Amy Arnott, a portfolio strategist at Morningstar that focuses on cryptocurrencies, has revealed she believes Cardano (ADA) could become one of the largest three cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and go mainstream, along with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Speaking to Business Insider, Arnott backed the cryptocurrency created by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, saying it is a promising altcoin that along with BTC and ETH could form a “big three” of mainstream cryptocurrencies.
She added:
Cardano is similar to ethereum, in that it’s a protocol that has a lot of potential technical applications. There’s a lot of enthusiasm about Cardano, and also various stablecoins.
Arnott also noted that institutional investors have been “far more willing to adopt cryptocurrencies and look at them as an investment asset.” As that trend continues, she said, we will “see other cryptocurrencies become more mainstream,” likely referring to Cardano.
Speaking to the publication, she also revealed she would like to see a diversified cryptocurrency index fund in the form of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that would allow investors to gain exposure to the space as a whole.
The SEC, she said, still hasn’t approved any cryptocurrency ETFs in the United States, which “makes it very difficult for mainstream investors to gain exposure to cryptocurrencies.” Such an ETF could even help reduce the volatility seen in the cryptocurrency space while attracting more traditional investors with a lower risk profile.
The volatility may also in part be coming from a difficulty to determine a suitable price for cryptocurrencies, which are not cash-generating assets. Ether, for its use to power DeFi and NFTs, has seen some refer to it as “digital gas” and has some utility that “should provide some sort of price floor.”
The same could be true for Cardano once it rolls out support for smart contracts, allowing developers to create new DeFi applications on top of it. As reported, the ADA network is set to become browser and mobile-compatible in the near future thanks to a new upgrade being worked on by the team behind the project. The upgrade will allow running the Plutus application backend in Javascript, the most widely-used programming language on the web.
Last month one of the companies behind the Cardano blockchain, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), has announced the launch of Alonzo Blue 2.0’s testnet for the cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Alonzo Blue is part of a series of upgrades that will bring smart contracts to the Cardano network and allow developers to create decentralized applications on it.
The Alonzo hard fork is part of the network’s “Goguen” era, named after Joseph Goguen, an American professor of computer science from the University of California and the University of Oxford. The Goguen era comes after the Shelley phase, in which Cardano became a decentralized blockchain and community members became validators.
Alonzo will roll out in three phases: blue, white, and purple. Each opens up more to the public until the upgrade’s full integration is complete, with the process taking 90 days. It’s expected to be completed by the end of August. It will include a converter to allow ERC20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to run on Cardano.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
IMAGE CREDIT
Featured Image via Unsplash
