Two years ago a friend recommended me to invest some money in Cardano (ADA), he did not tell me any details only that he thought it was a good project. My friend is an intelligent person and I have some confidence in these matters but I have always followed my own protocols when it comes to investing and this opportunity would not be the exception.
In my case I follow my own criteria before investing in a new or unknown project: 1) Know who are the people responsible for the project 2) What is it about? 3) Feasibility in time and 4) value of the crypto. Research is the key before investing and in the case of ADA what I managed to observe was very interesting.
1) ADA Project Manager:
Right away the name of Charles Hoskinson stands out as the main leader of ADA, who was previously one of the founders of Ethereum, an entrepreneur with high knowledge in science and mathematics. Hoskinson, participated in the creation of Ethereum before founding Cardano, before joining the Ethereum Classic teams. He is also the former CEO of Invictus Innovations (the entity behind Bitshares) and has also worked with Daniel Larimer, co-founder of EOS.
Unlike other projects Cardano does not inspire the feeling of adopting a centralized model like Ripple, its creator and team let this be known to the point of assuring that their project will be 100X more decentralized than Bitcoin.
2) What is ADA all about?
Cardano is a project framed within the spectrum of smart contracts just like Ethereum, it has open source decentralized blockchain. These features allow you to create, deploy and maintain dApps. The development team consists of a large global collective of engineers, researchers and scientists.
ADA offers more advanced solutions for the exchange of value coming from a contract, a situation that Bitcoin does not cover, e.g. "I give you $1000 in exchange for your motorcycle". Bitcoin is not able to establish this type of agreements like Cardano or Ethereum, however ADA caters to scalability by applying a scientific approach in a blockchain that can support the increased load on its network (e.g., increasing transactions per second while maintaining its performance).
3)Feasibility over time:.
Looking at Cardano's website I noticed that this project is planned to be developed in three phases: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltair, being the third one, Gouguen, the one that will be implemented in March. In this phase Goguen focuses on the development of the framework for smart contracts, the development of IELE and security enhancements. Consequently, this phase will bring to Cardano the second collection of protocols for the computational layer (Cardano-CL), deployed using sidechains with support for smart contracts.
Everything is designed to make Cardano the most democratic space in the crypto environment and the most efficient among smart contracts, above Ethereum itself, for me the most important thing is to see the evolution of this increasingly decentralized project, led by a broad community. Obviously after this research I decided to invest a significant amount of money in ADA when its value was 0.3$, now Cardano every day is getting closer to the price of 1$ and its prospects are lost sight of. Each time its market cap gets bigger and bigger as more people believe, like me, in the project. Please do not take this as financial advice, it is simply an opinion based on my own experience, consider doing your own research before initiating an investment.