Last week was splendid for Cardano in terms of new developments. In its journey towards full decentralization, the Cardano team announced the launch of the long-awaited Shelley testnet. In addition, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the company behind the development of Cardano, announced that it had secured a strategic partnership with footwear brand, New Balance.
Following these developments, Cardano Creator Charles Hoskinson believes Cardano will be the most useful cryptocurrency on the market.
Hoskinson: Cardano Will Be The Most Useful Cryptocurrency On The Market
Speaking during the Cardano meet-up event held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria to celebrate Cardano’s second anniversary, Hoskinson explained that the Cardano team will engage in peer review so as to accelerate Cardano “beyond most if not all cryptocurrencies currently in the market and coming on to the market”:
“All throughout 2020, we’ll be gradually, slowly but surely, adding features and functionality into Cardano. If you send something on our network, it can make it look like a Bitcoin-style push transaction circa January 3, 2009. And you can go all the way to a modern Cardano transaction and embed all kinds of interesting data inside that thing and enjoy the power of that.”
The IOHK founder added:
“So if we do that, I have a firm belief Cardano will be the most useful cryptocurrency on the market. But are we done? No. Because we need to scale. We need to go beyond just a few hundred TPS (transactions per second). We need to go beyond just the ability to send a few thousand transactions an hour. We need to be able to move to a world where Cardano can service, realistically, millions to billions of people over an arc of time”.
Cardano’s Shelley Test Net Is Now Live
According to a blog post, the Shelly testnet is available for the users to join and test it. In fact, the team urges all members of the Cardano community to run nodes and actively participate in the network. Through this, the team will be able to analyze the performance of the network through the data collected. This test net incorporates the Ouroboros Genesis consensus algorithm.
In case you are unaware, Ouroboros is a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm which eliminates the need for a high energy-consuming protocol like proof-of-work (PoW) and also allows users to use only the genesis block information associated with the distributed ledger to safely enter the protocol execution.
With Shelley, Cardano will be 50-100 times more decentralized than other blockchain networks. Currently, all the nodes are run by Cardano Foundation (non-profit for education and marketing), Emurgo (business marketing) and IOHK (engineering and technology), but with Shelley, a majority of the nodes will be controlled by the community.
Following this successful launch of Shelley testnet, it will be possible for Cardano holders to earn ADA starting from November as the team explores new ways of improving it before moving to the mainnet next year. Users who will participate in this “incentivized testnet” will however not be able to transfer ADA, but the ADA earned will be transferred to the mainnet.
New Balance Partnership
To celebrate the launch of Shelley testnet, the company bagged a partnership with sports brand New Balance. During the anniversary celebrations on Saturday, Charles Hoskinson announced that the Boston-based company will be using Cardano’s blockchain to confirm the authenticity of their footwear.
Similar to other footwear brands, New Balance has fallen victim to several counterfeit incidents. In August 2017, a court in China ordered three local shoemakers to pay New Balance $1.5 million for copying the company’s logo and therefore confusing consumers.
Through this partnership, Cardano will help the American footwear brand authenticate their sneakers. In addition, Hoskinson believes Cardano will also help in identifying factories that are cheating and developing products on the sides as well as ensuring royalties go to the original manufacturers of luxury goods.
“Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Gucci –if you work with these companies, you can dramatically reduce counterfeiting risk, create better supply chains and better markets for their goods. And frankly, it can give them the ability to sell their goods at even higher prices – because they can have the authentic blockchain version of the bag and they can mark it up considerably,” Hoskinson added.
It’s worth noting that this project with New Balance will not be using Cardano’s cryptocurrency ADA.
Cardano (ADA) Market Update: ADA Is Up By 3.7%
On September 18, the cryptocurrency surged to $0.054 before succumbing to the broad-based selling pressure. On a weekly chart, Cardano has declined by 21%. The crypto is, however, attempting recovery at the moment and has gained 3.7% over the last 24 hours with a market capitalization of $1.01 billion. ADA is currently valued at $0.038971 and holds the 12th position.
With the launch of the Shelley, ADA evangelists expect an uptrend which could push its price above $0.05. Also, going by the current trend in the crypto market where most cryptocurrencies are posting gains, the natural conclusion is that ADA could continue with this momentum as well.
