IS CARDANO(ADA) A GOOD INVESTMENT?

Based on the historical price action, Cardano has been a decent investment. Cardano has received a ton of hype so far in 2021, and many fans hail it as the Ethereum killer. Does Cardano have a shot at stealing Ethereum’s market share? And should it be in your crypto portfolio? Let’s take a look!

Cardano: 

Background:

Cardano(ADA) is a blockchain project with over 75% of the total currency, staked for network validation. Part of the reason that so much Cardano(ADA) is staked is due to the cryptocurrency’s lack of smart contracts. While Ethereum has around 6% of its total supply locked as validators, much more ETH is locked in DeFi applications.

The Cardano project began in 2015 in an attempt to solve some of the problems that Ethereum faced from its Proof-of-Work consensus model. Cardano was officially founded by Charles Hoskinson, who is a former co-founder of Ethereum. 

Some of Cardano’s key improvements are proof of stake consensus, multiple processing layers for settlements and computations and the ability to upgrade its network easily in the future. 

The Cardano settlement layer launched in 2017 and raised around $64 million through the Cardano(ADA) ICO. The settlement layer excludes smart contracts, so at this time Cardano could only be used for settling peer-to-peer payments. Since then the ever-growing team of cardano developers has been hard at work preparing for the launch of smart contracts on the Cardano Computation Layer.

Cardano Development:

Cardano currently has between 110 and 160 developers actively working on the project and pushes out around 750 commits per week. These factors make the cryptocurrency the most actively-developed projects in the blockchain space today, suggesting that they will be able to deliver on their development roadmap. 

This level of developers places Cardano among the most likely projects to steal market share from one of the top cryptocurrency’s Ethereum. However, it’s still not close to the size and pace achieved by Ethereum.

Cardano(ADA) Smart Contracts:

Cardano(ADA) plans to add support for smart contracts in the 3rd-stage of its development roadmap, known as Goguen. With smart contracts being developed on other blockchains like the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, Cardano has some catching up to do. One of the most common critiques of Cardano is its non-existent DeFi eco-system. The project will need to deploy smart contracts in order to support decentralized finance applications, as smart contracts are the backbone of DeFi.

Cardano smart contracts will run on the Cardano computation layer, which will support legacy Solidity contracts as well as its own language, Plutus. 

ADA Partnerships:

Cardano has already inked some notable partnerships with governments, universities and businesses including Ethiopia, The University of Illinois and New Balance. Hoskinson (The CEO of Cardano) has pushed hard to see Cardano’s potential to come to fruition in Africa, where he believes blockchain can make a huge impact. This is in part due to a large proportion of Africa’s population being unbanked.

New Balance also has plans to use Cardano’s network to track the authenticity of its shoes.

Where to Buy Cardano

Cardano is available almost anywhere you can buy crypto. You can pick it up on Binance, FTX and even Coinbase as of June 2021. 

Stake Your Cardano

Cardano is a proof of stake network, so you can become a valitor by staking you Cardano(ADA) coins. Staking earns you the network fees for all of the transactions that you validate. This is a great way to support the decentralized community and earn easy passive income in Cardano(ADA)! So you basically get free passive ADA by staking the coins.

Is Cardano a Good Investment?

Cardano(ADA) is without a doubt currently one of the more promising applications in the blockchain space today, with a lot of momentum behind the project and strong fundamentals.

While touted by many as the Ethereum killer, this is extremely unlikely. In our opinion, Cardano(ADA) will carve out its own niche within the blockchain ecosystem, but we dont think it is going to flip Ethereum. If you are bullish on crypto and blockchain in general, then it makes a lot of sense to have Cardano in your portfolio. If you own Ethereum, then Cardano is a great hedge that will more than likely result in a net increase in gains. It’s truly a win-win. 

Remember, this is just our opinion and not financial advice. Crypto investments are very risky and you should not invest any money you can’t afford to lose. Crypto is extremely volatile, but I’m guessing that’s the reason you’re here to begin with.