Despite not faring especially well lately, Cardano has plenty to be proud of as the year comes to an end. The first three phases of the Cardano roadmap – Byron, Shelley, and Goguen – are almost complete, enabling network growth and diverse ecosystem participation. Major developments include a full scope of apps including smart contract capability, asset creation, and data storage and the full decentralization of block production.
Basho and Voltaire expected in 2022
Next year, Cardano will move into Basho and then into Voltaire. Basho will be focused on scaling the network to billions of enterprise grade transactions, while Voltaire will focus on growing governance on-chain.
Addition of native tokens
Cardano enabled this new feature in March 2021. With that, it became possible to create and transact in multiple assets in the ecosystem. Cardano is uniquely designed with a multi-asset ledger as a third-gen blockchain. Users can create and exchange tokens without smart contracts. The unified asset creation and management process is a distinct advantage for developers.
Smart contract capability
In September, the Alonzo Hard Fork brought Cardano programmability. It made it possible to create and deploy Plutus powered smart contracts, paving the way for Basho. Now, developers can build DeFi use cases and DApps on the Cardano blockchain.
For this and other reasons, Cardano hosted 23 million transactions in December. According to estimates of community aggregators, around 274 projects are currently in development or actively running on the network. They include payments, insurance, wallets, lending and borrowing, defi, stablecoins, and DEXs.
What’s more, Cardano now has over 2.5 million native assets, with more than 2 million of these being Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
Groundbreaking partnerships
While the partnerships are too many to encompass, here are some leading ones.
Veritree
Cardano joined forces with this international land restoration and tree planting verification company. It will use the Cardano blockchain to provide a transparent and immutable blockchain-based report of its reforestation efforts.
Save the Children
Cardano entered into partnership with Save the Children, one of the biggest NPOs for children in the world, to look for ways to use Cardano and ADA to benefit their humanitarian initiatives in East Africa.
HackerOne
Finally, Cardano partnered with HackerOne for its premiere Bug Bounty Program. This is the most prominent hacker-powered security community in the world. For the Bug Bounty Program, Cardano will turn to HackerOne’s white hat hackers and due diligence procedures to maintain its status of a stable and secure blockchain.
