Recently, two important news items have been released regarding the crypto project Cardano and its native cryptocurrency ADA.
It is a project that is continuing to move forward, despite the evident difficulties that ADA is experiencing in the markets.
Crypto news: the next hard fork of Cardano (ADA)
The first news concerns the upcoming hard fork of Cardano.
On GitHub in fact, the code for Cardano Node 9.0.0 has been released, which contains all the changes for the Conway ledger era.
This is the latest version of the software for Cardano validation nodes. According to the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, this is the last step to reach the Chang hard fork.
Between yesterday and today, the signal for mass updates will also arrive, as for the hard fork to occur, 70% of the nodes will need to vote for the update to the new software. This could happen in the coming days.
The hard fork Chang is important because it will start the path that will give the Cardano project a completely decentralized governance.
Thus would begin the Voltaire era of the project’s roadmap, characterized by major changes to the management system of its network.
The evolution of Cardano
According to the Cardano Improvement Proposal 1694 (CIP 1694), Chang will also allow the introduction of Delegate Representatives (DReps), who will be elected by Cardano. These representatives will have the task of drafting a Constitution that will become the supreme law governing its network.
As can be inferred, these are not changes or updates that have to do directly with the cryptocurrency ADA, or with its role in the financial sector, but a technical and political evolution of the project.
Cardano is increasingly less a project based on a cryptocurrency, and more and more a technological ecosystem based on decentralized governance. Its focus, for example, is not decentralized finance (the DeFi), but politics.
In fact, despite having existed since as far back as 2017, and its cryptocurrency being in the top 10 of those with the highest market capitalization, in the DeFi sector it is even only in 29th place for TVL, behind Near, Starknet and Gnosis.
The abandonment of interest in the DeFi of the project might have played a key role in the loss of value of ADA, but on the other hand, the continuous technical updates are playing a key role in transforming Cardano into a decentralized political ecosystem.
Crypto news: the new stablecoin of the Cardano (ADA) ecosystem
The other important news is the launch of the new stablecoin Anzens (USDA) on Cardano.
EMURGO, the founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, announced the news,
USDA will be fully collateralized in USD, and under the ownership of the institutional-grade trading desk Encryptus.
Encryptus has a European VASP license in Lithuania, and will make USDA available in over 80 countries.
The fact of being able to rely on a secure stablecoin even within the Cardano network should still help the development of DeFi dApps, even if it will probably be used mainly for other purposes.
By now, any crypto ecosystem needs its own solid stablecoin, because stablecoins are the foundation of crypto transactions.
The price of ADA
Despite this, the price of Cardano’s native cryptocurrency (ADA) is falling by 10% in the last seven days, 15% in the last 30, and even 40% since the beginning of the year.
After the boom of 2021, when it reached a historic maximum price of over 3$, a long period of decline began, which seemed to have ended in December 2022 below 0.3$.
Instead, after an initial rebound in 2023, it resumed falling, reaching the minimum in October of last year below $0.25.
With the new bull run, crypto seemed like it could recover, given that in December 2023 it had risen to $0.66 and in March 2024 to $0.77, but starting from the second half of March it began to fall, dropping back below $0.4.
Currently it is still at -88% from the highs, and there are no signs of a possible strong recovery in sight.
On the other hand, the crypto project Cardano is increasingly moving into non-financial areas, and this certainly greatly hinders a possible recovery in the market value of ADA.
Probably the hope of the development team is that, in the future, if this chain is used a lot even and especially outside the financial world, it can make ADA a requested asset to pay the fees on transactions on Cardano.
