The Future and Cardano
From robust tokenomics, to a vision for world change, Cardano is one of my absolute favorite crypto projects.
To better understand the asset and where it’s heading, I think it’s wise to get to know the founder and driving force behind Cardano, Charles Hoskinson. Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK and founder of Cardano, boasts an incredible resume. Being home schooled, Charles graduated high school at just 15 years of age. By the time most kids go to college, he had a college degree. He was one of the eight original founding members of Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Charles left Ethereum in 2014 due to differences of opinion as to the trajectory and vision for Ethereum. From what I gather in my research and Charles’s own words in his AMA’s (more about those later), this is the story as I see it. Charles is a great mathematician who was working on his Ph.D. when he left school to pursue his crypto interests. As such, he likes things to be very orderly and proven. From Charles own words (c), he wants projects that he works on to be proven to work as well as, to have been peer-reviewed prior to release to the public. By all accounts sage wisdom. The younger Vitalik Buterin seems to have a more cavalier, assertive manner- wanting to get his product to market as quickly as possible and work on it from there. This “first to market” mentality seems to have paid out big in the short term for Vitalik, as Ethereum is the #1 rated altcoin in the world today. But let’s get back to Charles.
Charles’s vision for Cardano was plugging along famously. The asset rose to over $3.10 per coin (g) on September 2nd, 2021 (6 months ago at the time of writing). The word was getting out about the much anticipated and impending “Alonzo Hard Fork”. This is the name given by Cardano to the upgrade which was to bring functionality to smart contracts for Cardano. This means that Cardano would be a platform where developers could build DApps (decentralized applications) and even allow the minting of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) with incredible, unprecedented functionality. The upgrade rolled out without a hitch, and then was followed by a long tangible pause. Crypto is an incredibly complex critter. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, and it can be difficult to get to the truth sometimes. This went doubly so for Cardano at that time. You see, the incorrect assumption building on the street was that once the A.H.F. was rolled out, DApps would instantly pop up on Cardano and its price would “go to the moon” (Charles hates that phrase, as it reduces the fastest growing technology in human history to a “get rich quick” scheme), perhaps even overtaking Ethereum as the #1 altcoin. Here’s an analogy to show why this thinking is flawed. Imagine a highway being built. The assumption was that after the highway way was completed, cities and stores would pop up out of nowhere to drive use and value to the highway. The pretty silly assumption, right? Well, that’s what happened. To make matters even worse, there was another dynamic taking shape that would bring Cardano’s price to its knees. Cardano is built on a language called Haskell, and its smart contracts on a language called Plutus. While these languages are not excessively difficult by reputation, they are functional program languages. This contrasts with Solidity, the native language of Ethereum. Solidity is an object-oriented programming language. Many of the developers for the upcoming DApps for Cardano were Solidity programmers who learned Haskell and Plutus. I know all of that is a little confusing but here is the takeaway point, Ethereum developers were used to programming in a certain way. Cardano DApps require a different way of thinking. So this is what happened… Imagine for a moment, a seven-core Pentium computer chip. Ok, now imagine that a developer made a program for that chip that only utilized one of those seven cores. What effect would that have on the speed of the app? It would be extremely slow, right? As, it is only utilizing 1/7 of the computing power of that chip. So DApps started getting released on Cardano and complaints were rushing in that the DApps are extremely slow. When the developers faced this backlash, they immediately pointed to Cardano as the issue. Charles Hoskinson made attempts to bring the truth to the public, but the damage had been done. Sharp criticism came from the Ethereum community adding insult to injury and creating even more false news. IOHK has since rolled out Project Catalyst and Ideascale to help developers and the Cardano community with education and collaboration.
Where are we now? Cardano has over 3 million user wallets in use and counting. There are over 400+Dapps and programs running on Cardano. With the upcoming integration of Hydra later this year, Cardano will focus on scaling.
My takeaway- Cardano is robustly built and proven safe. I feel that they have been unfairly penalized for issues that were not in their control and as a result, Cardano is grossly undervalued as an asset. DApps such as Sundaeswap exchange (Cardano’s version of Uniswap), are coming on line each day, though seemingly unrewarded in perceived value by the public. I believe that once Cardano starts to gain momentum again, it will be the force to reckon with. The initial momentum seems thus far, elusive. In my next article, I will break down key metrics which will be the markers for Cardano’s rise. I have not even gotten to touch on Cardano’s philanthropic and world-changing innovations. I believe that Cardano is the future of layer one blockchains and functionality. I hope that you’ll check out the Cardano ecosystem. To me, it seems that it is designed to take the lead in altcoin, layer1 solutions for the foreseeable future. I am frankly shocked that its price point is where it is right now considering the tokenomics and fundamentals which have not changed. If you get bored, head over to the IOHK’s main page https://iohk.io/ just to futz with the landing screen. It’s a really cool color explosion that follows your cursor when you move it across the screen. Definitely worth checking out.
(c)- https://www.youtube.com/c/charleshoskinsoncrypto
(g)- https://www.tradingview.com/chart/lBaBkOPl/
https://cardano.ideascale.com/
