Cryptogram - 21OCT2022

Analysis: Cardano | ADA

October 21, 2022

21 October 2022

In this issue

Hello, Even as macroeconomic signals continued to dull the crypto markets this week, more major financial institutions operationalized crypto trading services for their clients, enabling more institutional money to pour into the crypto ecosystem. There is a lot of building happening right now, and focusing on launching new products seems to be the mantra across the board, market jitters notwithstanding. Speaking of building, on this week’s issue, we bring attention to Cardano – one of the earliest major blockchain to employ the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism successfully – and its native token ADA. What are they trying to build, how likely are they to succeed, and should you invest in ADA – we will help you make up your mind on these questions. 

The newsletter is put together by Giottus Crypto Platform and The News Minute’s Brand Studio. You can read all the previous issues of Cryptogram here.

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THE BIG STORY

Analysis: Cardano (ADA)

BASICSCardano is an open-source, publicly-traded crypto network operating a unified cloud platform, with ADA as its native token. Cardano is one of the biggest blockchains to successfully use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, unlike Bitcoin and early-Ethereum that worked on the energy-guzzling proof-of-work mechanism.Cardano prides itself on its strong academic approach to building the network. It ensures that all the technology it develops goes through a process of peer-reviewed research, which increases the chance of potential pitfalls being anticipated in advance.Cardano is one of the most decentralised networks, which means slower development and progress, but that also means much more stability and long-term growth potential. The founders of Cardano are in no hurry, and want to build something which will stand the test of time. Where the founders of Cardano differ with much of their peers who laid the foundation of the crypto ecosystem is that they don’t intend to challenge the existing financial system (like Bitcoin does) but improve on it. The following lines from their whitepaper sums that up pretty well: “The ultimate reality of cryptocurrencies is not that they will disrupt the existing legacy financial systems. Legacy financial systems are always capable of absorbing change and maintaining their formand function. Rather one ought to look to places where it is simply too expensive to deploy the existing banking system, where many live on less than a few dollars a day, have no stable identity andcredit is impossible to find.”On the technical front, Cardano has continued to evolve. The Vasil hard fork in September 2021 allowed the blockchain the capability of having smart contracts, something it was missing to compete amongst the top blockchains in DeFi space. ADA, its native token, surged to more than $3 around this hard fork. Those were euphoric times…

Here’s the full Cardano whitepaper. You can track Cardano blockchain analytics in this Datastudio page.NUMBERS12 Billion USDMarket cap of ADA45 BillionADA tokens in supply3 USDAll-time-high price of ADA token65 Million USDFunding raised for Cardano 400Cardano team members across the world PEOPLE AND ORGANISATION Charles Hoskinson is the co-founder of Cardano and a public face of the ecosystem. He was earlier the co-founder of Ethereum and stepped out to build Cardano in 2015 after a dispute with Vitalik Buterin. Cardano’s focus on research and peer reviewed solutions is unique (and sometimes, time consuming).Jeremy Wood is the other co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Cardano. Cardano team is truly international — there are more than 400 people across 50 countries. The team consists of developers, researchers, supporters, and management.At the moment, network is driven by IOHK, whose headquarters is located in Hong Kong, Input Output Global, and Swiss-based Cardano Foundation.

TOKENOMICS ADA has a max supply of 45 billion tokens, out of which 34 billion are currently in circulation.Cardano distributed vouchers for 25.9 billion ADA in a public token sale from September 2015 to January 2017. Participants could redeem the vouchers for actual ADA through Cardano’s native Daedalus wallet. The three entities supporting Cardano’s development received 5.2 billion ADA following the mining of Cardano’s genesis block. Their allocations were:2.46 billion ADA were allocated to IOHK 2.07 billion ADA were allocated to Emurgo0.648 billion ADA were allocated to the Cardano FoundationADA had a spectacular growth in 2021, going from under $0.2 to over $3 by September. It also briefly became a top 3 cryptocurrency by market cap after Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, post the Vasil hard fork, the token has declined along with the general decline in market. It is currently trading in an accumulation zone at $0.35 a token, down 85% from its all-time-high (ATH). SPECIAL MENTIONSEssentially, Cardano’s market segments are Digital Currency, Cloud and DAOs, but Cardano claims to move beyond and specifically into several sectors like Education, Agriculture and Retail, with solutions like credential verification, counterfeit protection, supply chain tracking, KYC, digital identity verification and maintenance etc. You can read about their use cases here. One of the things which is very unique to Cardano is its Daedalus wallet. No other cryptocurrency uses its own digital wallet. Daedalus, which Cardano uses, is a full node wallet.Final thoughts: this is a project which has long-term growth potential, with high possibility of a few spikes in the coming months. Regardless of the short-term spikes and lows, given the approach of the founders and the team, Cardano has potential to perform well in the distant future. 

Disclaimer: Crypto-asset or cryptocurrency investments are subject to market risks such as volatility and have no guaranteed returns. Please do your own research before investing and seek independent legal/financial advice if you are unsure about the investments.

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  THE TOP FIVE 

Stories from this week you cannot miss

1. 

Flipkart has partnered with Polygon-incubated eDAO

where consumers can discover products in a photorealistic virtual destination and shop on the Flipkart App.

2. 

Mastercard

by acting as a bridge between Paxos, a crypto trading platform, and banks

3. 

With nearly

of Web3 personnel.

4. 

The police department in Firozabad district in Uttar Pradesh

.

5. 

Sachin Tendulkar has

as exclusive digital collectibles.

That’s all we have for this issue, see you next week! 

If you have any questions or feedback for us, write to us at [email protected]. You can check out the previous issues here.

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