Cardano (ADA) Jumps 25%, Overtake’s Ripple’s XRP As The Fourth-Biggest Cryptocurrency

Cardano’s ADA is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap dethroning Ripple’s XRP. Today, the ADA price has surged a massive 25% and is currently at $0.66 with a market cap of $20.9 billion.

Over the last week, Cardno’s ADA price has surged a massive 90% pushing it within the top five crypto ranks. Interestingly, ADA has been one of the top-performing altcoins so far in 2021 with its price multiplying 4x with a solid 300% gain. The recent price rally happens on the backdrop of a number of developments taking place on the Cardano network.

There’s some excitement about the introduction of smart contract functionality on Cardano which will give developers the options to create and deploy their own decentralized applications (DApps). On the other hand, the IOHK team, the development team behind Cardano, announced that platform users can now create their own custom tokens and use them on the network.

This feature comes as part of the “Goguen Mary” update on the Cardano platform. All the custom tokens will work on Cardano’s mainnet, meaning users can use them just like the existing ADA native cryptocurrency.

With this upgrade, Cardano will become a multi-asset blockchain network wherein ADA remains the “principal currency”. IOHK Marketing and Communication Director, Tim Harrison writes:

“This MA capability will become a fresh development fulcrum for developers worldwide, further widening Cardano’s reach and potential.”

As per the official announcement by IOHK, the team has successfully deployed the Goguen Mary update via a hard fork o the network.

NEW BLOG: Yesterday we successfully deployed the Mary update to the #Cardano public testnet, bringing us one step closer to becoming a multi-asset smart contract platform. Here’s more from @timbharrison about the road to Mary on mainnet & what’s next ???? https://t.co/E48AIBiRYF

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) February 4, 2021

Charles Hoskinson: Cardano Will Be Much Better than Ethereum 2.0

Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson recently appeared in an interview with BitBoy Crypto founder Ben Armstrong. Criticizing the developments with Ethereum 2.0, Hoskinson said that his project will be much better in the near future. Hoskinson casts some doubts over the sustainability of Ethereum 2.0.

Criticizing the Ethereum 2.0 scaling model, Hoskinson said that it is much easier for Cardano to achieve higher transaction throughput (TPS). He added:

“We’ve chosen a radically different scaling models. And actually I think both of them have the potential working, but I think Vitalik’s are a little bit riskier from an engineering and research point of view. This is why it is so difficult for them to get Eth 2.0 out. They have chosen to shard all that stuff. We don’t have to shard. We can get a thousand TPS on the base level and adding Hydra we can get to whatever we want. […] Because of UTXO Cardano is much easier to shard”.

Furthermore, Hoskinson called Ethereum 2.0’s approach risky and not scientifically proven.