Popular commission-free trading platform Robinhood, which allows users to buy a number of financial assets including equities, options contracts, and cryptocurrencies, has listed the popular smart contract platform Cardano ($ADA).
The platform now supports a wide number of cryptocurrencies after first launching its offering back in 2018, with BTC and ETH being the only cryptoassets available. It then added Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, before adding several other tokens.
Robinhood’s listing announcement on social media implies Cardano was added to the platform in response to customer demand. Cardano’s ADA is now being actively traded on the platform, with the listing coming ahead of a major upgrade to the cryptocurrency’s network, the Vasil hard fork.
The Vasil hard fork is a major upgrade that will involve four Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs). The hard fork was expected to be implemented in late June but was delayed because of Terra’s collapse, as the team behind it wanted to exercise caution before shipping out the upgrade.
Cardano creator Charles Hoskison has said the hard fork will deliver a “massive performance improvement.” Hoskinson has recently noted developers are making progress on the hard fork, noting:
Things are moving along very quickly. Extensive testing is still being done by both the community and still by us. A lot of integration work is happening behind the scenes, so all of that infrastructure is looking good.
Hoskinson noted that September is “what it looks like” for the upgrade to occur, although he cautioned that the date may be changed if “something is discovered or we run into a substantial slowdown somewhere.”
Robinhood’s listing notably means that Cardano is now available to the platform’s 13.2 million monthly active users, which could boost its liquidity. As reported, a popular cryptocurrency analyst has suggested that Cardano could soon start outperforming the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin as traders start using the cryptocurrency to hedge against Ethereum’s transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) one.
According to the host of Coin Bureau, which shared a video updating his 2.1 million YouTube subscribers on the cryptocurrency market, smart contract platforms other than Ethereum – such as Cardano, Solana, and BNB Chain – can be seen as a hedge against Ethereum’s upcoming major upgrade, the Merge.
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