Cardano’s ADA experienced a massive pump after a major shakeup in the crypto sphere due to one tweet by the arguable tech king, Elon Musk. Musk tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns. This caused speculators to buy ADA and many other sustainable tokens leading to a dramatic rise in price. ADA rose to an all-time high of $2.47. This seems to be just the beginning for Cardano. Sustainability, interoperability, and scalability are the pillars of the vision. Cardano’s much anticipated test net is on its way with the Alonzo hard fork and with it, smart contracts. Will Charles and team be able to flip Ethereum as the smart contract provider of the world? Only time will tell.

The Shelly era marked the decentralization of the Cardano eco system with 13.6 billion tokens staked in the first month to help run the network via proof of stake protocols. The Goguen era is bringing to the network many new features and products. A $250,000 grant was given to developers to start more blockchain development on the network. As the Shelly era and Goguen era overlap, culminating into the Alonzo hard fork, Cardano is ramping up to get smart contracts finalized and finally enter the DEFI market, bringing new tokens and DAPPs to the network.

IOHK has created Project Catalyst to jump start a full and robust ecosystem on Cardano. With the introduction of Plutus (Greek god of wealth) programming language, Cardano is providing everything a developer needs to create sound smart contracts, all peer reviewed of course. The Goguen era also brings an easier enterprise smart contract system called the Marlowe Playground. Marlowe will allow businesses to create smart contracts with greater ease and less programming know how. Marlowe, allows contracts to be written in the language of finance, rather than using a general-purpose language on the blockchain, as stated on their website. Marlowe will also have a visual programming tool called Blockly rather than text-based programming. These developments to the network will allow for wider and easier adoption.

Joseph Goguen, the namesake of the era, was an American Computer scientist who is known for his many contributions to computer sciences and abstract data types. He invented initial algebra semantics, theory of executions, security models and helped develop the OBJ family of computer languages. Goguen pushed comp sci forward with his contributions and inspired colleagues to think bigger philosophically. Grigore Rosu cites Goguen as a main inspiration for K Framework. “K is a rewrite-based executable semantic framework in which programming languages, type systems and formal analysis tools can be defined using configurations, computations and rules.” As the Lead Dev of K, Rosu was tapped by Charles Hoskinson to help with the groundwork of Cardano. K was made for mission-critical systems that cannot afford to fail. When billions of dollars are on the line this is an absolute necessity.

The Alonzo hard fork is anticipated to come anywhere from June to late August. The hard fork gets its name from yet another mathematician, Alonzo Church. Church Developed Lambda (λ) calculus as part of his research of the foundation of mathematics (philosophies which dictate mathematics.) “The λ calculus can be called the smallest universal programming language of the world. The λ calculus consists of a single transformation rule (variable substitution) and a single function definition scheme.” Lambda calculus is the foundation upon which the Haskell computer language was built. Cardano was built with Haskell. You can connect the dots in the Cardano mythos. Everything about Cardano has been built and curated meticulously.

The teaser image above by Coin98 Analytics shows prominent projects working within Cardano’s ecosystem and that is not even all of them. It may or may not dispel the vapor wave/ghost chain FUD for Cardano bears. Once smart contracts are deployed, it will be a major game changer for crypto. As the broken Ethereum network works to go from proof of work to proof of stake, Cardano has been working diligently to make sure that when the hard fork commences the community can hit the ground running. Having Uniswap/Pancakeswap competitors on Cardano’s chain will certainly bring more investors and traders, at a fraction of the price of Eth swaps. Cardano will be competing with other chains that have been able to bring gas fees down like BSC, AVAX, Matic/Polygon and ONE. There is stiff competition but the Cardano community seems to be cheering on Charles and his team, sharing the philosophy, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Cardano stands out as a humanitarian blockchain. We can see this via the work that has been done with #cardanoafrica. Hoskinson’s vision of the blockchain is to help fix systems and infrastructure in developing countries. Many in the developing world are under banked and Cardano is seeking to resolve this for many African countries. Charles states in the #cardanoafrica Special, “It’s difficult for people to receive money and send money. These remittance transactions on average carry an 8%-15% fee, when a person wants to borrow money, if it’s even possible, these micro finance transactions have interest rates as high as 85% according to the World Bank.” He points to legacy systems being the root of the problem for many on the African continent. Hoskinson believes everyone has an equal right to access markets, not just the ultra-wealthy or even those in developed nations.

IOHK inked a deal with the Ethiopian government to provide IDs for 5 million students. Atala PRISM is an ID solution built on Cardano. These IDs will carry certain metadata that is able to verify credentials and certification. IOHK is hoping it can be rolled out on the national level to 107 million Ethiopians. The hope is to bring other African nations into the digital age and onto Web3.0 and it appears they are off to a great start in making their vision a reality.

Cardano has been delivering everything on the roadmap. Many in cryptoverse have been impatient, but if you believe in the work and vision of Cardano and IOHK, you might be very bullish on their blockchain. As always, time will tell, investor sentiment is ever-changing. The future looks bright for ADA and the projects that will come with the Alonzo fork are extremely exciting for those in crypto. With the peer reviewed nature and methodical approach of Cardano investors would be wise to be patient.