of-work coins that require active computers.
Cardano requires roughly 6 GWh/year where as Bitcoin requires around 110.53 TWh/year according to the university of Cambridge. Apart from the energy efficiency, the coin can also perform roughly 250 transactions per second and they cost as little as 39 cents, this is a large change in comparison to other blockchain networks as it allows for bigger scale usage and easier implementation of new functions & tokens.
The Cardano network has a stable foundation but it desperately lacks the option for developers to build on top of the network. Most of the largest coins today (apart from bitcoin) are as widely used as they are as they allow for developers to build further functions on top of the network. Cardano is planning to adding in smart contracts at the end of September which would help promote larger scale adoption. The contract language itself is also built to be more friendly to non-coders in the financial sector, being written in a specialized smart contract language called Haskell.
The coin itself can be earned from staking your coins to help promote network growth. These coins come mainly from transaction fees as the full supply of the coin was released 2019, it came in three waves in 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively getting 33.33% of the coins released. The main use of the coin has been a store of value or for payment/transactions. Lately the storage of value is supported with the help of the stakeing option of the coin. Later this year the coin may see additional usage in different sectors both in DEFI & the real world as it has already been used for identification and record keeping projects along with the impending launch of smart contracts.
Cardano has seen a steady growth since it launch and with the oncoming updates to the network, this trends will more than likely continue upwards. It also has avoided backlash in comparison to it's competitors. BNB and it's native exchange Binance have had a lot of regulatory backlash and the network itself is host to a great deal of questionable projects. The two coins have been fighting over the number three spot the last month and it seems to be Cardano coming out on top. Even Ethereum is critized compared to this coin as the network is resource heavy and have larger fees which prevent larger scale adoption.
But underneath Cardano there are a great deal of strong competitors that perform similarly if not better than Cardano, if the coin will thrive or fade away is left to be seen.
