Progress Update

Just before the Christmas vacation IOHK announced the upgrade to Cardano version 1.4. IOHK is the engineering company founded by Charles Hoskinson focussing on building the Cardano ecosystem. Apart from that IOHK pursues further projects that are independent from Cardano.

The Cardano 1.4 release brought a solution to the previously present network connection issues. Furthermore, the block storage requirement was substantially reduced which enables users to connect to the network despite having only limited hard drive space available. Additionally, the Daedalus wallet will now be supported by the Linux operating system.

Cardano 1.4 is part of the first of five phases of Cardano which is called Byron. According to Charles Hoskinson there are currently around 160 people working for IOHK. However, IOHK is not the only organization who is active in the development of Cardano. Emurgo, which is a registered company in Japan, is also actively engaged in the development of the Cardano ecosystem. Eventually, there is the Cardano Foundation itself, which is based in Switzerland, and has the mission to drive adoption and grow the Cardano ecosystem.

One of the points of concerns for Cardano investors was how to securely store their ADA assets. ADA is the name of the cryptocurrency on the Cardano platform. Despite an announcement at the beginning of 2018 Ledger hardware wallets do not yet support ADA tokens. However, in Q4 of 2018 Cardano is eventually supported by the Trezor hardware wallet. Ledger and Trezor are the two main hardware wallets that are currently available.

At the end of Q3 2018 Kraken has listed ADA on their exchange and enabled purchasing ADA tokens through fiat currencies, in particular USD and EUR. This represents a significant fiat ADA pair on a major western exchange with high liquidity.

Market Sentiment

During the 2018 bear market Cardano has initially stronger corrected than Ethereum, its fellow smart contract platform. However, since June 2018 the price of Cardano in relation to Ethereum remained mostly stable. Just as almost all of the altcoins Cardano corrected stronger than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the main driver during the 2018 bear market. Cardano community enthusiasts have therefore expressed hopes that Cardano will eventually be able to decouple from Bitcoin and perform differently than the overall market based on the merits of its own platform. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano expects that it will take at least one or two more years until Cardano will perform independently from Bitcoin. Cardano has throughout 2018 mostly ranked among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. At the end of December it fell out of this group. Nevertheless, many community members expect Cardano to clearly rank among the top 10 cryptocurrencies in 2019.

Community Metrics

Despite the difficult market environment engagement on the Cardano subreddit has almost remained stable since March 2018. Among the subreddits that are dedicated to cryptocurrencies r/cardano is the 16th most active subreddit.

The amount of followers on Twitter has constantly increased for Cardano from 80,000 in January 2018 to more than 147,000 in December 2018.

Whereas other cryptocurrencies rely strongly on the founder personality, Charles Hoskinson is leading Cardano without attributing achievements to his own personality. He believes that the community needs to be strong enough to execute without him. However, he still plays a very important role for evangelizing Cardano.

Outlook

Cardano is still at an early stage of its journey and years away from its final implementation. The current phase called Byron is the first of five phases that Cardano will evolve through. The four subsequent phases are called Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire.

Cardano has a particular focus on empowering people in developing countries, especially in Africa. It has the objective to create a financial system based on the blockchain in geographies where a traditional financial system has not yet emerged. In that sense Cardano wants to build a financial operating system for those who do not yet have a financial operating system.

Cardano is conducting research on User Issued Assets, which can be described as tokens that run on top of Cardano. These assets may be compared to Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard. Once this technology is implemented there would also exist the possibility to create a stable coin on top of Cardano.

Disclosure: At PrimeICO we are dedicated to provide leading blockchain intelligence. Our quarterly reports are a new tool to cover recent developments in the leading cryptocurrencies. They are issued on a quarterly basis and cover selected cryptocurrencies among the top 30 coins by market cap.

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