What Makes Cardano Unique ?

Cardano, a public blockchain platform, has been in the news recently. InvestorPlace, a prominent financial publisher, has published multiple articles on Nasdaq and Yahoo! Finance to present its bullishness on Cardano.

Despite its volatile market rate, Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, ADA, has given its investors upto 13x returns this year. Whereas market cap of almost USD 50 Billion makes ADA a prominent currency, an average of 7 transaction per second may not make ADA ready for regular electronic payment. However, with a trend of increasing price, it offers the user an ability to use it as a store of value, aka, an asset.

So, what has brought Cardano to this point, and where would it reach going forward?

Insight on Cardano

Let’s get this information out first – a blockchain platform allows development of blockchain based applications. A platform can either be permission or permissionless (no approval required from an entity to participate in this system). Cardano is a permissionless blockchain platform which competes against platforms like Ethereum, Polkadot or EOS.

What Makes Cardano Stand Out?

While, Cardano incorporates many of the qualities from its competitors (store of value, faster p2p transaction than Bitcoin, smart contracts, etc), it stands out for unique reasons.

1. Proof of Stake Mechanism: Bitcoin uses PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism for mining new coins and recording transactions. On the other hand, Cardano uses Ouroboros which is a secure proof of stake (PoS) protocol. This mechanism enables an energy efficient method to create new blocks. Hence, instead of rewarding miners who have powerful hardware, PoS mechanism rewards those who can build a bigger stake through a private or a third-party pool.
2. Peer-reviewed researched: Led by the founder Charles Hoskinson’s emphasis on scientific scrutiny behind new ideas, Cardano is being built on robust scientific fundamentals. Exploring philosophy, sociology behaviour and game theory; each outcome is achieved by considering minutiae of possibilities. Through tie-up with institutions such as University of Edinburgh, and being open source code, Cardano’s strong fundamentals can be constantly validated.
3. Evidence of Adherence to the Roadmap: The organisation has divided its roadmap into five eras – Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire. Each era is centered around a set of functionalities and will be delivered sequentially. The Cardano team has a history of delivering weekly roadmap status to its users, and is on track to accomplish its roadmap in a timely fashion. This makes it easier for investors to uphold their belief in the system.
4. An Evolving Platform to host Large-Scale, Mission-Critical DApps: Ehtereum may have a headstart with about 2800 Dapps already on its platform. Nonetheless, Cardano is prepping up with its own host of applications to go head to head against Ethereum.

Why Cardano then?

People and institutions are investing in Cardano with a vision. The vision is that of achieving a sustainable future that focusses on people, purpose, technology, research and opportunity. If Cardano continues to deliver on its vision, then the upward journey for ADA may continue to be a reality.