Johannesburg | Cardano skyrocketed to $2.50 (R38.21) on Friday morning becoming the biggest cryptocurrency to hit record price after the $1 trillion (R15 trillion) market crash that began in May 2021.
As the rest of the cryptocurrency market took a breather, Cardano’s ada extended a stunning weeks-long rally early Friday morning, soaring 18% in a matter of hours as trading volume in the cryptocurrency surged, which last week became the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency, swelled amid anticipation for a coming protocol upgrade duped Alonzo upgrade that could see the protocol being able to allow developers to build smart contracts like on Ethereum.
The Smart contract functionality would allow Cardano to incorporate more applications including the much hyped decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms that allow for automated cryptocurrency lending and trading.
The improvement could allow the protocol to challenge Ethereum, which is currently the second largest cryptocurrency and the leader among blockchains with smart-contract functionality.
What is the Alonzo Upgrade?
The name is a reference to US mathematician Alonzo Church who was one of the forefathers of computer science.
Alonzo is a hard fork that will, once complete, introduce new features to the Cardano network, such as the development of new dApps and DeFi functionality.
The launch of Alonzo has been taking place in multiple phases, with each phase being identified by a color. First it was blue, which was succeeded by Alonzo White and finally it will be Alonzo Purple expected in September this year.
Blockchain Expert Shephard Dube said the Alonzo upgrade will bring about a whole new level of competition among smart contract blockchains.
“Cardano has been the slowest smart contract blockchain to roll out its technology, this is due to the fact that Charles Hoskinson the founder of Cardano prefers a thorough review of each phase of development. Each development has been peer reviewed by academics. This means there is a good chance that Cardano won’t need continuous tweaking like we see on Ethereum.”
“A lot of smart contract blockchains will see an exodus to Cardano once the Alonzo Upgrade is in effect.” said Shephard Dube.
2021 Background
Cardano’s ada skyrocketed in May after billionaire Elon Musk soured on bitcoin and said Tesla would no longer accept the cryptocurrency due to the hefty environmental downside of the massive amounts of electricity used to “mine” new coins. The crypto market crashed and has yet to fully recover, but ada surged to new highs as investors flocked to more environmentally sustainable tokens. Hoskinson has claimed Cardano uses just 6 gigawatt hours of energy annually—not even 0.01% of the 115.85 terawatt hours bitcoin is estimated to use. The token plunged nearly 60% as the broader market collapsed this summer but has since started to outperform bitcoin and ether.
CARDANO ADA GROWTH IN 2021
Ada has skyrocketed 1,300% this year alone, making it the best-performing top five cryptocurrency compared to returns of 1,030% for binance coin, 330% for ether and 59% for bitcoin. However, the token is also highly susceptible to the broader crypto market’s massive volatility. Ada crashed nearly 90% within less than two months in early 2018 as regulatory crypto crackdowns ushered in a years-long bear market for the nascent industry.
