Not only has Cardano (ADA) been tagged as an Ethereum Killer but it is also the eight-largest digital asset by market capitalization.
This piece takes an in-depth look into Cardano, its core areas of business, and – most importantly for prospective investors – the pros and cons which can help answer the question: Should I buy Cardano?
Cardano (ADA) has followed the crypto boom of 2021 which has seen most of the cryptocurrencies reach record new all-time highs. ADA returned more than 600% last year and reached an all-time high of $3.10 on 2nd September 2021.
Such milestones are a bit impressive for a two-layer blockchain project which has several roadmaps leading to the creation of smart contracts that would result in decentralized protocols and applications (DAPPS), but so far has no strong single use case.
ADA has seen such a spike in price because of the accomplishments of its roadmaps which would see it scale faster. Additionally, it will provide relatively lower transaction fees as well as have new and innovative decentralized applications which would provide seamless transactions within a short period of time.
Will Cardano accomplish its roadmap by the end of 2022 and challenge Ethereum (ETH) and Tron (TRX) primarily as the new colonizer of the decentralized finance space? Is Cardano a good investment in 2022 and beyond? Will Cardano double in price due to DeFi in the near future?
Most importantly, for new traders and investors - what are the pros and cons that can help answer the question: Should I buy Cardano?
Contents:
Where Can I Buy Cardano (ADA)?
Price Prediction of Cardano (ADA)
The Bottom Line: Should You Buy Cardano (ADA)?
Cardano (ADA) At A Glance
You may have seen Cardano on financial news outlets with several price forecasts by analysts. Unfortunately, you may not know much about the cryptocurrency or its blockchain projects and may have had reservations as to what Cardano is, who is the founder of Cardano and what is the primary purpose of Cardano and its native coin, ADA?
This section of the article takes a closer look at the beginning of the blockchain project as well as its novel token (ADA), roadmap accomplishments of Cardano and the performance of ADA from its inception on cryptocurrency exchanges to the time of writing this piece.
It also looks at the future prospects of the blockchain project in terms of decentralized protocols or applications (DAPPS) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). More importantly, why doesn’t Cardano have a single strong use case would be thoroughly assessed.
Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson in 2015, several months after he co-founded and then left Ethereum due to disagreements on how the project should be maintained.
Charles Hoskinson opted for a centralized approach to the decentralized project but Vitalik Buterin decided against that and maintained the project as decentralized throughout all its phases.
Hoskinson met a former associate at Ethereum (ETH), Jeremy Wood, and together they had a great idea on how to rival Ethereum.
Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK) as an engineering company which uses cryptography to build blockchains and cryptocurrencies for corporations, government entities and academic institutions was formed in the process. The flagship project of IOHK is Cardano and its novel token is ADA, which started trading in October 2017.
There are three entities which work together to see the effective functioning of the Cardano platform, and they are Cardano Foundation, Emurgo and Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK).
What is Cardano?
Cardano is a technological platform through its blockchain and a cryptocurrency through its novel token (ADA) which aids in the running of financial applications which are employed by business organizations as well as individuals globally.
A team of engineers from all around the world designed the blockchain project of Cardano which can be implemented easily on aerospace and banking applications (mission-critical systems).
This is the main reason why blockchain experts have touted it as the first peer-reviewed decentralized blockchain solution.
Cardano has an aim of solving all the problems related to blockchain technology and its adoption by individuals and business organizations such as scalability, sustainability and interoperability.
What Is The Purpose of ADA?
ADA, through the use of cryptography serves as a primary purpose of sending and receiving money digitally in a relatively faster and easier way.
How Many Cardano (ADA) Coins Are In Circulation?
Cardano has a circulating supply of 34.45B ADA which represents 77% from a total supply of 45,000,000,000.
Where Does Cardano Operate?
The United States of America was where Cardano was conceived but the development of the project is practically supervised by the Cardano Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, Europe.
Cardano’s (ADA) Performance from 2017 to Date
ADA, unlike other cryptocurrencies, started trading with a huge volume on its first trading day on 1st October 2017 which stood at $56,765,624. It closed the day with a price of $0.026 as per data retrieved from CoinTelegraph.
Since its first trading day, Cardano has seen a meteoric rise and some bearish declines in the years which followed. ADA has along the way been tagged by several analysts as a ghost chain performing miracles on the charts since its rally has been based on “what may happen in the future”.
Competitors, such as Bitcoin (BTC), enjoy its first-mover advantage as a transactional cryptocurrency and store of value (digital gold), while Ethereum (ETH), Tron (TRX), EOS.io (EOS) and Flow (FLOW) provide decentralized finance applications to back their spike in price.
Additionally, Ripple (XRP) and Stellar Lumens (XLM) serve as cross-border payment solutions, helping several centralized financial systems work together globally. Ripple (XRP) and Stellar Lumens (XLM) have even gone on to experiment with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), with the latter forging a partnership with Ukraine to build the country’s first digital currency.
Despite the naysayers, Charles Hoskinson has followed the roadmap of Cardano to the letter with each upgrade announced and completed as planned. This has seen ADA exceed numerous expectations set forth by credible analysts and experts across several financial and more importantly, cryptocurrency news outlets.
Byron Upgrade
The first version of Cardano was shipped out in September 2017 and this brought about the roadmap called BYRON. This allowed users for the first time to buy and sell ADA as a cryptocurrency on a federated network which runs the Ouroboros Consensus Protocol (OCP). This era saw the delivery of Input-Output Hong Kong’s (IOHK) official desktop wallet for ADA, the Daedalus wallet.
The main essence of the BYRON roadmap was to build a community of crypto enthusiasts who would get involved in the creation and continuous upgrade of the blockchain.
After starting on the 1st October 2018 on a strong note, ADA increased substantially due to the crypto boom of 2017 led by parent crypto (BTC) which crossed $20,000 for the first time. ADA ended up closing on the 31st of December 2017 with a price of $0.702 (ADA returned 2,600% for investors).
With such huge gains, Cardano (ADA) was predicted as the next golden goose investors should watch out for in the coming years.
2018 also saw Japan follow China into banning cryptocurrencies and this led to a bearish outlook for the cryptocurrency market. Cardano plummeted in 2018 and overall, ADA lost 94% of its price.
Many analysts started asking questions about the future of Cardano since its upgrades did not take effect as planned. With that said, founder Charles Hoskinson remained resolute and decided to take time and create a fully functioning system.
As a result, many new and experienced investors decided to keep faith in the crypto trading asset and buy the dips from 2018. Despite the interest shown by new investors and fans of the crypto, it did not save Cardano’s price. ADA closed 2019 at $0.034 (24.4444% decrease in price).
Shelly Upgrade
The SHELLEY era followed and was primarily centred on decentralizing the network. The main purpose of Shelly was to achieve a smooth, low-risk transition without any interruptions. During this era, authority on the validation of nodes shifted towards the Cardano Community.
This era also brought a delegation and incentive scheme and this drove stake pools and community adoption. This scheme allowed and encouraged users to delegate their stake pools on community run network nodes and be rewarded for honest participation in the network.
At the end of Shelley, the platform became more decentralized (50 to 100 times), set the stage for a fully distributed network and brought forth a new application ecosystem.
The upgrade was completed on 29th July 2020. ADA responded well to the Shelley update by finishing the year with a 417% increase in price at $0.176.
Mary Upgrade
The year 2021 was a great year for ADA having seen the digital trading asset cross the $1 price mark and even hit $1.56 as its all-time high. This was achieved by a new upgrade called MARY. This upgrade came into effect on 1st March 2021.
With the introduction of the Mary upgrade, Cardano became a multi-asset network which is similar to Ethereum (ETH) but comes with advantages. Some of these advantages include enabling users to create tokens which will lead to new features and result in new use cases.
According to Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), “The protocol’s developers and users can transact with tokens, but without the need for smart contracts. This means sending a token on Cardano’s Network won’t be more expensive than sending its native token ADA (unlike Ethereum (ETH)”.
Aside from this, was announced that FD7 Ventures (a cryptocurrency fund in Dubai) completed a $380 million purchase of Cardano (ADA) on 4th March 2021.
Prakash Chand, managing partner of FD7 Ventures, pointed out that “the price of Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) could rise to approximately 20X within the next 2-3 years”.
FD7 Ventures has other investments in Polkadot (DOT) and Bitcoin (BTC) and decided to make this purchase due to the huge potential of Cardano (ADA) in the market.
Goguen Upgrade
In September 2021 The Alozo Hard Fork, part of the Goguen phase, rolled out. The upgrade allows developers to create and deploy smart contracts on the Cardano mainnnet. This boosted Cardano's price to its new all-time high.
Currently, ADA has a price of around $0.32 and market capitalization of $11 billion and has so far returned more than 1386% from the time of its trading launch.
Despite this performance, what are the pros and cons of investing in Cardano in the near future?
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
Pros Of Buying Cardano (ADA)
What drives Cardano price, what are the pros of purchasing the crypto trading asset?
✅ Cardano Thrives On Diversity through Its Blockchain Solutions
While Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin (BTC), Dash (DASH) and Dogecoin (DOGE) primarily serve as digital currency for transactions, Cardano is a cryptocurrency as well as technology.
Cardano is providing technological benefits through blockchain for countries in Africa through its official commercial arm EMURGO. As part of Cardano’s Africa Strategy, the project has liaison with government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as start-ups that will help drive the adoption of Cardano’s technological solutions to everyday users and businesses in Africa.
Cardano has two main goals in Africa and they are, “Engage with local stakeholders in delivering projects which solve real issues in the market and train and educate local developers to create solutions for local problems”. Cardano signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the government of Ethiopia to train and hire junior software developers as well as employ Cardano’s technology in its agriculture sector.
Coffee is the largest export of Ethiopia and Cardano will utilize smart contracts to motivate farmers to employ productive farming practices. This would help Ethiopia’s economy and, in the process, provide more liquidity to Cardano through the use of ADA as the transactional currency.
In February 2021, Cardano announced that four more countries will be added to the Africa Strategy Project and they are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania.
Aside from this, another key achievement of EMURGO is the launch of Yoroi wallet. Yoroi is available on Google Play Store and Apple Store which are accessible to smartphone users across Africa. Yoroi is a light wallet on the Cardano blockchain and provides users with a fast, simple and secure access to Cardano’s cryptocurrency, ADA. Yoroi can become Charles Hoskinson’s innovations’ gateway into Africa as citizens can use ADA as a transactional currency as well as a store of value.
Alonzo Upgrade
The Alonzo upgrade’s full mainnet launch was September 2021 and this feature allows users to deploy decentralized applications (DAPPS) on Cardano. ALONZO is an essential feature of GOGUEN.
Under the GOGUEN era, Cardano will become extremely accessible to wider audiences. This means that business and financial experts without any technical knowledge about blockchain will be able to create smart contracts.
The fourth and fifth steps are BASHO (scaling) and VOLTAIRE (governance). Once all these are achieved, Cardano will be better suited to create DAPPS which would compete with Ethereum and other smart chains and this will contribute to the real valuation of ADAs price in the future.
✅ Cardano Has a Much Larger Audience
Digital assets are not created to be hidden. It has a primary purpose of reaching more people and providing them with the solutions they need. When ADA first appeared on cryptocurrency exchanges, it was relatively unknown. It has so far gone on to be listed on all the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
Trading on such cryptocurrency exchanges is not a golden ticket to an improved price valuation but it helps expose a digital asset to new and experienced traders and investors to consider it for addition to their portfolios.
When Cardano’s blockchain reaches full functionality, buying ADA will bring no stress to prospective investors. High volumes mean there is confidence in the asset and this will have reflection in the price of ADA.
✅ Scalability Gives It Competitive Advantage In Terms of Adoption
Cardano (ADA) uses “OUROBOROS”. As part of the proof-of-stake blockchain consensus protocol family, this algorithm can run both permissioned and permissionless blockchains.
With this, the Cardano Settlement Layer (CSL) holds the novel token, ADA, which keeps track of transactions and mirrors Bitcoin (BTC). Cardano Computation Layer (CCL) is the second layer which enables smart contracts and applications to run on the network which mirrors Ethereum. Evidently, in terms of transaction speed, Cardano (ADA) processes 1,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Due to upgrades, Cardano will process more transactions than the mere one thousand numerous blockchains are used to processing. Some of such upgrades include the layer 2 solution, HYDRA.
HYDRA will boost the network of Cardano in terms of scalability which will topple the current proof-of-stake algorithm (Ethereum) currently employed on its Ethereum 2.0 platform.
HYDRA will see Cardano process over one million transactions per second (TPS) compared to the 100,000 transactions per second feature of Ethereum 2.0.
After full functionality, Cardano’s blockchain will have some form of advantage over other smart contracts blockchains due to its unique system and its features of scalability, interoperability and sustainability.
Evidently, Ben Goertzel, a renowned artificial intelligence expert and founder of SingularityNET, has pointed out that their speed issues are directly related to it running as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum’s blockchain, which has put his project into a situation where they are considering other blockchain solutions.
Alex Mashinsky, CEO of CELSIUS (a crypto lending platform) has said that gas fees on Ethereum’s blockchain are too high. He further added that his team is tired of forking out $2.5 million annually in transaction fees and may consider other options such as Cardano which offers relatively smaller fees through its novel token ADA.
✅ Cardano Is Decentralized but Centralized
The primary reason why Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson left Ethereum was because of administrative issues NOT on creative solutions. As cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies gain more attention and acceptance in the mainstream, several regulatory bodies would respond with compliance issues.
Additionally, some may choose to offer central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as we have seen in China, Sweden and trials in the United States government.
The vision of Charles Hoskinson may finally pay off when several crypto projects fail to meet the standards of regulatory bodies.
Suppose Ethiopia decides to create a central bank digital currency (CBDC), as a result of its partnership with Cardano, Cardano will have a competitive advantage with regards to the creation of CBDCs on the African continent. This makes Cardano censorship resistant and a crypto asset which is poised to survive all the challenges the whole decentralized finance space may face in the near future.
Read Also: The 5 Best Ways to Buy Cardano (ADA)
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
Cons Of Buying Cardano (ADA)
Cardano looks like a good prospect without strong use cases with mere accomplishments of roadmaps in the form of upgrades. Though Cardano has great potential to provide software solutions, it does not mean it does not have its pitfalls.
Let us take a look into some of the cons of purchasing Cardano.
❌ Cardano Faces Infinite Competition from other Altcoins
Crypto projects such as Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC) and Dash (DASH) are not the primary competitors of Cardano (ADA), although they are alternative coins. ADA’s main competitors are the blockchains which not only use smart contracts but have hundreds of decentralized protocols and applications on the market raking in millions of volumes daily.
Ethereum (ETH) is the main rival of Cardano (ADA) being dominant in the DeFi space and in terms of the adoption of blockchain.
Ethereum is one among many (Tron, EOS.io, Tezos, Flow, NEO, etc.) and they all have a use case that helps drive their decision making in terms of how future products should be designed.
Ethereum and Tron continue to form new partnerships and their use cases keep rising, bringing in trust and long-term confidence on the part of investors.
This means that partnerships being formed by the founder of Cardano must provide unique decentralized applications. These DAPPS must command the strongest use cases which would boost the use of ADA on its platform and contribute to the overall valuation of the asset.
While Cardano continues to roll out upgrades, it does not have a single use case. Until it does and achieves full functionality, no single expert or analyst can forecast a clear price valuation for the digital trading asset.
Where Can I Buy Cardano (ADA)?
There are several cryptocurrency exchanges as well as brokerages which list ADA as tradable token. After extensive research, if Cardano fits into the asset with the future potential you crave for, then you can head to eToro and make your first purchase of ADA.
The first step is to SIGN UP.
The second step is to go through a VERIFICATION PROCESS. You will need to upload a government-issued identification card. It must include your full name, date of birth, signature and date of expiry.
The third step is to DEPOSIT FUNDS (GBP, EUR or USD).
The fourth step is NAVIGATE to ADA to purchase your first ADA coins which will be processed and added to your account.
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
Price Prediction Of Cardano (ADA): What Are Analysts Forecasting For The Price Of Cardano?
There are great forecasts with bullish sentiments and then not-so-great forecasts with bearish sentiments. Let us find out what experts at the various online financial news and prediction portals have in store for ADA.
FX Leaders foresees Cardano (ADA) trading in the price range of $3 up to $4 in one year due to the development of Voltaire (this will provide the final pieces required for the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system), favourable technical indicators which points to an uptrend, crypto crackdown and ERC20 token converter.
Coinpedia foresees ADA price to reach as high as $1.1308 in 2023. The experts also expect that "If Cardano successfully flags off some projects, collaborations, and new updates in smart contracts. The ADA price might strike a maximum of $3.4952 by the end of 2025.".
Experts at Prime XBT foresee that ADA could surpass the $1 price by the end of 2023 and after that maintain its bullishness and trade at $2.5 by the end of 2025.
Previsioni Bitcoin foresees Cardano reaching $1.25 in 2023.
Digital Coin Price predicts the price of Cardano (ADA) to reach $0.83 by the end of 2023, $1.17 in 2024 and $1.47 in 2025.
Cardano Price Prediction 2030
According to Digital Coin Price, by 2030, Cardano (ADA) will reach $4.6 mark. In contrast, Coin Price Forecast expects Cardano (ADA) will have a price of $0.72 by the end of the year, 2030.
Read More: Cardano Price Prediction Forecast
The Bottom Line: Should You Buy Cardano (ADA)?
According to predictions, Cardano ADA is worth buying. Most Cardano price forecasts suggest that the crypto asset can expect to see significant growth over the coming years. Leading analysts vary wildly on their forecasts - but if even the most conservative predictions pan out, anyone who chooses to buy Cardano could see decent returns.
Cardano has a great future and can join the race of blockchains which aims to take the current web 2.0 to web 3.0.
In the last week of March 2021, founder Charles Hoskinson made it known that several developers have approached Cardano with Non-fungible token (NFT) creation proposals which are still under consideration which will see the developers port their creations to the Cardano Network.
With more partnerships being forged in developing economies, Cardano will have a first-mover advantage when those countries decide to resort to the creation of central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Ultimately, most platforms predict steady growth for Cardano and as such it represents one of the more reliable investments in what is a very unpredictable market. Cardano may well prove to be an excellent investment over both the short term and long term.
eToro – Best Platform To Buy Cardano
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Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
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How To Make (Or Lose) Money With Cardano (ADA)?
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