Can Cardano finally take off?

Cardano will become either a great success or a great failure.

Released in 2017, Cardano used to be one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. Over time, however, dreams and hopes surrounding the blockchain started to dissipate, prompted by the lack of meaningful developments on it.

?‍? Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (also co-founder of Ethereum) has been praising Cardano’s development for an academic-style peer reviewed research, which did get people intrigued and hopeful.
Cardano launched staking in summer 2020 and added a smart contract functionality in autumn 2021. However, a year after, it seems there are still too few DApps developed on Cardano to speak about a proper ecosystem. Cardanocube lists some 400 utility Dapps and about the same number of NFT projects, but they are still rather invisible on a wider crypto arena.

? On September 22, Cardano activated the Vasil hard fork, intended to improve the blockchain’s scalability, enhance its programming language Plutus, and improve its security by making it easier to interface with Cardano’s UTXO model.

Yes, Cardano uses an extended UTXO model, unlike most other smart contract platforms that have adopted Ethereum’s account-based model. The main difference between the two is the book-keeping: in blockchains like Ethereum, transactions record follows the accounts (addresses) and their states, while in Bitcoin, the most prominent example of a UTXO blockchain, transaction record follows the coins themselves, their input and output. In Cardano, the transfer of assets is recorder as a directed acyclic graph between addresses.

Now that Ethereum is facing serious doubts as to its centralization and its capacity to resist censorship, book-keeping becomes important: it is much easier to track an address’ activity in an account-based system.

The UTXO system can become one of Cardano’s main selling points, as well as its serious intentions to develop the African crypto ecosystem (Ethiopia, Zanzibar and Burundi have signed partnertships with the company) ?

So far, however, Cardano is struggling to prove its points. The Vasil fork has hardly had any influence on the markets, and the ADA coin is steadily sinking. And while Mr Hoskinson is taking it to Twitter to defend his slow and steady approach, the markets are growing wary.