The Cardano Price Is Rising: Will the Africa-focused Cryptocurrency Really Be Able to Surpass Ethereum?

27 August 2021
Content from a Premium Partner
InfoWire

ADA was one of the best performing digital assets of the last few weeks, and the Cardano price has more than doubled in a very short time. However, the Ethereum price is also doing very well, and many Cardano investors have concerns if the coin often called “the Ethereum killer” will really be able to surpass ETH in the long term. But what exactly is behind the recent rise in the Cardano price, and can ADA really beat Ethereum?

Why Is the Cardano Price On the Rise?

The Cardano price is growing because we finally get to know the release date of the long awaited Alonzo hard fork of the ADA blockchain. According to the recent announcement made by Nigel Hemsley, Cardano’s Head of Delivery, the Alonzo update of the ADA network will be launched on September 12th.

Alonzo is a major upgrade to Cardano which will add to ADA the functionality of a smart contracts platform. In other words, thanks to Alonzo the users of Cardano will be able to enjoy features such as DeFi (decentralized finance), dApps (decentralized applications) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

Up until now, Cardano’s main selling point was simply the fact that ADA transactions were extremely cheap and very fast, especially compared to Ethereum which is notorious for its high fees. Since Ethereum wasn’t created with DeFi in mind, it has problems with efficiently processing DeFi protocols during times of peak network activity.

But while Cardano is much faster than Ethereum, up until now ADA wasn’t useful for anything else except sending and receiving transactions. In other words, Cardano users were not able to enjoy features such as DeFi, DEXs, dApps or NFTs.

Alonzo changes this radically, and enables blockchain developers to build all kinds of custom tokens and decentralized applications using the Cardano blockchain. Thanks to the new upgrade, Cardano will finally be able to become a true competitor to Ethereum, and might even surpass ETH one day.

Cardano’s Investments in Africa

IOHK, the company behind Cardano, has been heavily investing in the development of the African blockchain ecosystem for years. The ongoing Cardano Africa campaign has started in 2017, and has already managed to launch many successful projects focused on providing blockchain-based innovation.

Cardano has been working on developing an Africa-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) in partnership with SingularityNET, as well as partnering with Word Mobile to improve the informational infrastructure of remote and hard to reach areas of Africa. Another important project is the Iceaddis pan-African technology incubator, which supports local tech startups in 5 African countries, and plans to expand to another 20 countries in the near future.

IOHK has also been working with charities like Save the Children, and even government entities like the Ministry of Education of Ethiopia. Cardano’s adoption in Ethiopia is particularly impressive, since it will help over 5 million teachers and students to gain a secure, blockchain-based digital identity.

Cardano’s numerous investments in Africa reflect the massive potential of this continent when it comes to global blockchain adoption. Many African countries are repeatedly topping the charts of cryptocurrency popularity, so in the long term Cardano’s dedication to investing in Africa might immensely help ADA to become one of the largest digital assets in the world.

Can Cardano Really Become the Ethereum Killer?

Ethereum had many problems over the past few years. Most importantly, the ETH blockchain proved itself to be quite inefficient when it comes to accommodating advanced DeFi features such as dApps and DEXs. The high fees of Ethereum has caused many projects to migrate to other blockchains, primarily to the Binance Smart Chain.

With the release of the Alonzo hard fork, Cardano will soon be able to provide the same functions of a smart contracts platform like Ethereum, but in a much more efficient way, since ADA transactions in general are much faster and cheaper than ETH transactions. Cardano is already one of the largest coins on the market, but the launch of the Alonzo upgrade can help it to become one of the undisputed leaders of the blockchain ecosystem.

But will Alonzo be enough to make Cardano surpass Ethereum? It definitely won’t be easy, since ETH is one of the most time-tested and well-established blockchains on the market. However, Cardano’s massive involvement in Africa might prove to be decisive in the long-term. Since Ethereum is not interested in huge infrastructure investments like that, Cardano might eventually gain the upper hand.

Tagged:
Copyright © 2021 InfoWire. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.

AllAfrica publishes around 500 reports a day from more than 100 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals, representing a diversity of positions on every topic. We publish news and views ranging from vigorous opponents of governments to government publications and spokespersons. Publishers named above each report are responsible for their own content, which AllAfrica does not have the legal right to edit or correct.

Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. To address comments or complaints, please Contact us.