On Wednesday (May 26), Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of IOHK, explained what makes Cardano ($ADA) stand out among blockchain platforms (including Ethereum and its many challengers).
His comments were made during an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita and Zack Guzman.
When asked by Guzman what is about Cardano that makes it better than other blockchain platforms, the Cardano founder replied:
“You know, now, mainstream real people are coming to space, and they are trying to figure out well what can I do with this. So how do I do lending? How do I do insurance? How do I do payments? And why are these things better than the conventional legacy systems? And usually it breaks down saying you have fast finality, you have global settlement, you have significantly lower cost structures, it’s easier to scale things down, so for example micro IPOs, so you can IPO small scale firms, not just under $100 million, $200 million dollar deals, and so forth.
“And the reason we built Cardano was that we wanted to build a collection of protocols that could do all of these things specifically for the developing world because we saw Africa growing at 10-15 percent per year and Southeast Asia growing at similar paces and do that for some of the poorest people around who over the next 30 to 50 years will build up wealth and they could be at a completely alternative system that has built into it everything.
“It has governance built in, it has compliance, and so forth, and these are the kinds of conversations we have and we see not only us [having] tremendous growth, but we’ve seen the industry as a whole have tremendous growth, and actually government adoption is pretty remarkable.“
Guzman then asked for an update on how what’s being built on top of Cardano compares to what’s being built on other Ethereum killers.
Hoskinson answered:
“First off, it’s important to say Ethereum is killing itself. They’re replacing Etheruem with Ethereum 2.0. So, Ethereum 2.0 will kill Ethereum 1.0. So, I think that’s the Ethereum killer.
“We try to do more holistic things. It’s not just can you process smart contracts. It’s also can you do that with identity and compliance? Can you do that with metadata? Can you do that with automated regulation?… Can you do that at a scale for billions of people? Can you do that with some notion of governance that doesn’t require a custodial entity to always be around to take care of it?
“We’re used to custodial entities… but when you strip away that centralized curator who’s going to make it quantum resistant? who’s going to do the next big innovation? Who’s going to make sure it’s interoperable with some big legacy payment system or the BIS or something for CBDCs and so forth?
“So, Cardano was really built to be holistic in that respect. For smart contracts, we’re almost through that entire rollout. We started December with metadata and that allowed us to bring identity to the blockchain. We’ve already started deploying those systems in Georgia — the country of Georgia — and in Ethiopia for five million students.
“The next major milestone was ability to issue assets on the platform. We’re seeing the largest adoption there with NFCs, and there’s a lot of NFT platforms coming in, and the final rollout will be programmability. So, that’s smart contracts, and that’s imminent in the platform. So, in the next 90 days, we should see a lot of beta testing and that it’s just a question of what’s the best time to do that for all the people who use it.“
According to data by CryptoCompare, $ADA is currently (as of 20:53 ITC on May 26) trading around $1.743, up 14.90% in the past 24-hour period.
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