Cardano completed some stages, and there are ongoing stages nowadays. So let’s merge the most recent updates.

The next few weeks are going to be very exciting for cryptocurrency. That’s because some of the largest crypto projects will be meeting major milestones, which could have a massive impact on the crypto market.

Cardano is one of these crypto projects, and its upcoming smart contract update could become one of the most important developments this industry has seen to date. Cardano’s smart contract capabilities have been in the works for years, and it looks like we could be in the final stretch of this revolutionary rollout.

Today, I’m going to give you a quick recap of Cardano, bring you up to speed about what the project has been up to lately, tell you everything you need to know about its upcoming smart contracts, and give you my estimate on how high I think ADA could go as a consequence.

There are two things you need to know about. First, I hold Cardano’s ADA as part of my personal cryptocurrency portfolio. Second, I can’t tell you what to do with your cash or crypto. Everything in this post is just for your info.

Disclaimer: All the content converted from Coin Bureau’s “Cardano: You CANT Ignore ADA!! Latest Updates” video after getting the whole permissions.

Cardano Recap

If you’re a bit rusty on Cardano, here’s more or less what you need to know. Cardano was founded in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, and Cardano’s mainnet went live in the fall of 2017.Cardano (ADA): 15 Things You Need To KnowOne of the Ethereum killer major projects aims to grow its ecosystem and enter many markets during 2021. So, I…medium.com

The Swiss-based Cardano Foundation oversees the development of Cardano and its commission’s to companies to do the development work.

The first is a for-profit software company called Emurgo, and the second is a for-profit software company called Input Output Hong Kong or IOHK, which has Charles as its CEO.

Blank Ethereum Cardano is a smart contract cryptocurrency, which seeks to be the backbone of the future of finance. However, unlike Ethereum, Cardano does not have smart contracts yet because it prioritizes research over practice.

Every technology on Cardano has been peer-reviewed and is rigorously battle-tested behind the scenes before being implemented.

This includes the Cardano blockchain’s unique dual-layer architecture, which keeps token balances in the settlement layer, and smart contract operations in the computation layer.

Cardano uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism dubbed Ouroboros, which allows it to process around 300 transactions per second.

Cardano’s native ADA coin has a maximum supply of 45 billion. ADA is used for staking and paying for its subzero transaction fees. Any native asset, aka token created on the Cardano blockchain, can technically be used to pay transaction fees thanks to Cardano’s Novel Babel fees mechanism.

Cardona staking rewards are currently around 4.5% per year with no lock-up or unlock period, and the minimum stake is just 1 ADA.

Cardona’s flexible staking and reliable rewards combined with its Clever K parameter have led to the creation of nearly 3,000 staking pools. This makes Cardano one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies on the market.

Cardano also has the largest amount of crypto staked by dollar value now.

I last covered Cardano back in March, and I suggest you go back and read that post if you haven’t already. It’s below.Cardano: ADA Run Could Just Be Beginning.One of the major projects of the crypto market run by updating all the systems and enhance market share. Let’s deep…medium.com

Cardano Updates Part 1

Not long after I last covered Cardano, Coinbase finally announced that they would be listing ADA.

I suspect that this had something to do with the Cardano Foundation, Emergo, and IOHK actively participating as validator nodes on the Cardano blockchain.

This came to an end shortly after the Coinbase listing, which means the Cardano is now fully decentralized according to the arbitrary crypto regulations in the United States.

As a cherry on top, Cardano was also a to the Bloomberg Terminal, a tool used by professional traders.

In April, IOHK secured a partnership with the Ethiopian government to track the country’s performance and educational credentials of 5 million students and teachers.

This will involve IOHK’s at Atala Prism, a decentralized digital identity solution built on the Cardano blockchain.

I detailed this partnership in my weekly crypto review shortly after it was announced, and back then, I wondered how much of an effect this partnership could have on ADA.

Although this effect is still not entirely clear, Charles Hoskinson mentioned in a recent AMA that they had only just begun hiring people to deliver on the Ethiopia partnership. This means it will be months, if not years, before we see any impact on the price of ADA. Assuming ADA is even part of that equation.

Also, in April, the University of Wyoming announced that it would be staking cryptocurrencies for additional funding.

Though its announcement did not specify which cryptocurrencies it would be staking, many suspected Cardano would be on that list because of the institutions’ close relationship with the project.

Low and behold, the University of Wyoming is now running staking pools for the Cardano blockchain.

Cardano Updates Part 2

Cardano’s bullish momentum continued into May when it was added to the popular mobile banking app Revolut.

Not only that, but the environmental concerns about proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, which contributed to the market Fall Out in mid-May, caused many institutional investors to move their money into ADA.

In June, Cardano secured some significant partnerships and integrations. The first was Cardano’s partnership with Nervos Network to create a cross-chain bridge between both blockchains.

The second was Cardano’s partnership with the Orion Protocol, hoping to make all decentralized applications across all cryptocurrency blockchains accessible from a single terminal.

The third was Cardano’s integration with the Nexo crypto lending and borrowing platform, with ADA added to its list of supported currencies.

Some of Cardano’s most exciting updates have just taken place in the last few weeks. At the start of July, Grayscale announced adding ADA to its large-cap digital fund. Cardano is currently the third-largest asset in the 400 million dollar fund with a 4% allocation.

IOHK partnered with the Wolfram blockchain lab to sell Cardona-based NFTs on Wolfram’s live mining platform a few weeks later.

Charles Hoskinson also gave the crypto community a sneak peek of Cardano’s upcoming stable coin called Djed.

To paraphrase Charles’s quote, “Djed behaves like an autonomous bank that buys and sells stable coins within a certain price range. It is also crypto-backed as this bank keeps a volatile cryptocurrency in its reserve.”

If this flew over your head, don’t take it personally. Charles said the details of Djed are still being hammered out, and I am having a hard time conceptualizing how exactly this stable coin is going to work.

Charles Hoskinson Under Fire

On that note, if you’ve been watching Charles is Channel on YouTube lately, you’ve probably noticed that his recent videos have received an uncanny number of dislikes.

This is because a popular Indian YouTuber called Asghar Techie was hacked by scammers, who created a Cardano giveaway scam Livestream featuring Charles Hoskinson himself.

Thousands of Asghar fans have blamed Charles for the hack, and some of them have even gone as far as saying that Charles will be the quote in threat if he does not return the YouTube channel to Ashgar.

If these face followers are taking the time to read my post about common cryptocurrency scams, they would know that Charles is not to blame. This is just the typical MO of scam streamers. Hack a popular account, purge all the information on the account, rebranded to the cryptocurrency you are trying to collect, run a stream featuring the founder with a text promising to double or triple any money sent to the QR-code wallet address, and boom profit.

Many prominent people in the crypto community have reached out to YouTube to prevent these scam streams. But the way they’ve done it makes this impossible to do. So the only solution is for popular YouTubers to keep their login credentials safe, which is why I keep mine under lock and key.

Anyway, Charles revealed a few other interesting things in his recent AMA. One of these was that he’d spoken with politicians in the Philippines. This could mean that IOHK is working to secure another public partnership. But, again, it’s more likely that Emergo will pain the deal given that it’s focused on the Asian market.

In another video a few days later, Charles announced the beginning of the end of Cardano’s smart contract roadmap. So, let’s take a closer look at where we are now and what comes next.

Cardano Smart Contract’s Alonzo Roadmap

Those familiar with the Cardano roadmap will know that we are at the tail end of the Goguen era, which centers around smart contract functionality.

Goguen has a roadmap of its own, and to my understanding, it features too many hard forks of the Cardano blockchain.

The first was the Mary Hard Fork, which introduced Cardano’s native assets back in March.

The second is the Alonzo Hard Fork which will introduce Cardano’s smart contract functionality. This is scheduled to take place in early to mid-September, possibly the end of August.

If this roadmap inception weren’t enough, you’d be happy to know that Alonzo has a roadmap of its own consisting of different colored stages.

The first age is Alonzo Blue, which is like a close test net, which will feature fewer than 50 pre-selected users and only the most basic smart contract transactions.

The second stage is Alonzo White, which will feature a slightly more open test net with a few hundred pre-selected users that can play with full-featured decentralized applications.

The third stage is Alonzo Purple, and that’s when the test net goes public with thousands of users, hundreds of decentralized applications, and integrations with the Cardano Blockchain Explorer.

Now, Alonzo Purple is further divided into light purple and dark purple, and I honestly don’t know where the differences between these stages are.

In any case, according to the fine folks at IOHK, once Alonzo Purple is complete smart contracts will be live on the Cardano main net within a month.

Alonzo Red and Black will stress test Cardano’s smart contract scalability and stability and address any last-minute bugs not caught in the previous colors in preparation for launch.

If you’re wondering where we are now, we seem to have just begun Alonzo Purple, or at least this is what I was able to gather from IOHK’s updates during the recent Cardano 360 event.

We’ll know for sure when IOHK releases their next mid-month update in about a week.

The good news is that Alonzo is advancing right on schedule. Given that Charles announced the beginning of Alonzo at the end of May, the 90-day timeline by IOHK suggests the end of August is possible. And now for the big question, what will all these developments do for ADA?

ADA Cryptocurrency Price Analysis

In contrast to just about every cryptocurrency on the market, ADA has done surprisingly well during the recent downturn, so much so that some people are jokingly calling ADA a stable coin.

That’s because ADA has been hovering just above the dollar range ever since February, when the Mary Hard Fork date was confirmed.

ADA rallied with the rest of the market in mid-May and crashed along with it, though not nearly to the same degree. I suspect that ADA’s resiliency is due to the insane amount of bullish news coming out about Cardano every other week.

ADA also has some seriously robust tokenomics. For example, only 16.7% of its initial supply was allocated to the companies behind Cardano, with the remainder being sold to retail investors.

All the ADA earmarked to these parties finished vesting back in 2019. So the only new supply coming in is being created by staking rewards. Now, this number is capped at ADA’s maximum supply. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but let’s not go there this time.

Best of all, more than 70% of ADA’s circulating supply is being staked, which means that there is very little of it changing hands-on exchanges at any given time.

That sort of supply squeeze means it’s easier for ADA to rally, and its low sticker price relative to other popular cryptocurrencies makes ADA and attractive to retail investors who have no idea what a market cap is.

Even though ADA has a market cap, it has an equally massive community riding a wave of bullish momentum towards Cardano’s smart contract launch.

We’re also waiting for Grayscale to roll out that Cardano Trust it filed for back in January, and I bet that announcement will come out at the end of August or early September.

I could see ADA reaching four to five dollars by the end of the year, assuming Bitcoin sees another slingshot to the upside in September or October, which is likely, in my opinion.

If this scenario does play out, it seems that Charles Hoskinson will become one of the richest crypto holders out there.

Charles Hoskinson ADA Holdings

When researching my Ethereum versus Cardano post, I tried and failed to figure out how much a de IOHK was holding.

IOHK had initially been given nearly 2.5 billion ADA, and I suspect a substantial chunk of that was given to Charles. The exact figure apparently doesn’t exist, but Charles holds between 1 and 2 billion ADA.

This is because Charles noted in an AMA that he briefly became a billionaire during the last bull market and that he became a billionaire again earlier this year. In both cases, ADA crossed the 1 dollar threshold.

In his most recent AMA, Charles revealed that his net worth is currently 2.5 billion dollars, which would suggest that he holds more than 1 billion ADA but fewer than 2 billion ADA.

A substantial chunk of Of Charles’s net worth likely consists of other assets he has purchased along with his stake in IOHK and any other companies affiliated with Cardona.

Most importantly, it’s extremely unlikely that Charles will sell any of his ADA anytime soon. That’s because staking ADA yields a 4.5% annual return when you have a billion ADA that’s 40 million dollars of passive income per year.

Now, if you guys are interested in learning about other methods of passive crypto income, I have a dedicated post all about that below Medium post.Top Staking Coins With Most Potential In 2021Passive income is one of the most strong tools of rich people. In the crypto market, you need to know some popular…medium.com

Cardano Smart Contract Concerns

Before I wrap things up, I want to touch on a few concerns quickly. First, I have about Cardano’s upcoming smart contract ecosystem.

For starters, there still doesn’t seem to be a comprehensive list of crypto projects deploying on the Cardano blockchain. Now, this might be because most of Cardano’s decentralized applications are being created in-house via Project Catalyst.

As a quick recap, Project Catalyst was one of the first steps towards Cardano’s decentralized governance. It allows a hold to vote on projects they want to see on the Cardano blockchain, and a portion of community treasury funds are used to finance the most promising candidates.

They have been dozens of deaths that have received funding through Project Catalyst. Many of these will be participating in Cardano’s smart contract testers.

The only problem is that none of their names are recognizable, and this means they will not bring any additional interest outside of the Cardano community. This brings me to another concern.

Earlier I mentioned that Cardano had partnered with Nervos Network to create a cross-chain bridge. Besides the fact that Nervos seems to have very close ties to the Chinese government. Cardano’s bridge to Nervos is the only one it has.

As many of you have noticed, almost every other smart contract cryptocurrency has taken pains to become interoperable with Ethereum to try and siphon some of that liquidity to their protocols.

Now while it’s true that Cardano probably doesn’t need the liquidity, it definitely needs interoperability if it wants to succeed in a competitive smart contract crypto market.

In Cardano’s defense, its lack of bridges probably comes from its lack of smart contracts. These are required to ensure trustless transfers between cryptocurrency blockchains.

It also doesn’t help the Cardano is written in a different coding language to most cryptocurrency blockchains.

Now luckily, there are solutions in the works for many of these issues and shortcomings. I know that once those smart contracts go live, these pain points will become a top priority. What happens after? That could change the crypto world forever.

Conclusion

Cardano is a timeless classic. But, as someone who’s followed the project for years, I can tell you that all the updates I discussed today have been a long time coming.

Whether it’s protocol developments, partnerships, or integrations, the years of hard work put in by IOHK, Emergo, and the Cardano Foundation are starting to come to an for. The craziest part is that this is just the beginning for Cardano. This is as terrifying as it is exciting because so much is riding on a successful smart contract rollout. Expectations are very high. If they’re not met, it could spell disaster for the project in the short term.

Now, this would make for a convenient opportunity to buy the dip, which I think Charles has been doing since ADA began circulating. This is the only thing that would explain why he has so much ADA today because even though he probably did get a lot of ADA through IOHK, there’s no way he received most of that allocation.

Now, as much as people tend to hate on Charles, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. But, I suppose, that’s an easy thing to do when you’re making over 40 million dollars per year in passive income by staking ADA.

Now, I’m nowhere close to having enough ADA to do something like that, but I bet a few crypto projects in Cardano smart contract ecosystem will bring me closer if I get in early. So I will be keeping my eyes peeled for any promising crypto projects coming out of the Cardano camp, and I strongly suggest you do the same.