The “Ethereum of Japan” is Now the World’s Sixth Largest Digital Currency

On December 16, 2017, ADA coin, almost overnight, appreciated in value quickly to become the sixth largest digital currency in the world, beating out IOTA. Speculators and officials have widely regarded 2017 as the year of cryptocurrencies, and while bitcoin’s 20,000 percent price growth is known to many, other smaller digital currencies have also enjoyed an upward surge. In fact, Litecoin, Ripple, Tron all enjoyed a bull market this year.

Institutional Backing

ADA coin is backed by the Cardano Foundation and saw 95 percent of its initial investor participation from Japan. At the time of writing, each coin is valued at just over $0.51 and while still far away from the hundred and thousand dollar valuations of other digital currencies, its market capitalization has seen sizable growth as well.

Going by that metric, Cardano’s total market cap comes in at just above $13 billion, comfortably inching its way past other highly valued currencies such as IOTA and Dash. According to CoinGecko, the altcoin is ranked ninth overall. This development is, undeniably, quite an impressive feat for a cryptocurrency that the world was mostly unaware of not too long ago.

Cardano’s website highlights that its ADA coin, like most other cryptocurrencies currently in circulation, is an open-source endeavor, based on a decentralized public blockchain. Even though Cardano’s venture into the world of blockchain was first conceived in 2015, it is still very early days for ADA itself.

Charles Hoskinson, who is spearheading the project, also happens to be a co-founder of Ethereum. It perhaps fits then that ADA coin has begun attracting many comparisons to it over other cryptocurrencies.

New Tools of the Trade

The Cardano development team prides itself on being scientifically driven and research-oriented in its approach, as is evident from their website. While that may seem like a bold claim used purely for marketing, it is hard to overlook the new features that ADA coin brings to the table.

For instance, the cryptocurrency’s native Proof-of-Stake (PoS) implementation, Ouroboros, was a result of work carried out by cryptographers from academic institutions around the world and promises to be more robust than other digital currencies that rely on the same protocol.

With an Ethereum-like smart contract platform and its Ouroboros PoS approach, Cardano is attempting to solve current cryptocurrency problems of scaling and lack of proper decentralization. Interestingly, Ethereum is also said to be moving to a PoS implementation at some point in the future, when it will detach from its current Proof-of-Work system.

ADA coin’s ultimate goal is to offer greater flexibility and diversity to adopters wishing to use it as a currency, while still allowing itself to be a “store of value” similar to bitcoin.

Cardano’s ADA coin is a new cryptocurrency and as such, still has a very low relative valuation at 52 cents a coin. In the digital currency market, it has become apparent that the sky is the limit for how valuable a particular coin can be, even if we were to base our observations solely on the record-breaking growth of bitcoin and ether.

Whether this sudden increase in price for ADA coin is due to investors scrambling to buy into a new project or is an orchestrated event by several high volume traders remains to be seen.

Whatever the answer may be, the cryptocurrency market now has its attention on Cardano.