The market's fifth-largest cryptocurrency is built on a third-generation blockchain
The cryptocurrencies bitcoin, ether, and Ripple have attracted the most interest from investors during the crypto frenzy of the last year. That's not too surprising, considering they're the three most valuable tokens by market cap and the only three worth more than $30 billion at the moment. But as the precipitous price declines of January demonstrated, things can change pretty quickly.
At the moment, the volatility is due to an overheated market and a fair share of investors who don't know exactly what they're getting into. But in the future, there will be volatility as newer, faster, and better blockchains emerge to replace older, slower, and less optimized ones. While bitcoin and Ethereum (the blockchain that supports ether transactions) are king today, a third-generation blockchain called Cardano aims to become the ideal version of the technology. Can it replace its predecessors?
Introducing Cardano
Cardano is a fully open source, decentralized, and public blockchain and cryptocurrency (just like bitcoin, the blockchain and token share the same name). It spawned from a project between three entities: the non-profit Cardano Foundation, engineering firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), and the Japanese company Emurgo, which works with businesses interested in adopting and integrated the Cardano blockchain.
The network is still in its infancy and has yet to publicly release all of the necessary updates, but Cardano has one thing going for it: It's the first peer-reviewed blockchain. It was built from the ground up with the intention of overcoming the limitations -- regulatory, privacy, and scaling -- of existing blockchain technologies.
Here's another way to look at it: Bitcoin was a first-generation blockchain that introduced cryptocurrencies to the masses, but it had, and has, its pitfalls. Second-generation blockchains, such as Ethereum, had the advantage of launching after learning from bitcoin's faults. While overcoming certain obstacles of the bitcoin network, though, Ethereum has encountered problems of its own.
Cardano wants to use the power of hindsight to breeze past both of its predecessors. Here's how the network compares to bitcoin and Ethereum read full story here
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