ADA

There has been a lot of buzz around Cardano since its inception in 2015, however, the price rally that followed the success of Shelley hard fork made Cardano more relevant to other competitors. Although slow, Cardano devs are dedicated engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who published more than 90 whitepapers for the underlying technology (what the fuck?).

The most prominent name behind the project is Charles Hoskinson, who's been developing the protocol under the IOHK tech company and is highly respected by the crypto community - Even Adam Back likes him - to some extent haha.

Cardano’s development is separated into multiple business units. IOHK handles the development of the Cardano protocol, while the Cardano Foundation supervises the project, and EMURGO is responsible for business development and driving adoption. IOHK also has been involved with the development of Ethereum Classic (ETC).

To be quite honest, the Governance structure reminds me more of Montesquieu's separation of power model, where one entity controls the other, thus ensuring the power doesn't get corrupted, rather than being decentralized in a full sense.

It's worth noting that centralization isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially at the beginning when the project needs to be executed in the best way possible. Let's not forget how slow and unorganized decentralization really is, which can kill the project before it even started.

What is Cardano

Cardano is a public blockchain designed to solve the trilemma, thus become the third generation technology that combat inherently limited use-cases. Cardano aims to offer Security, Decentralization, Scalability, and Interoperability where the main emphasis is on interoperability.

Given that blockchain protocols are closed ecosystems that live in their own world, providing the ability to interact and share information/wealth between them is a great value proposition. If they manage to create a system that won't need to sacrifice any of the main propositions in order to be functional, we will witness something great. What scares me though, is how slow the process really is. Don't get me wrong, I understand Game Theory and how hard it is to think of everything, but the market, unfortunately, doesn't give a shit - although I must admit there has been a

So, there are five main phases of development: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. The first one was the genesis of the network and it allowed primitive use-case such as sending/receiving ADA. Shelley Hard Fork was implemented this year, and it was a big success since it offered further steps towards decentralization. Nodes are now operated and secured by the community. The next step is to implement smart contracts as a part of the next Goguen Hardfork. Under the assumption everything goes right, Basho hard will deal with optimizing scalability and interoperability features, and Voltaire introduces a treasury system to address the governance issues.

As can be seen, the roadmap is both ambitious and brilliant, however, it mostly depends on how fast can they deliver. Let's not forget that Cardano is competing with ETH, which has the largest community of devs out there who are equally dedicated and brilliant.

I love Cardano, although I don't have much invested in it(I'm an idiot since I follow the project for literally 3 years) - The success of such projects (legit ones) are giving this industry a shot on a global scale :)

Some Thoughts

It's kinda funny how #bsc managed to take overtake a big sum of users, simply by being the first copycat that utilized open-source tech haha (regardless of how centralized they are). That's what I'm trying to say, decentralization is just a term that most people/projects just love saying out loud - makes them feel special while the intentions and general understanding remain the same as web.2.0.

ADA is different in this aspect - at least they're trying to make this whole thing decentralized.

That's why some projects have a tough time getting noticed. A lot of work has been invested into making decentralized systems viable and yet, the market doesn't appreciate that. As we enter the bull, no one actually cares - until they got burned.

You do understand that most defi projects will fail, right? To even think otherwise is just dumb. The only ones that will remain are those who'll keep inventing and powering up their community.