CARDANO - The Ethereum Killer?

What is Cardano?

They described in their official website as, ' Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.' I hope they really mean it and wishing them to be successful in their vision.

According to their website, Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform: the first to be founded on peer-reviewed research and developed through evidence-based methods. It combines pioneering technologies to provide unparalleled security and sustainability to decentralized applications, systems, and societies. 

The founders of Cardano describe it as “the most environmentally sustainable” cryptocurrency, thanks to its innovative proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that values the percentage of coins a miner holds rather than the processing power they possess. The Proof-of-Stake(PoS) is a new innovative concept in itself. It states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins they hold. This means that the more coins owned by a miner, the more mining power they have. Unlike Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake mechanism minimizes the extreme energy consumption in mining cryptocurrencies.  Many other cryptocurrencies like BNB, Dash, Neo, Tezos, Raydium, Qtum etc. use Proof-of-Stake. The Ethereum Foundation has announced a plan to switch Ethereum from PoW to PoS within 2021.

Cardano has its cryptocurrency known as ADA, which ranks under the top 10 cryptocurrencies. ADA is available to trade across all the cryptocurrency exchanges around the globe.

Background 

Three organizations are responsible for Cardano’s development: IOHK, Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO. IOHK is established by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum. Hoskinson left Ethereum after a dispute with its co-founder Vitalik Buterin; Hoskinson wanted to accept venture capital and create a for-profit entity while Buterin wanted to keep it running as a nonprofit organization. 

The platform began development in 2015 and was launched in 2017. It is named after Gerolamo Cardano and the cryptocurrency after Ada Lovelace. Cardano was funded through an initial coin offering. The currency debuted with a market cap of $600 million. By the end of 2017, it had a market cap of $10 billion, and reached a value of $33 billion briefly in 2018 before a general tightening of the crypto market dropped its value back to $10 billion. Now it has a market cap of $47 billion and is ranked at number 5 among all the cryptocurrencies according to market cap. 

It's vision

ADA can be used as a transfer of value in a similar way that cash is currently used. This is not very different from other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, but ADA has other uses as well.

Cardano is considered as the biggest proof of stake cryptocurrency in 2021.  The blockchain platform also has a goal of providing banking services to the world’s unbanked. Cardano’s main applications are in identity management and traceability. The former application can be used to streamline and simplify processes that require the collection of data from multiple sources. The latter application can be used to track and audit a product’s manufacturing processes from provenance to finished goods and, potentially, eliminate the market for counterfeit goods. Cardano can be used to build a secure voting mechanism for token holders.

Is it really the Ethereum-killer?

Cardano has positioned itself as an alternative to Ethereum. According to Investopedia, Cardano and Ethereum both platforms are used for similar applications, such as smart contracts, and have goals of building a connected and decentralized system. Cardano considers itself as an updated version of Ethereum and has anointed itself a third-generation platform over Ethereum’s second-generation credentials. 

They said, “Cardano is likely to be a challenger to Ethereum as not only can it be used as currency, but its blockchain can also be used to build smart contracts, protocols and decentralized applications. Plus its is significantly more scalable than Ethereum.”

How to buy Cardano?

ADA is available on most major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Huobi Global etc. Some online brokers like Robinhood also facilitate to buy ADA.
Then you have to hold ADA in a supported wallet, and Cardano specifically recommends two digital options. One of these is the Daedalus Wallet, which works and grows within the Cardano network. The organization also recommends the Yoroi Wallet, a simple digital cryptocurrency wallet that can help keep your ADA safe and secure.

Last words

Cardano boasts an impressive performance and a long-term vision for its blockchain and cryptocurrency. But it is still early days. While its initial use case is as a cryptocurrency, Cardano’s blockchain intends to expand beyond coins into a control layer that will provide services absent in the cryptocurrency ecosystem today. Given that it is still early days, much depends on execution of the vision.