Charles Hoskinson promised hundreds of cryptocurrencies and thousands of dApps a year ago. But he lost the bet.
Cardano (ADA) now bundles a market capitalization of over 40 billion US dollars, and in view of the annual return of over 1,000 percent, even the crypto veterans Bitcoin and Ethereum pale. It is therefore hardly surprising that the impressive performance is increasingly attracting the interest of institutional investors. Just a few days ago, Grayscale, the largest wealth manager for digital assets, put ADA into the Digital Large Cap Fund recorded, a mutual fund for professional investors. The composition is weighted according to shares in the crypto market and represents around 70 percent market participation, which is recalculated every quarter. With just over four percent, Cardano has recently made the third largest share in the portfolio, right behind Bitcoin (67 percent) and Ethereum (25 percent).
Cardano in debt
Nevertheless, the criticism of the project is getting louder. Because the thousands of dApps that Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced somewhat cocky in a tweet a year ago, the “Ethereum killer” is still a long time coming. No wonder: Smart contracts will only find their way into the Cardano blockchain with the next hard fork “Alonzo”. Until then, dApps will remain in short supply in the ADA ecosystem.
And while Hoskinson’s prediction of “hundreds of assets running on Cardano” was to be proved right, it is not exactly evidence of high trade. That counts Cardano network meanwhile a considerable number of over 7,000 tokens. Of these, however, only two make it to over 10,000 transactions a month – Spacecoins and ADAX.
Because the network status quo lags far behind the timetable and self-set goals, the critical voices are gradually increasing. In addition to Coinmetrics founder Nic Carter, who is “not aware of a single popular application that is used on Cardano” and Mike Novogratz, who described ADA investors as a “strange sect”, Mark Cuban is now wondering what the current use of Cardano lies.
Great plans
Unimpressed by the headwind that Cardano is blowing against on Twitter, Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, has set ambitious goals for the next five years. According to this, at least three Fortune 500 companies should hold and use the crypto currency ADA by 2024. Two years later there should be ten companies. An ambitious goal: So far, only two companies from the select group of 500 companies with the highest turnover have invested in cryptocurrencies – Tesla and Square. So far, however, both have only relied on Bitcoin.
In addition, 50 banks are to be connected to the Cardano ecosystem in the course of the coming year. Gregaard also mentioned the magic number of one billion Cardano users targeted by Hoskinson in his presentation as a target. It remains to be seen whether the forecasts can be achieved in this period. First of all, Cardano will have to prove its smart contract capabilities after the hard fork “Alonzo” that will likely hit the network in September.