What is Cardano (ADA)?

If you're like me you watch David Hay or CryptoLark on Youtube and so may have recently seen a review of Cardano (ADA).

Their content is very complimentary and I certainly left intrigued but those reviews were about a week and a month ago respectively and ADA has been quietly killing it since then. This weekend ADA went up over 40%, and again today we had another boom, so I decided to take a closer look here now.

What is Cardano?:

"Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed. It is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach. The development team consists of a large global collective of expert engineers and researchers"
https://www.cardanohub.org/en/home/

Cardano is a 3rd generation blockchain which will serve as a currency, in fact Japan has ATMs already in place equipped to exchange ADA and more to come. Also ADA is going to be a platform for dApps, which in my mind will be the future of the internet. Another feature that sets it apart from Lisk, Ethereum or ETC, at least for the time being is that it is Proof of Stake, not Proof of Work.

The Cardano Team:

Additionally the dev team has pedigree and includes Charles Hoskinson of IOHK, former CEO of Ethereum.

The project has a large team including a seperate wallet team which is nice since wallet development can often take a back seat and suffer on some projects.

Other Considerations:

Cardano has famously implemented a formal peer review system for their open source code which is intended to vastly improve the security and reliability of the code to avoid major weaknesses or errors.

The project does not have an official road map but has a promising general outline.

The project has been around for a couple years however it is less developed than some of the other dApp platforms on the market.

Charles Hoskinson has an impressive public presence, he does informative videos intending to equip the community with knowledge of Cardano and its future. I think such a front man is a strong selling point. Here is one such video from Hoskinson, warning it is quite long but if you are intrigued watch this:

The Specs:

Cardano Market Cap: $1,360,224,865 Billion
Circulating Supply: 25,927,070,538
Total Supply: 31,112,483,745
Max Supply: 45,000,000,000

Conclusion:

All and all the project is very exciting. I do not hold any ADA at the moment but I do plan to take a position after we see a correction following our recent bull run. Might Cardano blow past this point and leave me behind? Maybe but Im not rushing in at these all time highs.

Can Cardano challenge Ethereum, Ethereum classic, Lisk, EOS, or Neo for a meaningful segment of a congested sector of the crypto marketplace? I definitely think there is a good chance that ADA can contend with the big boys, but any investor needs to acknowledge they are taking a longer shot with Cardano than with a name brand like Ethereum or Neo.

Forecast:
My plan is to wait for an opportunity, ADA will take a breather and I will buy the dip. I consider this a long term hold. I suspect late 2018 or 2019 we will see ADA establishing itself as a leader in the decentralise application platform. I think we can conservatively imagine the market cap to increase by double by 1st or 2nd quarter next year, bringing it to approximately 3 Billion. If so that would still only be 1/15th of Ethereum's current market cap, very plausible I think.

I am long term very bullish on this project but as always I am not a financial advisor and I am not an expert. Do your own homework. Do not risk anything you're unwilling to lose.

What do you all think? Do you own ADA? Are you bullish with Cardano, why or why not?

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