The founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson believes that the platforms native currency ADA still has a leg up above Facebook in emerging markets. His comments come even after Facebook officially announced its upcoming stablecoin, Libra which has been building up a lot of hype over the past few weeks since its reveal.

Hoskinson made his comments in a new interview with Finance Magnates published on June 26th. The CEO noted the importance of cryptocurrency in emerging markets, relative to established financial systems.

“Emerging markets are where cryptocurrencies matter.”

Hoskinson went on to say:

“When I look at the developed world, I don’t care. It’s highly regulated and, in many cases, a rigged system. If I decide to compete with a tech company they can just push me out via regulation.”

Hoskinson has taken his efforts for crypto adoption around the world as he even met the Georgian Prime Minister earlier this month as he showed on Twitter saying, “Great meeting with the Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze about Georgia’s desire to innovate over the coming years”. As well as talking about cryptocurrency, we presume the two talked about blockchain tech and its impact on infrastructures like education and healthcare.

Facebook

Payments will be the final test for cryptocurrency dominance in the end in developing and emerging markets. The CEO was asked on the impact of Facebook’s Libra coin getting involved with digital payments and whether or not Cardano would be able to compete with the massive social network.

Hoskinson said:

“I am not entering a market and looking to extract value from people. Facebook has to come into countries it doesn’t know a lot about and convinces them to enslave themselves to an economic monopoly and give nothing in return. And their only pitch is that you’ll pay less on fees.”

Shelley

The Shelley testnet went live at the end of last week leaving a lot of people very excited about the future.

Shelley is designed to be the next evolution in Cardano and will make the public blockchain completely decentralised.

The actual update will go live next year with Hoskinson saying:

“It’ll be this year. But exactly when is hard to say. Delays happen. Unexpected things happen. There may be some things we can accelerate but creating software is hard.”