On Tuesday (June 14), Dan Gambardello, Founder of Crypto Capital Venture, pointed out the smart contract platform Cardano ($ADA) is recently becoming even more popular. 

Yesterday, Gambardello, who is a huge fan of Cardano, the host of the very popular YouTube channel “Crypto Capital Venture“, and a respected member of the Cardano community, told his over 230K Twitter followers:

So, is there any evidence to support this claim?

Well, the Vasil hard fork, which is expected to deliver a massive improvement in the performance of the Cardano blockchain is expected to go live on the mainnet on June 29.

Charles Hoskinson, who is Co-Founder and CEO of IO Global (aka “IOG”, formerly known as “IOHK”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, talked about why he is excited about the Vasil hard fork in a video released on his YouTube channel on April 12.

“As many of, you know, a major major major hard fork combinator event is happening in June, which is the Vasil hard fork, and that is going to contain pipelining, which will be a massive performance improvement to Cardano, alongside the first wave of significant Plutus enhancements since Plutus shipped in September.“

On February 1, John Woods, Director of Cardano Architecture at IOG, published a blog post, in which he introduced pipelining:

“Pipelining is, effectively, an evolution in Cardano’s ‘plumbing’. It is a key element in our scaling plan this year, one in the series of published steps covering our methodical approach to flex Cardano’s capacity as the ecosystem grows…

“Pipelining – or more precisely, diffusion pipelining – is an improvement to the consensus layer that facilitates faster block propagation. It enables even greater gains in headroom, which will enable further increases to Cardano’s performance and competitiveness...

“Pipelining is just one of the pillars supporting Cardano’s scaling this year. Combined, all these changes will lead Cardano to a position where it is faster than its competitors, and a highly competitive platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) this year.“

As “ADA Whale” (“cardano_whale” on Twitter) explained on June 1, the Vasil hard fork combinator (HCF) event will deliver enhancements such as “reference scripts (point to script on-chain instead of constantly reloading it)…, reference inputs, inline datums, collateral, core interpreter speed increases, diffusion pipelining,” which means that “L1 throughput becomes one of best in crypto.”

And here are a few of the Cardano projects he mentioned:

In the mean time, Cardano’s NFT ecosystem seems to be growing very rapidly.

As you may remember, on June 7, Lawrence announced — during a conversation on Twitter Spaces with Patrick Tobler, Founder and CEO of NFT-MAKER, and Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of IO Global (aka “IOG”, formerly known as “IOHK”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development — that he was going to release a Cardano-powered NFT collection consisting of 30 unique pieces.

Here is what Hoskinson said about NFTs during this chat:

“I didn’t expect Cardano to be a major player in the NFT space, at least initially. It kind of caught us all by surprise. We worked really hard at trying to create great asset standards… We didn’t expect to to have NFTs be quite large, but then it was completely community led. So, all these projects materialised out of nowhere, and about 40% of the 1000+ projects on Cardano are NFT-related, and there’s over five million assets that have been issued on Cardano, and the transaction volume is remarkable…

“There’s about $270 million worth of sales that are occurring on a monthly basis when you look at this in the last three months average. So, it’s an unexpected surprise, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense. When you look at the native asset standard, when you look at the eUTXO model in particular, it makes it really easy to do an airdrop, it makes it really easy and low cost to issue things and manage these things that that are coming through. So, in hindsight, it does kind of make sense.“

Then, on June 10, Lawrence announced that his “Martin: The Reunion” NFT collection had gone on sale on his website www.martincnft.com and that holders of any of these 30 NFTs would be invited to attend on June 15 the Hollywood premiere of “Martin: The Reunion”, which is set to air on Black Entertainment Television (BET) on January 16.

Influential American rapper and record producer DeAndre Cortez Way, aka “Soulja Boy“, also seems to be excited by Cardano-powered NFTs.

On June 3, Soulja Boy turned his Twitter followers to ask what Cardano NFTs to buy by sending out the following tweet that Hoskinson found interesting.

In April, an even more famous American rapper “Snoop Dogg“, alias “Cozomo de’ Medici”, and his son, “Champ Medici”, launched their collaboration with crypto project Clay Nation. The result was a Cardano-based NFT collection called “Clay Mates“. Clay Mates are “characters who are brought to life in stop motion animation and re-homed on the blockchain as CNFTs.”

Image Credit

Featured Image by “Quantitatives” via Unsplash