As per the data put together by Santiment and CryptoRank, Cardano was the highest developed crypto project in 2021 on GitHub, as it boasted more than 140,000 events. The top three most developed projects included Kusama and Polkadot, with the second and third position, respectively. They have approximately the same number of events during the course of the year. However, the latest Cardano news indicate that the crypto was able to surpass the development activity of that of Ethereum by a wide margin, as the latter had claimed the fourth spot in the list.
A GitHub evnt is defined by Santiment as one that creates a pull request, creates an issue, commenting on a pull request or issue, or watching/starring/forking a code repository, amongst others. Last week, Cardano’s founder had conducted a live YouTube session in which he had disclosed that the total number of projects that were currently under development on the Cardano blockchain was around 127. Apart from that, the founder had gone on to add that he was expecting the number of Cardano users to surge as well from the existing 2 million. He believes there will be a tenfold increase in this number because of the growing popularity of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
The technological advancement of Cardano is also gaining a lot of traction post-Alonzo. The layer-two Hydra upgrade is one of the notable works in progress of the blockchain, which does not partition the ledger, but is able to channel transactions to staking pools off-chain. In theory, this could allow the network to undergo advanced linear scaling, with hundreds of transactions being processed by each ‘hydra nodes’. Another aspect worth mentioning is the initial stake pool offering (ISPO), which is a novel fintech funding mechanism, and is unique to the Cardano blockchain.
This setup allows blockchain enthusiasts to fund a new project by delegating their cryptocurrencies in a protocol and they get rewards in the form of tokens of the project in question. As far as the ADA staking rewards are concerned, they are given to the developers. The process is a very secure one because the funds don’t have to leave the delegator’s wallet. Genius Yield is one such project, which saw its ISPO pools go past the $118 million mark in a matter of 24 hours.
In his YouTube video, Charles Hoskinson had talked about the concerns that some members of the crypto community have had about Cardano. He highlighted that most of the crimes that are conducted involve fiat currencies, such as the US dollar. But, he added that there was a need to change the bizarre mantra of Silicon Valley to move quickly and break things in the world of crypto because this had resulted in losses worth $10.5 billion in the DeFi (decentralized finance) space in 2021. Hoskinson highlighted the methodical and slow approach of Cardano and said that most VCs don’t comprehend that it actually has a community.
He said that most believe that it is just him behind a microphone Santiment. Hoskinson went on to say that it will eventually transition into an open source project permanently and even compared it to the Linux operating system. He is hoping to switch to an open-source DApps system and away from the hierarchical structure. Hoskinson envisions that the Cardano roadmap would be completed faster via this ‘small resource commitment’. He called out VCs, podcasters and YouTubers who have questioned the growth of Cardano and said that they are at the top where GitHub commits are concerned.
When speaking about the potential of DeFi and Cardano’s role, he said that Santiment engineers need to have a long-term vision in order to survive in this space. Cardano had recently experienced a price correction of about 70%, but the latest crypto price analysis indicates that its price could actually rebound. As a matter of fact, it may be in oversold territory, which shows that it can breakout the $2 mark.
