Cardano (ADA) is one of Ethereum’s self-proclaimed competitors – yet still without a single smart contract – that is enjoying the most hype from the crypto community. With its recent price explosion, more and more holders of its token are seeing their investment become extremely fruitful.
ADA Cryptocurrency Hits Record Highs
August has been an extremely prolific month for investors who have placed money on the ADA token on the Cardano network. Indeed, in the space of a month, its price more than doubled from $1.32 per unit (on August 1) to $2.95 (on August 23). This figure represents a new ATH for Cardano’s token, which had, for the first time, exceeded the $2 mark in mid-May 2021.
Several analysts had already taken a public stand, announcing their enthusiasm for the project. Amy Arnott, portfolio manager for Morningstar had predicted the birth of a “Big Three” composed of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano, as the release of the long-awaited smart contracts on the latter approached.
The insane rise in the price was initially initiated by the deployment of the Mary hard fork last March. This date, considered historic by its founder Charles Hoskinson, had introduced the multi-token on the Cardano platform. This long-awaited feature allowed the network to support other crypto-currencies, in addition to the ADA token, in the same way that Ethereum hosts ETH and various ERC-20s.
Cardano: the factory for millionaires
Faced with the rising price of ADA in recent weeks, more and more holders of the token have seen their investment explode.
As a result, the number of addresses holding more than $1 million in ADA tokens has increased by 173% over that time. The network now has 9,830 addresses holding this amount, up from 3,625 in July, according to information reported by Messari.
At the same time, the number of wallets holding more than $10 million in ADA tokens increased from 504 to nearly 1,000 between July and August.
Cardano now has everything to become a major competitor to other smart contract blockchains, such as Ethereum, the Binance Smart Chain or Polygon… if, indeed, the famous smart contracts end up landing there. Let’s remember that at the end of July, the Alonzo White hard fork was deployed on the testnet finally introducing the sacrosanct smart contracts. A final testnet should be deployed with the Alonzo Purple hard fork, which should mark the last step before the passage on the mainnet.
Once deployed on the mainnet, Cardano will have to catch up in terms of ecosystem. Indeed, Ethereum and its competitors have had plenty of time to evolve theirs, especially through the rise of DeFi and NFT. On the other hand, Cardano has a card to play in terms of security. Indeed, it could well surpass Ethereum if its decentralized applications are less prone to hacks, unlike Ethereum’s DeFi.
