Cardano continues to deliver good news for its investors as its development arm announced major upgrades coming to the blockchain soon.
Cardano delivering at last?
To call Cardano a slow burn would be an understatement. The blockchain has taken years for the first smart contracts to appear, and when they finally did, they were buggy. However, the ecosystem is making serious moves to turn around its reputation of being a laggard, as good news just keeps coming in this year.
IOHK, the consortium developing the Cardano blockchain, announced that it was in the “very final” stages of a major code upgrade for the Cardano blockchain in 2022. Tim Harrison, its Head of Marketing and Communication, said two more upgrades in June and October would follow the February release. With Cardano growing quickly, updates would be necessary to keep it running smoothly, especially as companies relying on the Cardano infrastructure need to be aware of when updates are published.
Harrison also said that the February upgrade – naysayers will rightly note that its release is in old Cardano tradition past February – will have “powerful improvements and enhancements” for the network’s nodes. For example, users will be able to create transactions conforming to the Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL) while using Cardano’s native command-line interface (CLI). Furthermore, multi-signature transactions will be improved to allow for incremental stages, and the upgrade presents multiple CLI tools for stake pool operators (SPOs), developers, and node users.
While this may sound a bit confusing to average users, it is reassuring to see that something is happening at Cardano. Mr. Harrison also said that the coming June and October hard forks would be just as impactful, containing scaling elements like pipelining, new Plutus CIPs, UTXO on-disk storage, and Hydra. In other words, Cardano is doing everything it can to increase its throughput as fast as possible and make the blockchain as useable as possible.
Cardano growing fast
After years of late release and promises, Cardano may be late but not too late to the party. As the network peaks in transaction activity, the infrastructure cannot cope with the influx of new users looking to interact with Cardano. For example, six decentralised exchanges already launched on Cardano this year, after years of no activity on the blockchain whatsoever. Many more decentralised applications are expected to follow. Small wonder that Cardano introduced improved bug bounties to combat possible security leaks (that will inevitably come with more network usage).
Although the price of ADA has not seen a major uptrend following the good news, analysts still expect ADA to have a good 2022. It’s also worth remembering that crypto markets rarely trade on logic. Cardano will have to “frontload” a lot of positive development to turn around its image of overpromising but underdelivering. However, if it can do that, a tsunami-like price rise may eventually follow as investors realise that Cardano is a serious blockchain after all.