A few nice items caught our eye recently, all positive on Cardano. It seems as though the developments shared at the 2021 Summit are starting to make it into the awareness of the wider news outlets.
First up a GreyScale report “An introduction to Cardano“. You may remember that Greyscale recently invested in Cardano, opening the door for large institutional investors in the U.S.
This is a well written, balanced, professional report that clearly lists strengths and weaknesses to Cardano at this point:
Cardano aims to differentiate itself from other blockchains by emphasizing a “get it right the first time” approach, which Cardano believes can be accomplished by utilizing a development model heavily reliant on academic research, peer-review, and formally verified security.
The trade-off of Cardano’s approach has also resulted in its biggest weaknesses, which include: a historical lack of smart contract capabilities, an unproven track- record for how well dApps will function, a still maturing third-party developer ecosystem, lack of widespread mainnet dApps, and lower transaction fee revenue.
https://grayscale.com/learn/an-introduction-to-cardano/
There are some interesting metrics including:
- The network has successfully settled over $1.6 trillion in total on- chain transaction value in the prior year since the mainnet version of Cardano’s core PoS protocol went live
- The network is currently processing more than 115,000 transactions per day, which is up ~13x since the start of 2021
- The valuation per monthly active user (market cap / monthly active address) of Cardano is ~$30,000 and Ethereum is ~$55,000, which may imply Cardano’s is cheaper than its largest peer based on relative user value fundamentals
Recommended reading.
The recent “WSJ explains” section covers Cardano and is also accurate and helpful.
Lastly Oasis Pro Markets presented at the Summit on their plans to bring primary bond markets for developing countries to Cardano. A new blog post by Anthony Quinn notes:
IOG and Oasis are joining forces to create a bond issuance platform. Oasis Pro is the parent company of Oasis Pro Markets, which already operates a multi-asset alternative trading system called OATSPRO in the US. This allows secondary trading of public and private multi-asset digital securities.
The Oasis Pro technology facilitates digital cash for digital securities transactions, and the use of the Cardano blockchain to remove the need for intermediaries such as banks from the process will cut trading fees by half. The combined platform provides a viable and secure financing alternative for governments of developing nations.
With recent reductions in foreign aid and investment, many governments are struggling to access capital. The integration of OATSPRO technology with users of Cardano’s ada cryptocurrency – with a market capitalization of $70 billion – will enable a new source of foreign investment to be tapped for crucial infrastructure projects.
https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/26/cardano-deal-with-oasis-will-give-developing-world-better-access-to-financial-markets/
Q4 promises to be a strong quarter for the Cardano ecosystem, with a strong position going into 2022.