Cardano to Support Smart Contracts in September: Can ADA Continue Its Legend Amid Front and Rear Attacks?

ADA+4.85%

Since Cardano announced it would launch smart contracts, its native token ADA has shown a soaring trend. OKX real-time market data shows that from the low of $1.529 on August 11 to the high of $2.251 on August 15, ADA's maximum gain reached 47%.

If we extend the timeline, as of August 18, ADA's year-to-date gain has exceeded 1000%. Such impressive performance has enabled it to surpass assets like XRP , DOT , and DOGE, becoming the world's fourth-largest crypto asset with a market value exceeding $64 billion.

Regarding Cardano, sentiment in the crypto community is quite complex. Supporters praise it generously, calling it a refreshing force and a "technological revolution initiated by academics" with naming that's full of "philosophical depth." Opponents, however, consider it mere facade—essentially a project focused on marketing. After all, its sworn competitor Ethereum, which it vowed to surpass, already has a flourishing on-chain ecosystem, while Cardano remains in a "dead chain" stage with slow development progress—established for many years yet still unable to deploy smart contracts.

Yet it's precisely this Cardano that, despite project scandals and long-term bear market打击, has seen its token ADA achieve a "comeback against the wind." Rising from its historical low of $0.018 on March 13, 2020, to its historical high of $2.470 in May this year, ADA achieved an astonishing maximum gain of 136 times in just over a year—resembling a "miracle coin" trend that left Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz and others exclaiming "I don't understand!"

Now, slowly-developing Cardano is finally set to welcome smart contract functionality in September. Whether this will enable the sparsely-populated Cardano ecosystem to achieve "overtaking on a curve" and allow the already-mythical hundred-bagger ADA to "go divine" again remains to be seen. Perhaps we need to review Cardano's development history to seek some inspiration for the future.

14+ Months, Over 100x Gain: ADA Takes Fourth Place Globally

When mentioning star projects, Cardano certainly deserves a spot. Its token ADA, after 6 years of development, has become the fourth-largest asset with a total market capitalization exceeding $64 billion. As of writing, OKX real-time market data shows that affected by the broader market decline, ADA's price has dropped in the past two days, currently at $2.006. This represents a 110x increase from its low of $0.018 during last year's "Black March 12," though it still lags 23% behind its all-time high of $2.470 set on May 16. Just days ago, shortly after news broke that Cardano would support smart contracts in September, ADA even briefly rose to $2.251—just 10% away from matching its historical high. This rally briefly made ADA the third-largest crypto asset by market capitalization.

Faced with such gains, on August 15, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz tweeted that ADA, ranked third by market cap on CoinMarketCap, was "a mystery" to him. He stated that among the industry professionals he's接触, no one considers Cardano attractive in terms of developer activity. These comments naturally drew rebuttal from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, who suggested Mike Novogratz was colluding with bankers and that his statements appeared immature.

This dispute ended with Mike Novogratz clarifying he had no ill will toward the ADA team, understood Cardano had passionate followers, and his comments merely reflected personal belief in better options. Moreover, investors don't need to catch every trade. But from this debate, we can see Charles Hoskinson's response speed and his常年奋战在营销一线的工作状态.

Mentioning Cardano inevitably involves Charles Hoskinson, a legendary figure who has worked successively with Dan Larimer (BM), Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and others. Although Charles Hoskinson's collaboration with them wasn't particularly long, his accumulated experience and influence enabled him to soon launch Cardano—hailed as an improvement upon first-generation blockchain (Bitcoin ) and second-generation blockchain (Ethereum)—which he termed "blockchain 3.0."

Cardano was founded in 2015 and conducted its public offering from September 2015 to January 2017, with a total supply of 45 billion tokens. Of these, 25 billion were for crowdfunding, 5 billion for company operations and development funding support, and the remaining 15 billion would be distributed as block rewards. Because early Japanese investors accounted for nearly 90%, Cardano also earned the moniker "Japanese Ethereum."

This funding situation is also related to Cardano's architecture. The Cardano team consists of three organizations: the Foundation, IOHK, and Emurgo. The Foundation, based in Switzerland, is primarily responsible for team fund management and project promotion. IOHK, responsible for technical R&D, was founded by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood and is based in Hong Kong. Emurgo, based in Japan, serves as a startup incubator to promote ecosystem expansion and development, thus leading ADA's fundraising. It's worth noting that this seemingly separate structure harbored contradictions—Cardano encountered a "tumultuous year" in 2018, with both Emurgo and the Foundation successively questioned for issues including nepotism in key positions, opaque fund usage, and neglecting core duties.

Beyond "Japanese Ethereum," Cardano has also been endowed with highly romantic labels like "academic school" and "philosopher." Its project implementation process is divided into five phases: Byron (British poet), Shelley (British Romantic poet), Goguen (American computer scientist), Basho (Japanese haiku master), and Voltaire (French Enlightenment thinker and writer).

Among these, Shelley and Goguen are important phases in Cardano's parallel development, conducted by different teams within the organization. Shelley's purpose is to achieve decentralization, with increasingly more nodes transitioning to being run by the Cardano community, while also introducing delegation of stake and reward schemes. Users can stake ADA and earn rewards during this phase. Goguen represents a major advancement in Cardano network capabilities, building upon Shelley to enable dApp creation. The completion of Shelley and Goguen in parallel means Cardano will allow users from both technical and non-technical backgrounds to create and execute functional smart contracts on the mainnet.

Smart Contracts Coming in September: Countdown to Cardano Becoming a Complete Public Chain

Bitcoin pioneered broader crypto asset applications by solving the Byzantine Generals Problem to achieve distributed system consensus, but the high energy consumption of the PoW mechanism and scalability limitations—processing at most 7 transactions per second to achieve consensus—have made Bitcoin widely criticized. This has led subsequent public chains to focus on solving these problems.

Cardano employs the Ouroboros algorithm as the key to unlocking blockchain 3.0. Reportedly, Ouroboros is the world's first provably secure PoS mechanism, recognized by authorities in the cryptography field. However, the algorithm's settlement performance TPS metric remains somewhat controversial. Given current foundational technology, TPS performance and decentralization are negatively correlated variables. Excessively pursuing network performance inevitably leads to centralization, while excessive centralization puts the cart before the horse—yet still underperforms pure centralization in terms of performance. The Ouroboros algorithm is relatively conservative, considering network transmission issues without blindly pursuing TPS. Instead, it focuses on developing the cryptographic security attributes of encrypted cryptocurrencies while balancing decentralization requirements.

Currently, Cardano network functionality is relatively limited. Staking is the method for long-term Cardano believers to earn returns. According to Staking Rewards, Cardano is currently the world's largest PoS blockchain network, with a staked value of $45.275 billion and a staking rate of 67.57%.

Looking at Cardano's development history, because it emphasizes starting from for-profit entities, its integration direction has consistently been governments and enterprises. Considering markets like the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe are approaching saturation, Cardano has focused its development efforts on Africa. This includes cooperation with the Ethiopian government to improve its education system, creating decentralized identities (DIDs) for millions of students and teachers through an identity management system called Atala PRISM. Ultimately, these基础设施 can enable owning academic records, employment, and asset purchases. Additionally, Cardano has developed Atala Scan for anti-counterfeiting that can establish product origin and verification, as well as supply chain product Atala Trace.

In early 2021, Reddit platform r/Cardano had 94,750 subscribers, while as of August 16, subscriptions have exceeded 560,000—a nearly 500% increase in 8 months. Founder Charles Hoskinson's Twitter followers have also surpassed 580,000, showing a strong community taking shape.

Now, Cardano plans to launch the Alonzo hard fork on the mainnet on September 12. This upgrade will allow users to run smart contracts on Cardano. Previously, the lack of smart contracts meant the six-year-old Cardano couldn't support dApps and was widely criticized. Now this missing puzzle piece is finally being completed, meaning Cardano will begin competing with major public chains on ecosystem footing as a complete public chain. The latest GitHub data also shows that Cardano has the most development activity, followed by Polygon and Solana.

A maximum gain of 47% in 5 days naturally demonstrates investor enthusiasm to the market. However, it's worth noting that its target competitor—Ethereum—already flourishes in DeFi, NFT, and other fields, while later smart contract-capable competitors like Polkadot, Polygon, Near, and others are also accelerating their expansion. Although Cardano has left impressions of being "academically oriented" and "technologically outstanding," its implementation capability remains widely questioned. Additionally, although its token has achieved hundred-bagger myths, this is still attributed to the team's marketing and market capabilities rather than value investment. Therefore, where Cardano's future lies, whether it's overvalued or undervalued, may only gradually become apparent after it becomes a fully functional blockchain.

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