Cardano caught the attention of many when it first appeared suddenly on the Crypto Currency Trading Platform, Bittrex. From it's first day of appearance on September 29, 2017, Cardano (ADA) held on to heavy volume trading and drastic price flucations. Holding it's ICO 2 years ago, Cardano remained somewhat quite as its ambititous team of Reasearchers, Mathmaticians, Professors and Developers, lead by Charles Hoskinsion, the Ethereum Co-founder, drafted and designed what they concluded would be a true Decentrilzed and Democratic Smart Contract Platform and Crypto Currency system. Cardano has gained major popularity since its release on exchanges and huge price gains.
Cardano seems to have caught attention of not just investors but Developers as well. At first glance, its comparison to Ethereum seemed to be a publicity stunt. Though after some research and investigating the team's core, culture and vision, one begins to see a clear picture of something huge brewing at Cardano and IOHK (Input/Output Hong Kong). Its a vision with a lethal team of Researchers, Engineers and Developers with nothing to lose and much to gain. The Cardano vision is to build a Smart Contract Platform with ADA as its Currency while remaining as sustainable, versatile and upgradable as possible. All with out compromising Decentralization. As of now Cardano seems to challenge Ethereum with things like Scalability, Interoperability and Versatility.
Scalability: The problem with Ethereum is that it can only process 15 transactions per second, which makes it a slow blockchain technology. Cardano is promising better scalability to process a bigger number of transactions at faster speeds.
Interoperability: Ethereum might be good to only deal with it's own cryptocurrencies on their platforms. Cardano on the other hand is promising to support ADA and other Crypto Currencies using it's own blockchain, making it more versatile and appealing. An example of this is Cardano’s wallet, Daedalus, will allow for storage of Bitcoin in the near future.
Versatility: Unlike Ethereum which forces developers to learn new languages such as solidity and Viper in order to Develop Dapps, Cardano is using a combination of the K framework and semantics based compilation to allow any language that is K defined to autocompile to run on the IELE VM. In essence, what this means is that they only need to define the semantics of a language once and then add it to the Blockchain. Once this is done, developers can begin to write smart contracts in this language. Currently it supports Java, C, Javascript, Plutus and Viper with plans to also add Solidity.
Is Ethereum just the Guinea Pig of smart contract platforms? Is Ethereum what Myspace was to Facebook? After all, a new technology lasts only until the next more superior innovation. Cardano's versatility and upgradeability is key and Ethereum clearly lacks that.
From an investment standpoint, Cardano's choice to remain 100% decentralized and have Daedalus wallet support Bitcoin and other tokens is a huge symbol of honour which hits home at the hearts of those early believers loyal to the original pioneer of Crypto Currency and a decentralized economy, Bitcoin, "The Bitcoin Billionaires". While Ethereum investors continue to argue that Ethereum will crush Bitcoin's Marketcap and take the lead, this remains doubtful. Following the Charts, trends and popularity momentum, compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cardano has only gone through its first price increase going from $.02 to stand at $.12 today. This looks to be the first of many price spikes and a $1-3 prediction within the next 6 months is not far fetched. After all Ethereum doesn't have Bitcoin's loyalists and solid infrastructure making Ethereum investors more likely to Jumpship and move on to ADA, this if Cardano manages to shake Ethereum's investor confidence. The December 5, 2017 Crypto Kittie Crash did not help either.
Yours Truly
BoyGenius