In a recent YouTube video (on October 4, 2018), Cardano (ADA), the smart contract blockchain created by the IOHK company, provided updates on their development roadmap.
After Cardano’s mainnet launched last year, investors have been seeking upgrades to the network that they hope will help ADA become a top 5 cryptocurrency. Data from CryptoCompare shows that ADA is currently the eleventh cryptocurrency by market cap, ahead of XMR but right behind BNB.
During September, there were a handful of upgrades to Cardano. The most exciting news is the launch of the Yoroi wallet. This light wallet is offers impressive speed and is built into a Google Chrome plug-in, storing your coins right in your browser.
Other developments include expansions to Cardano’s marketing department. Cardano hired Florian Bohnert as Chief Marketing Officer.
The entire Cardano team has been regularly releasing blog posts and other content, but they hope that Florian will provide even more public exposure to Cardano. In addition, Cardano hired new community managers in China, Korea, and Japan, and are seeking to hire new translators and help desk leaders.
The video also explained what’s coming on the horizon for Cardano – most significantly – a network upgrade: Cardano version 1.3.1. The developments have been submitted and are in review now. Along with this update, the new Cardano testnet titled “IELE” will be available soon. This will allow more developers to test their code on Cardano without risking loss of capital.
Lastly, Cardano confirmed that Trezor support is coming. ADA fans have been waiting months for hardware support, and Trezor has confirmed that users will soon be able to store ADA on the Trezor hardware wallet.
Community Unenthused
Although these updates are coming along well, ADA holders don’t seem as enthusiastic as the developers are. There have been a lot of developments, but at the same time, many upgrades are being postponed. The “Shelley” phase of upgrades, originally scheduled for 2018, has been pushed back to 2019. This phase includes implementing Ouroboros BFT stake delegation, multisignature transactions, human friendly addresses, and quantum resistant signatures.
The Cardano community seems wary that upcoming ETH upgrades, like Casper and sharding, will overpower any progress by Cardano.
In this vein. comment on Reddit explains: “Concerning Shelly I’m a little bit worried. It seems they postponed it again (staking and delegation testnets) till sometime in 2019 (date now not further specified).”
