IOHK, the global blockchain research and development company behind Cardano, recently announced the blockchain’s cryptocurrency ada has been listed on Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. Coinbase’s community of more than 43 million users are now able to trade ada with US dollars, Bitcoin, euros and British pounds.
The technical integration of ada into the exchange has been carried out using Coinbase’s Rosetta open standard, which IOHK is now planning to use as one of its general purpose integration tools for blockchain-agnostic companies.
The listing marks another step forward after a year of remarkable momentum for the growth of Cardano functionality. From the success of its Incentivized testnet in December 2019, to its successful Shelley staking upgrade last year, making it 100 times more decentralized than the bitcoin blockchain and its Mary upgrade, which allows users to create tokens on the blockchain. Cardano’s smart contract functionality is currently being rolled out.
The listing comes at a time where decentralization of Cardano continues unabated as full responsibility for block production is handed to Cardano’s broad network of community stake pool operators. Cardano has been five years in the making, the product of extensive research and development by IOHK, including producing more than 65 peer-reviewed scientific papers, in order to create a blockchain which is not only provably secure, environmentally sustainable and able to scale to meet the needs of the global population.
“This marks another significant milestone in the development of Cardano, allowing Coinbase’s extensive user base to access ada for the first time,” IOHK CEO Charles Koskinson said. “The months ahead will see us achieve many more milestones, including the continued expansion in the size of our advanced on-chain governance platform, Catalyst, which has already funded a number of proposals to enrich the Cardano ecosystem. We will also announce a number of industry-leading commercial partnerships which will provide real-world value to end users, and the continued roll-out of our smart contracts functionality, which will allow developers to write and deploy smart contracts on Cardano.
“We admire Coinbase’s continuing contribution to the open-source space of which Rosetta is a great example. Rosetta has the ability to interlink numerous blockchains under the hood, giving greater flexibility for institutions to manage numerous assets without spending months researching the various technical implementations. We look forward to working with the Rosetta team going forward to find better and more efficient ways for the industry to work together.”
