Despite a recent slump in market price, the Cardano (ADA) ecosystem has reached a milestone in ecosystem-building, as over one million delegated wallets are now staking ADA.
Wallet Staking ADA Crosses One Million
Delegated wallets that stake ADA, the native token of blockchain Cardano, have successfully surpassed one million in early December, which indicates an expansion of ADA’s user base although the token’s price has plunged significantly after its Alonzo upgrade in September. The growth of staking wallets shows investors’ long-term confidence in ADA with some professional crypto traders like Lukas Moore thinking it will go “parabolic” in 2022.
Proof of Stake (PoS) has become a popular option for public blockchains to improve efficiency and to fulfill carbon-neutral purposes as Proof-of-Work-based (PoW) coins like Bitcoin are constantly attacked for not being environmentally-friendly. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world, will also change its consensus mechanism from PoW to PoS next year in an effort to solve problems of congestion and slow throughput.
Though considered slow in development, Cardano’s initial staking system may help it take a step ahead of Ethereum in the future as Ethereum faces the challenge of merging numerous dApps into its new consensus mechanism (PoS).
A Thriving Ecosystem of Cardano
The Cardano team consists of: the Cardano Foundation, Emurgo and, IOHK. Similar to Ethereum, Cardano has its own, native programming language called Plutus. IOHK is committed to improving the brand awareness of Cardano among the developer community, and the increasing numbers of Plutus-based smart contracts show that the blockchain is more popular among developers than before.
To catch up with the tide of DeFi, SundaeSwap, a decentralized exchange, has been set up on Cardano lately to help users borrow, lend and stake their Cardano-based cryptocurrencies. It is believed that the test net of SundaeSwap could work as a pressure test for Cardano as the ability to process real-time transactions in crypto would prove the network’s functionality, safety, and efficiency as a whole. SundaeSwap is integrated with tokenomics, same with its counterparts, Uniswap and Sushiswap, on Ethereum.
While building more applications among its own ecosystem, Cardano is working with different companies to boost interactions with other blockchains. For example, IOHK recently announced they were working with SingularityNFT, the AI company behind Sophia, in building a network of ERC20 converters called AGIX ERC20, which may help Cardano grab more market share from its competitors.
Despite the global crypto market currently going through a downward trend with many crypto investors worried about the end of the bull market, many still seem to be bullish long-term on Cardano and ADA.
