Why will Cardano (ADA) be a top performer in 2018

Cardano (ADA) continues to bring excitement to its holders with the recurrent releases of their roadmap for 2018. With the promise of more releases coming in 27 days, Cardano sure seems to be one of the projects with most in store for this year.

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano (ADA) co-founder, has been one of the leading individuals that has driven blockchain technology to the next level. After participating in Ethereum (ETH) on their earlier years with the collaboration of Vitalik Buterin and others, Charles Hoskinson decided to leave the project due to differences of opinion, as he put it. Since he was not the lead in Ethereum it was best for him to leave and start his own project.

After leaving he founded IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) in conjunction with Jeremy Wood, an engineering firm that tries to bring banking services to the ones that can’t reach them, since an estimate of 3 billion people have no access to it. IOHK was the firm that was contracted to lead the development of Cardano (ADA).

Delegated Proof-of-Stake in Cardano (ADA)

Although the token was only released in September, it got lots of attention due to the team behind it and what they promised. Way before OmiseGO (OMG) had planned to have a PoS (Proof-of-Stake) that would enable them to release Plasma Network, one of the most promising ones yet, Charles Hoskinson was already thinking of creating a DPoS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake) in Cardano’s protocol.

This staking system is clearly referenced in their roadmap on their website and this DPoS system brings new forms of decentralization where in their focus they intend to enable users to delegate stake. Cardano (ADA) will allow you to delegate your tokens to stake in a staking pool just like you have mining pools for Bitcoin (BTC), and on top of that they also allow to create your own staking pools.

Cardano (ADA) system clearly shows us that they want to give stakeholders a real glimpse of a powerful decentralized database. The completion of this “Ouroboros Delegation” is only at 75% completion and the best part is that it will be functional in the Daedalus Wallet.

Image 1 – Delegation of Staking in Daedalus (Ouroboros)– Source: https://cardanoroadmap.com/

Genesis Vision possibility

In terms of adoption Cardano (ADA) is still struggling right now since there are no working products released this far, but still Genesis Vision (GVT) intends to enable payments through Cardano’s platform. This could be huge for both companies, and the rumors have been spread thanks to the addition of code to the Genesis Vision GitHub.

This Genesis Vision partnership is not yet official but you can check out their Cardano API addition in GitHub through the link: https://github.com/GenesisVision/ada-blockexplorer-api

Multi-signature Transactions

When you bring the possibility of merging the banking industry with blockchain one must ask, how do we solve simple problems such as joint accounts. Cardano (ADA) is currently implementing a multi-signature transaction option that will only incur in the asked transaction when all parties have agreed to it.

This development is currently at 35% and, although there is no official date for release, we should expect it in 2018.

Incentive Plan for full nodes

Cardano (ADA) also mentions on their roadmap that they will design an incentive scheme that rewards good performers in validating the network. This means that full nodes will be rewarded for their presence, and also there will be incentives for people to delegate their stake in validating the network which means that even people that don’t run full nodes will benefit from using their tokens in staking pools to receive rewards.

This plan is still being studied and it must be carefully calculated since there will always be people that take advantage of uneven rewards or compensations. The implementation is still a little longer down the road but it shows us, in my opinion the good intentions of Cardano (ADA).

Cover image: 1221johnny