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- Insights
- Cryptocurrencies
- Stocks
- White Papers
- Industry
- Geography
To answer the question 'what is Cardano?' you need to know the difference between a blockchain and a cryptocurrency.
A blockchain is a decentralised ledger that validates transactions and stores the entire history of a unit of value; a cryptocurrency is the unit of value.
Why is this important?
Because while you can never buy any Cardano – you buy the cryptocurrency, ADA – the success of an ADA investment is directly tied to the success of the Cardano blockchain.
You need to know that not all cryptocurrencies come with their own blockchain.
Below, we'll analyse 10 reasons to buy Cardano in July 2022, and compare the benefits of ADA with a fast-growing altcoin – EverGrow – which has no native blockchain.
The Cardano blockchain is often dubbed 'the Ethereum killer'.
It's true that Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche and more are all competing to have their blockchains overtake the total valued locked (TVL) and market cap of Ethereum – but there's also a deeper connection between Cardano and Ethereum.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson was an Ethereum co-founder who left the project in 2014 over a clash of vision.
Hoskinson wanted to make the Ethereum blockchain commercial.
After starting work on Cardano in 2015, Hoskinson sent the blockchain live in 2017 with the goal of bettering Ethereum's scalability, reducing its high energy output and providing blockchain solutions for a fascinating array of industries.
For example:
Cardano is already working with New Balance to track the authenticity of shoes, with Ethiopia to issue digital identities to students, and with various universities to develop academic training and research partnerships.
Cardano is best known as the company which develops and improves its blockchain – Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) – only making updates after a rigorous, scientific peer-review process.
Demand for ADA depends almost entirely on the current use cases and future potential of the Cardano blockchain.
If Ethereum overcomes its scalability failings, if Solana gets better dApps, or Avalanche becomes the smart contract platform of choice, then Cardano will struggle to offer significant ROI to investors.
Compare this with the fast-growing altcoin EverGrow.
Like the majority of cryptocurrencies, EverGrow launched on an existing blockchain network – in this case, the BNB Chain (Binance).
EverGrow does not need hundreds of computing engineers to beat the competition. Instead, the EverGrow core team comes from the world of finance to offer what most crypto investors want – a good return on investment.
For example, a cryptocurrency like EverGrow can afford to charge a 14% transaction tax with 8% distributed instantly in the BUSD stablecoin as investor rewards, with 2% for strategic coin burning and the rest for marketing and liquidity.
ADA needs to be rapidly transferable at the lowest cost possible to be the native token of a huge network of dApps, DeFi protocols and decentralised exchanges.
EverGrow, meanwhile, priotises long-term holding for maximum ROI.
Since launching in September last year it has paid out more than $37.5 million in BUSD rewards to holders who understood the difference between blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
1. Crypto 3.0. Cardano is arguably the natural evolution of crypto from Bitcoin (crypto 1.0) and Ethereum (crypto 2.0). Cardano offers an exciting array of real-world use cases for cryptocurrencies beyond the pure speculation of Bitcoin. Cardano offers the development platform the get there without the high processing fees and enormous energy consumption of Ethereum.
2. Ouroboros. Ethereum has an annualised energy consumption of 70 TWh – equivalent to the consumption of the Czech Republic. Ethereum has a carbon footprint compared to the Republic of Ireland (39 Mt C02). A single Etheruem transaction has the carbon footprint equivalent to 201,422 VISA transactions and uses enough energy to power an average US household for 5.5 days. Cardano was discovered to be the least energy intensive blockchain network on the market in 2021 thanks to its randomised consensus mechanism called ouroboros.
3. Peer-reviewed blockchain. Cardano takes its name from Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano, and its ticker ADA from British mathematician Ada Lovelace – considered the first computer programmer in history. Cardano's peer-review process ensures it does not suffer the network outages of other competitors like Solana and makes it an attractive blockchain solutions provider for other global industries.
4. Use cases. Cardano is the blockchain network that most reaches outside of the crypto industry to ink partnerships with top brands like New Balance, as well as universities, world governments and other key sectors.
5. Fast transactions. Cardano can process more than 250 transactions per second (TPS) compared to around 5 TPS on the Bitcoin blockchain and 15-45 TPS on Ethereum. In 2022 a scheduled network upgrade should make Cardano able to process 100,000 TPS. Through the Hydra layer-2 system, Cardano will eventually process up to 1 million TPS.
6. High network staking. More than 70% of ADA is staked for network validation. Using the two official wallets (Daedalus and Yoroi) users are incentivised to take their ADA off exchanges and stake it for up to 5% APY. Ethereum has about 5% of its supply locked for validation – but this is because Ethereum still uses an energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
7. Developers. Cardano has up to 150 developers working day-in-day-out to develop the blockchain network. Cardano is one of the most actively-developed projects in the blockchain space and this summer of 2022 will rollout the Vasil hardfork, which will rapidly increase the scalability and operation of smart contracts on the blockchain.
8. Vasil hardfork. The Vasil hardfork scheduled for July 2022 will allow faster block creation on the Cardano network and greater scalability for decentralised apps (dApps) running on Cardano. This year could be the year Cardano cements itself as the leading Ethereum competitor – recent dApps to enjoy greater scalability includes the Revuto project which offers lifetime subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, and more as NFTs on the Cardano blockchain. Subscriptions can be traded like any other NFT for a fixed price.
9. Lowest prices in 18 months. The price of ADA is the lowest since early 2021 – some 18 months ago. Cardano had a successful price rally last year to reach an all-time high of $3. In July 2022, the price of Cardano is trading between $0.41 to $0.47.
10. Whale accumulation. Cardano whales (wallets holding 10k to 100k ADA) have been accumulating more than 79 million ADA in the past month according to Santiment. Whale accumulation is a key sign that experienced investors are bullish on the future price potential for Cardano.
The key risks of investing in Cardano are both theoretical – as outlined by comparison with EverGrow above – and real.
Ethereum is by far the leading smart contracts platform for developers in the cryptocurrency industry. Ethereum has over 1,500 active developers (10 times more than Cardano) and will transition to a more environmentally friendly and scalable consensus mechanism before the end of 2022.
Solana, while suffering network outages numerous times in 2022, also has more developers on board than Cardano.
The problem is also to do with the price of ADA. In April 2022, before the crypto crash, 82% of ADA investors were in the red on their portfolios. Back then ADA had a price of $0.97 – today the ADA price is $0.47.
Compare this with the BUSD rewards from EverGrow.
The daily BUSD rewards mean that even during a bear market EverGrow investors can make passive income. The passive income may be reduced when daily volume is at a current $150,000 per day – meaning $12,000 distributed to investors.
But this helps to keep investors engaged until the daily trading volume of EverGrow is back to its 2022 peak of $12 million – meaning $960,000 for EverGrow investors in a single day.
You can use one of the EverGrow calculators on the website to look at your passive income potential with an EverGrow position depending on daily trading volume.
EverGrow is also a useful comparison due to its automatic coin burning mechanism. More than 53% of the initial EverGrow supply has been burned since launching in September.
The EverGrow team has been burning more tokens from supply in July 2022, which helps to increase scarcity and raise prices during a broken market in a way that cryptocurrencies like ADA tied to a blockchain platform can't afford to do.
Cardano is undoubtedly one of the most promising Ethereum competitors in the market.
Cardano is currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap ($16 billion) and ahead of Solana in 9th place, Polkadot in 11th place, Avalanche in 14th place, NEAR Protocol in 25th place, and Algorand in 29th place.
The real-world use cases and robust peer-reviewed process of the Cardano blockchain make it one of the more future-proof cryptocurrency ecosystems, with potential for industry adoption outside the cryptocurrency industry.
The lively community forums and the popularity of decentralised staking pools make Cardano a fantastic place for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
If you're only interested in crypto for making a decent return on your investment, however, then ADA is not necessarily the best buy in July 2022.
You should research small market cap cryptocurrencies like EverGrow ($60 million) with a huge potential to breakout in 2022. Smaller, relatively unknown cryptocurrencies are also the ones to provide the most spectacular gains (just look at Shiba Inu in 2021) and are where the investors looking for ROI should search first.
