Crypto News: Cardano, Polkadot, Chainlink & Algorand News

Crypto News: Cardano, Polkadot, Chainlink & Algorand News
5 min read
28 February 2021

It’s been a big week for Cardano ADA as the network is inching closer to adding smart contracts, everyone's darling Polkadot is bringing parachain functionality online and Chainlink has come out with a new upgrade which they claim will increase speeds by a factor of 10.  This week we’re turning the tables and looking forward to what’s coming up in the cryptoverse.


If you’re a cardano fan it’s been a good week for you for a couple of reasons. First, On February 20th of this year the Cardano price hit a high of just above $1.17. This brought ADA to just below its all time high of $1.30, from January 2018. In total, the Cardano price has risen a whopping 500% this year. 

All of this price action shows how popular the Cardano project has become. For alternative comparison, if you look at Coin Gecko, ADA is just a few cents away from its ATH while XRP still needs another 6x climb to reach its previous peak. 

Why is Cardano price pumping so hard? We think that there are two good reasons that justify the rising ADA price First, Cardano recently introduced staking with the Shelly upgrade. Investors can stake their ADA coins and earn about a 4% passive income for doing, well, nothing. There's no lock up either which means your coins are always available to you. This makes Cardano ADA more attractive to own, versus other coins that don’t have these features.

Second, Cardano is rolling out smart contract functionality. After all these years, developers are finally going to be able to build on top of Cardano. Exchanges, tokens, lending platforms, all of that and more is coming to Cardano soon. 

Now that Cardano will have smart contracts do you think it can compete with Ethereum?  Let us know your thoughts and Cardano price prediction for 2021 in the comments.  

Polkadot also continues to innovate, the creator of Polkadot, the web3 foundation is one step closer to launching what they call parachains. For those who don’t know, parachains are like individual blockchains that run parallel to each other on the Polkadot network. Since applications will be able to run on different parachains, the Polkadot network will be able to handle a lot more traffic without the resulting high fees, here’s looking at you ETH.  

Polkadot’s biggest advantage however is its interoperability with other blockchains. Interoperability is Polkadot’s number one selling point and if the massive Polkadot price appreciation is any indication, the market is pricing this in as a very desirable feature. 

It can be difficult to keep up with all the innovation happening in crypto because new features seem to be fast and furious. 

The smart contract platform Algorand is teaming up with Ledgermatic to offer a range of blockchain services to enterprise clients. 

 This is great Algorand news since it shows how blockchains aren’t just for individual users, they can also offer solutions to large corporations and other professional organizations.  The Algorand price hasn’t gone up much on the news, but then again the entire crypto market seems to be taking a nice breather today.

Pricing oracle Chainlink has figured out a way to 10x its efficiency.  We won’t get heavy into the details but the short version goes like this. The Chainlink team found a way to move a bunch of computation off-chain. All of this work that was being done on Ethereum before, can now be done offchain and only the results get published onchain.  That means a 10x boost in efficiency. This should lead to lower fees and more scalability. Way to go Chanlink team.

The almighty Federal Reserve wasn’t looking so mighty recently when a glitch shut down their system for several hours. The so-called “operational error” caused a bunch of different services to go offline, including direct deposits, ACH wire transfers and other financial products that underpin the global financial system. Definitely not a good look for the legacy financial system.  Compare this to Bitcoin, the world’s most secure financial network. Bitcoin never goes down. For more than a decade Bitcoin has been making new blocks and clearing billions of dollars worth of transactions without fail.  Decentralization for the win
.

If you had to guess the total number of crypto users worldwide, you may be surprised. Crypto  has now topped 100 million people. Even though Bitcoin has been around for more than a decade these are still early days of crypto and with everything that’s happening with Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum and all of the other cool projects out there, it’s groundbreaking stuff but we’re only getting started. 

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Alex 9.8K
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