Will Cardano Change DeFi and NFTs Forever?

Cardano a top 3 cryptocurrency, whose market cap exceeds $77 billion, has yet to successfully release a fully tested product to the public.

Despite publishing it’s long-awaited smart contracts rollout on September 12, ADA price drops 10% following Cardano’s long-awaited smart contracts rollout.

So what’s all the hype about…

Cardano announced the completion of its Alonzo hard fork, ushering in its long-awaited smart contract functionality.

“This is where the mission truly begins as we — the whole community — start delivering on the vision we have all been working towards for so long. Building a decentralized system that extends economic identity and opportunity to everyone, everywhere.”

The Alonzo fork enables smart contracts to be written for Cardano using Plutus scripts, which the team describes as “a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell.”

Cardano is a public blockchain that was founded by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson and developed by his research firm IOHK.

Cardano has been touted as a significant mover in the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) sector as they grapple with slower and costlier transaction fees on the leading smart contracts platform Ethereum.

While Cardano pledged to rival Ethereum’s dominance in hosting decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 applications, the project has garnered criticism for failing to deliver smart contract functionality until now despite launching in September 2017.

Outspoken Ethereum maximalist, Anthony Sassano, tweeted: “Seriously 6 years of “peer-reviewed” research and a $90bil+ market cap later and the first dapp on Cardano can’t even do concurrent transaction processing (aka the very thing you need for DeFi).”

Despite its lack of any real progress, the hype for Cardano’s upgrades recently drove its native token ADA into record highs, with ADA rallying 192% from a local low of $1.06 in late July to tag $3.10 on Sept. 3 according to CoinGecko. ADA is also up more than 1,600% since the start of 2021.

Short answer, no idea.

Now that Ethereum supports staking it’s unclear how Cardano is any different.

The only difference I could find from Ethereum is that Cardano developers will have to program smart contracts in Plutus, a Turing-complete smart contract language written in Haskell, a programming language that has been around since 1990 but has yet to see mainstream adoption.

Cardano has marketed it’s smart contracts an essential tool for future DeFi apps and claim their contract language allows developers to run end-to-end tests on their program without leaving the integrated development environment or deploying their code.

However these are very broad and unspecific claims.

To make matters more mysterious, Cardano does not have a white paper. Instead, the Cardano team claims it uses design principles intended to overcome issues faced by other cryptocurrencies such as scalability, interoperability, and regulatory compliance.

Could Cardano be successful? Yes.

The market for smart contracts is so massive, there is bound to be several top players in the world all focusing on their specialty.

Will Cardano overtake Ethereum and rule the blockchain? No

Projects like Solana have already achieved scales of 50,000 transactions per second with insanely low fees. Solana supporting 5X the amount of transactions as Ethereum, Cardano still has a higher market cap than Solana, which supports 5X the amount of transactions as Ethereum.

The Cardano team should still be be commended for developing an impressive blockchain, however they have much work to do before rightfully earning it’s spot as a top 3 blockchain.

Source: https://medium.com/@cormacnchees/will-cardano-change-defi-and-nfts-forever-21929d92f07f?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency