The global cryptocurrency market is currently experiencing a small relief rally. With a 27% price increase, Cardano has surpassed Ripple to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation.
Let’s take a look at the current state of GameFi and what we can expect in the future.
Cardano Flips Ripple
Cardano is outperforming the majority of the cryptocurrency market.
The smart contract blockchain’s ADA token has risen 27% on the day, surpassing Ripple to reclaim its position as the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. The rally comes ahead of Cardano’s highly anticipated Vasil hardfork upgrade, with a testnet release on June 2 and a mainnet launch on June 29. The Vasil upgrade, when fully implemented, will be the network’s most significant overhaul since the Alonzo hardfork in September 2021.
While the Alonzo upgrade provided Cardano with smart contracting capabilities, enabling a variety of new DeFi use cases, the upcoming Vasil hardfork is said to improve network scalability and usability. Vasil will include four Cardano Improvement Proposals, CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40, which are intended to reconsider how Cardano’s Plutus scripts are submitted to the blockchain. The CIP upgrades are intended to lower transaction fees, improve network throughput and decentralisation, and resolve the so-called “concurrency” issue, which has severely hampered the scalability of blockchain apps to date.
Despite being one of the first smart contract-based Ethereum competitors to hit the market in 2017, Cardano has fared significantly worse in terms of ecosystem than the majority of its competitors. It introduced smart contracting capabilities long after other blockchains, such as Solana, had already established their own DeFi and NFT ecosystems, and it continues to see significantly less activity than most other leading Layer 1 networks eight months later. According to Defi Llama data, Cardano has approximately $158 million in total value locked across its decentralised apps, which is approximately 25 times less than Solana and 455 times less than Ethereum.
ADA is currently trading at around $0.66, up about 27% from its low of $0.51 today. Cardano’s market cap is now around $22.3 billion.