This month, we celebrate Ethereum’s third birthday and reflect upon the many milestones that have occured in the industry since the dawn of the original smart contract blockchain. Mainstream interest is burgeoning, market capitalization for the industry has increased by over 5,900 percent, and the number of cryptocurrencies currently in circulation is at an all-time high. Up until recently, it seemed as if Ethereum would be one of the only platforms capable of fostering the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. That is, until Cardano (ADA) appeared.
While admittedly in its early stages, Cardano is already being labeled by some experts as a scalable solution to several of the inefficiencies created by Ethereum, which, some say, seems to be suffering from its own success. In recent months, the platform has been inundated with a slew of new decentralized applications (DApps) that are creating a bottleneck effect on the Ethereum blockchain .
Cardano’s PoS model holds or freezes a certain number of tokens in order to validate transactions, many believe that decreasing supply will ultimately cause its value to rise. As the Cardano community grows, more ADA will be needed to validate each transaction, which will likely contribute to industry growth. Over time, investors will increasingly view Cardano as an adequate store of value, and prospective users will flock to the platform in search of heightened opportunity.
With all of the excitement flying around in the crypto market right now, it’s often difficult to accurately predict which projects, like Ethereum, are going to survive to see their third birthdays. However, amidst an increasingly saturated market, Cardano stands out from other Ethereum competitors (e.g., NEO and EOS) by creating a one-of-a-kind platform that promises all of the best qualities of a smart contract blockchain, but with unprecedented scalability and interoperability. I, along with the rest of the cryptocurrency community, are looking forward to witnessing this growth.