Finder.com has predicted that Cardano will be the third largest cryptocurrency by the end of the year, according to the website’s new monthly service – the Cryptocurrency Predictions Survey.

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Finder is a price comparison website which advises on decisions such as credit card selection, real estate purchases and health insurance, according to its website. Also according to its website, it was founded in 2006, operates in 10 countries, and has 175 employees that drink 800+ beers a week (hopefully between them).

The survey is really a panel of four experts who have sat in discussion on the subject of cryptocurrency and come to a conclusion as to the direction of 8 major coins – Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Stellar Lumens, and Verge.

The panellists

The panellists are Clayton Daniel, former tax accountant and financial adviser and founder of Sprout Superannuation; Michael Dunworth, CEO of blockchain-based money transfer service Wyre Inc.; Fred Schebesta, co-founder of Finder, described on the Finder website as an award-winning entrepreneur; and Joseph Raczynski, a professional “Technologist/Futurist”. Meaning that he is a technology consultant specialising in AI, cybersecurity and legal technology. Raczynski’s predictions for six of the eight coins was the same: “If heavy regulation comes, that will kill this for a good three to six months.”

The panellists have put together a fairly thorough analysis, predicting both the market cap and price of all the coins on both the first day of February and the last day of December.

The panel has predicted that Cardano’s token, ADA, is going to see the greatest rise in value (8623.99%) and end up with the third largest market cap by the end of the year, after Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. The second largest rise will be seen by the Stellar Lumens token, XLM, with 1269.93%.

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All other coins are predicted to rise in value by between 24.14% and 119.91%, with the exception of Verge which they expect to drop by 37.99%.

Cardano

Zug-based Cardano is an open-source, proof-of-stake based blockchain which was launched in September 2017. It is built in two layers – the settlement layer, which handles basic blockchain computations with its native token ADA, and the computing layer which processes smart contracts and decentralised applications.

According to its website, Cardano is the first blockchain “developed from a scientific philosophy, and the only one to be designed and built by a global team of leading academics and engineers”, and its major innovation is “that it will balance the needs of users with those of regulators, and in doing so combine privacy with regulation”.

We last reported on Cardano a few days ago when it listed ADA futures on BitMEX.

Interestingly, the panellists’ comments on Cardano (of which there are only two) don’t seem too positive. One says: “Cardano is a third-generation cryptocurrency with a team that gives weekly updates. Apparently, that’s all you need in this world to be worth multiple billions of dollars — weekly updates — as that’s all they currently have.”

It currently has a market cap of over 19 billion USD, according to Coinmarketcap. Given that it is only about 4 months old, that would be extremely impressive were we not talking about a cryptocurrency – such gains seem to have become rather commonplace nowadays.

Regarding Verge, one panellist commented on the McAfee coins-for-cash controversy, which we covered in December. As I said at the time, if McAfee is actually pumping coins for payment, it is inevitably going to backfire. Unluckily for Verge, it could possibly have been caught up in the controversy regardless of its veracity.