ADA: 4,800 smart contracts on Cardano

In recent days, Cardano’s cryptocurrency, ADA, has been recovering sharply from its major drop in 2022. 

In fact, after falling to $0.42 in July, ADA’s price continued to fall until it hit a one-year low on 30 December at $0.24. 

At that point, the loss from the all-time high of $3 in September 2021 was 92%, and from just five months earlier it was 43%. 

In short, 2022 was a strong year for Cardano’s cryptocurrency, but 2023 opened with an interesting +41%. 

The Cardano (ADA) ecosystem

The fact is that projects continue to be developed within the Cardano ecosystem. 

Recently the Essential Cardano Guide to the Ecosystem was published, which is a guide to the main projects that have been launched on Cardano so far. 

The report was curated by the IOG (Input Output Global) team, and features more than 90 projects developed on the platform in different categories, including electronic identity solutions, metaverse, data exploration, and more.

Cardano’s numbers are these: 56 million transactions, 3.7 million wallets, 4,800 smart contracts, 1,100 projects being built, 1.3 million Twitter followers, 7.2 million native tokens, and 3,200 stake pools. Added to these are 11,000 members of IOG’s technical community on Discord. 

This is therefore a large and very active community, especially from a development perspective. Such a scenario explains both why market demand for ADA skyrocketed in 2021 and why after the crash of 2022 it seems to be recovering. 

The Cardano (ADA) boom

The boom in 2021 was resounding. 

Cardano has been around since 2017, so much so that as early as January 2018, ADA had very briefly exceeded $1 in market value. 

After plummeting to $0.02 in March 2020, when all financial markets around the world collapsed due to the onset of the pandemic, the price had definitely recovered, so much so that by the end of 2020 it was back to $0.17. 

Starting in January 2021, a real boom began that, with ups and downs, led the price to register +1,800% in nine months. One of the best performances in 2021 for a top 10 cryptocurrency. 

However, as evidenced by the current price of $0.35, which is the same as in January 2021, the bear market has completely erased the gains of 2021, so much so that the 2022 low was just above the December 2020 starting level. Moreover, it is also three times lower than the high of the previous cycle. 

Thus, that of 2021 was a colossal boom due only to the speculative bubble, so much so that when the bubble burst everything went back to the way it was before it began to inflate. 

Nevertheless, in the meantime Cardano’s development went on, so it is logical that at some point this long fall that lasted more than a year came to a halt. 

The projects on Cardano

The Essential Cardano Guide lists only 90 projects, in other words the main ones, but there are many others as well. 

There are lending apps such as Aada, which is a peer-to-peer platform that allows users to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies, or NFT marketplaces for ebooks, audiobooks and digital content such as Book.io. 

There are also metaverse and games such as VIRTUA, which is a gamified metaverse offering Web3 games and experiences with digital collectibles

Demeter.run, on the other hand, is a platform that provides tools and infrastructure for the creation of DApps on Cardano, while Empowa is a RealFi project that is enabling the construction of affordable and greener homes in Africa. 

Of the 1,151 projects under construction on Cardano, as many as 32% are related to the NFT world. 6.7% are community-related, while 5.7% are gaming-related. 2.9% are DEXs, while only 2.2% are DeFi projects. 

It is no coincidence that the bulk of this growth occurred precisely in 2021. 

Taking the number of GitHub repositories as a reference, there were less than 100 projects in development on Cardano at the end of 2020, but they doubled in one year. By the end of 2022 there were more than 300. 

The community of developers on Cardano is one of the most active in the crypto world, perhaps also because of the many activities that are carried out within universities and in the field of education. This helps to spread knowledge and foster initiatives for experimentation on this particular blockchain. 

Decentralization

One of the strengths is the decentralization of governance. 

In the next era, called Voltaire, decentralization will be further strengthened by providing the final building blocks necessary for Cardano to become a fully self-sustaining system. Indeed, decentralized voting and treasury infrastructure will be introduced so that anyone can propose changes or updates that the community can vote on. 

It is worth noting though, that compared to other blockchains, development on Cardano is not super-fast, and less centralization could slow it down further. 

In fact, Cardano suffers greatly from competition from projects that are more advanced because they have been in existence longer, such as Ethereum, or because they are less decentralized, such as Solana. Just think of Cardano’s almost total nonexistence within the decentralized finance ecosystem, and the suffering of its NFT projects that fail to emerge due precisely to competition. 

Therefore in theory the premises for a great future are there, but the present casts no small shadow on these prospects.