The upcoming Alonzo hard fork has generated much interest among investors and traders for Cardano. Let’s take a quick look at everything that happened this week for the fifth-largest blockchain project by market cap.
Cardano Overtakes Bitcoin On eToro
According to data released by multi-asset trading platform eToro, Cardano’s ADA has taken over BTC’s place as the most held token on the platform. Despite Bitcoin having market cap dominance over Cardano, the latter is steadily climbing higher, with eToro customers holding 51% more ADA in the second quarter of 2021 than they did in the first.
Experts believe that this could be the beginning of BTC’s fall, as the crypto has a limited store of value use case. eToro analyst Simon Peters commented on Cardano’s upcoming Alonzo hard fork, which is pulling in investors and traders, saying,
“If successful, it will bring smart contract functionality by allowing the writing and deployment of smart contracts for the first time on the Cardano blockchain.
Cardano 5-Year Plan: Onboarding Financial And Corporate Giants
This week also saw the CEO of the Cardano Foundation, Frederik Gregaard talking about Cardano’s five-year growth strategy. According to Gregaard, the foundation will be looking to partner up with financial institutions and large corporations to bring the blockchain’s native token ADA into the global mainstream. This will also enable legacy financial institutions to benefit from the innovations of blockchain technology.
Speaking about onboarding 50 banks, Gregaard says,
“It should be in a way that if you have a lot of ADA, you can always get into the local fiat currency. And you can always get from a local fiat currency into ADA and, over time, into whatever other token you might be holding using the Cardano blockchain.”
ADA Reaches Investment Portfolio Of US Congressman
Alabama Congressman Barry Moore has been in the news for being one of the first political figures in the country to invest in crypto. As per the trading disclosures filed with the House of Representatives on July 2nd, Moore’s crypto investments were between $1,001 to $15,000, with Cardano holding the largest percentage.
However, the report only provides the purchase information; therefore it is unclear if he still holds these coins. To make any further analysis about his portfolio, additional information regarding the time of purchase and his current holdings needs to be disclosed.
Alonzo Hard Fork On Track, Hoskinson Updates
The highly anticipated Alonzo hard fork is right on track, according to Cardano CEO Charles Hoskinson. In a livestream video, he clarified that the Blue era (first stage, representing a small userbase on the testnet) of Alonzo development had been completed, and the White era (second stage, broader group of testers) starts next week. This stage will expand the number of testers to involve several hundred people and is anticipated to run for 2-4 weeks.
During the stream, Hoskinson alluded to a significant business engagement traction with the network:
“When you look at the D5 set on Cardano, there are dozens if not hundreds of good candidates there and over 1,500 developers trained through the police pioneers program, so there’s an enormous amount of commercial interest traction community effort with Cardano.”
Additionally, Cardano was recently accepted as Grayscale Investments’ third-largest position, showing the rising demand for the digital asset, and as a result, it has attracted a lot of institutional attention.
