Cardano is a product of a scientific approach to solve most of the critical issues with early blockchain projects. Cardano spent 4+ years in development to solve latency, throughput, security and decentralization issues that commonly plague other blockchains. Currently there are over 3 million Cardano wallets in existence and Cardano is ranked 26 out of 600 global brands for brand intimacy.
Cardano has signed partnerships with at least two governments
In 2018, IOHK announced a partnership with the Ethiopian government to investigate ways to deploy Cardano in the country and in April 2021, IOHK and the Ethiopia Ministry of Education announced plans for an identity and record-keeping system on Cardano and Atala for the country’s school pupils.
In 2019, the Ministry of Education in Georgia signed a memorandum of understanding with the Free University of Tbilisi to use Cardano and Atala, IOHK’s decentralized identity software, to build a credential verification system for Georgia.
Cardano uses less than 0.01% of the energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain
Charles Hoskinson in February 2021 estimated that the Cardano network uses about 7GWh annually, which is less than 0.01% of the 119 TWh used by the Bitcoin blockchain according to data provided by the University of Cambridge.
There are currently more than 12 DeFi protocols operating on Cardano
According to the information on DefiLlama, there are more than twelve decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that currently operate on Cardano with half of them being decentralized exchanges.
2nd Layer Hydra protocol launches on Cardano to drive scalability and long term sustainability
By facilitating faster and more affordable transactions, Hydra enhances user experience while attracting developers and users to ADA. Moreover, it enables the implementation of complex and innovative decentralized applications like decentralized exchanges, gaming platforms, and social networks on its blockchain.
Furthermore, Hydra contributes to Cardano’s ambition of becoming a global social and financial operating system with accessibility for billions of people worldwide. Hydra’s enhanced capacity and performance scaling makes Cardano inclusive and accessible globally.
Cardano (ADA) developers are actively working on the launch of a new decentralized payment system dubbed Cardano Hydra Pay. Testing for Cardano Hydra Pay on Android was carried out sometime in May. Seeing that Cardano Hydra Pay is being driven by its foundational protocols Cardano and Hydra, which theoretically can scale up the Cardano blockchain to reach 1,000,000 transactions per second (TPS). It is expected that just as the Visa payment service has become known for its efficient transactions in the fintech ecosystem, so will the Hydra Pay solution be in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sector.
Cardano introduces real world utility focused solutions
Cardano has been known to roll out top-notch products that solve real world problems. One of the key innovations for 2023 is the launch of a DJED: SHEN algorithmic stablecoin running on the Cardano blockchain.
$DJED’s algorithm is based on a collateral ratio within the range of 400%-800% for $DJED and $SHEN to ensure there’s enough $ADA in the pool.
The Djed stablecoin is an over-collateralized algorithmic stablecoin, built on Cardano and powered by COTI. It is pegged to USD, backed by the base coin ADA, and uses SHEN as its reserve coin.
Shortly after DJED’s launch the crypto markets have experienced high volatility due to some announcements made by the SEC declaring that everything but Bitcoin may be considered a security which included ADA, DJED and SHEN and the DJED : SHEN ecosystem has worked exactly as designed and DJED has not lost it’s peg to the US dollar.