Before the Shelly hard folk, centralized IOHK nodes had full control of the production of blocks during the Bryon era. The centralization has been decreasing with the continuous development and implementation of Shelly Mainnet. After Shelly Mainnet reached epoch3, the very first block was minted by a stake pool and the community is expected to mint the majority of all blocks from Friday, Nov 6.

Kelvin Hammond, IOHK’s technology manager stated that the end goal is to have all blocks produced by stake polls thereby making the network and governance completely decentralized.

“IOG will continue to run its own stake pools that will produce blocks in line with the stake they attract, just like any other pools. But these will no longer have any special role in maintaining the Cardano network. It will also, of course, delegate a substantial amount of its stake to community pools. Simultaneously, the voting mechanism will be enabled, and it will no longer be possible to increase d and ‘re-centralize’ Cardano.

Cardano has already reached 1,208 stake pools, even surprising it’s initial target of 1,000.

Cardano

Cardano is a cryptocurrency network and open source project that aims to run a public blockchain platform for Smart contracts. On their official website it reveals”Cardano is a blockchain platform for coin markers, innovators and visionaries “Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.

Badali offers next generation digital currency payment solutions and as such will allow ADA holders to purchase items from over 1,200 major retail brands. Some of these brands include Amazon, Nike, Starbucks, Airbnb, and many more via the Badali’s online Gift Card. 

ADA holders will be able to purchase name-based retail gift cards which can be used in their local region with their ADA at an equivalent fiat value, this is possible with the Badali’s Gift Card and partner ecosystems which includes different wallets and exchanges.

EMURGO is delighted to increase the real world utility of Cardano ADA and give ADA holders the option to purchase products from a wide spectrum of some of the world’s most well-known brands. We are happy to support Bidali and platforms adding to the Cardano ecosystem with our resources,” said EMURGO CEO Ken Kodama.

“Cardano is a very promising project. As we’ve seen blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies develop, Cardano is third generation technology that is now finally getting us closer to the performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness required to bring the benefits of cryptocurrency to the mainstream and begin to solve some very large global problems. We’re very excited to be applying this towards the gift card space where fraud and lack of traceability are huge problems,” said Bidali VP of Growth Erik Ashdown.

Cardano (ADA) Bullish?? 

Cardano (ADA) has gained different partnerships and exposure over the last few months and since the release of Shelly Mainnet. In a recent tweet by Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano it seems the ecosystem is yet to be done. The tweet states that they are stepping up marketing and are doing a lot of hiring plus many more things to come. This could in turn become bullish for ADA in terms of price. 

“The Skies are blue, the weather is good and we’re now counting down toward the launch” Charles said regarding indications of the launch.

He points out that the softwares has been tested and bugs found were fixed, he also thanks Cardano exchange partners, the Cradano community, The stakepool operators and every other believer for their support.

Cardano’s Goal since Inception

Charles points out that since inception of Cardano in 2015, the “dream” has always been about perfecting and delivering promises that Bitcoin had through evolving over time to meet the demands on mass adoption. Charles explained that this is already happening with Cardano and he said that Cardano is the best Cryptocurrency out there as at now.

ADA’s Price Responds To News

ADA’s price was reportedly 0.12223 at the moment Charles started streaming on YouTube. As at time of writing , ADA is priced at 0.1302 on Binance exchange and is ranked at No 7 with a market cap of $3.3M according to Coin Market Caps data.

See Full Video here

The IOHK  CEO noted that they are working on a simple Erc-20 converter, this will help migrate erc-20 tokens to a Cardano Testnet in a test run. An external company is taking charge of these developments, through this converter, moving of tokens from the Ethereum Network to the Cardano Network becomes possible and easy. 

Valuable DApps that would perform useful functions within the ecosystem would be launched by the Plutus Foundation and Guogen Developments team. 

Charles also said that by December, developers will be able to create, test and execute  Smart Contracts. 

Everyone or company that plans on building a DApp on Cardanos Blockchain is working with this acronym in mind ACID which stands for Adoption, Collaboration, Incentive and Deployment. In the video, Hoskinson explains these terms.

Charles plans to stay with the project until all that is needed is put in place, after which the Cardano project will operate in a decentralized manner.

You can see full video here 

YouTube Promoted Scam Ads

It is surprising or a bit disgusting and annoying to find out that YouTube could actually allow promoted cryptocurrency scam ads to be displayed to millions of their customers, they do not allow legit cryptocurrency ads to be advertised, so why allow scams. Recently, these misleading ads have been constantly displayed on YouTube videos. YouTube at some point started removing videos that had anything to do with cryptocurrency, they however debunked it as an error promising to reinstate the videos back. (Forbes article).

With all that has been happening, one is left with the option of wondering if the Google subsidiary YouTube is very well conscious of what they are doing and seriously wants to paint cryptocurrency as a bad choice to newbies who are most likely going to fall to the scam.

What the Scam Ads look like

You would normally see them anywhere you would have seen a YouTube ad (before and in between videos). Sometimes too they are uploaded like a live stream on the Video platform. The scammers take videos of popular individuals in the crypto space like CZ, Vitalik , Elon Musk and even recently the CEO of Cardano Charles. They take these videos of them speaking in public gatherings like blockchain summits, on these videos they add text promising you 100% or more returns of your initial deposits almost immediately.

It is worth noting that YouTube is yet to address any of this and it is alarming because individuals are losing money on these scams.

Here is what CZ had to say

Meanwhile, we can’t even buy ads on YouTube…  crazy world.Quote Tweet

ADAs CEO, Charles Hoskinson

Will Scam always be there?

Sadly, the answer might be YES. Our daily lives are filled with it honestly, in Banks, in Face to face dealings and the rest of them. We could however minimize the risk of getting scammed by learning and understanding how they work, and fixing the amount of greed we have. When offered something too good to be true, let’s try to contact the official handles or communities to confirm them before sending funds.

They will try to be smarter and create new ways to scam, but so will you, you will be ready.

“I love the idea of testing cross chain communication between Litecoin and Cardano. We got a lot of ideas and I’m sure you guys do too” – Charles stated in the tweet. 

Founders of two Great Projects 

Charlie Lee is the founder of Litecoin, a peer to peer digital asset that allows instant and near zero-cost transactions globally. It is currently the 8th coin out of the whole cryptocurrency market according to Coinmarketcap Ranking. They have a market capitalization of $2.83 billion. 

Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano (ADA), a proof of stake blockchain platform that combines pioneering technologies to provide unparalleled security and sustainability to Decentralized Applications (Dapps), systems etc. It is currently ranked as the 7th most traded coin on coinmarketcap with a market cap of $3.25 billion. 

As at the time of writing, Charlie is yet to reply Charles, but we sure they work together to create something marvelous since both projects have been successful in their own ways. 

The funds will be provided to new startup companies and projects building on Cardano’s ecosystem. Investments to be made on these start-ups would range from a total of $250,000 to $500,000.

Other developments

Cardano (ADA) launched it’s Shelly Mainnet on June 30th and since then Shelly has been live. It will be accessible for public use on the 7th of July, ADA holders can then move their funds to supported Mainnet wallets. 

IOHK also launched ATALA PRISM, a decentralized identity system which aims at delivering one of the most set out goals of blockchain : “banking the unbanked”. Anyone with the mobile app will have access to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) services and Flash loans. Those without access to bank accounts will own “self-sovereign identities”.

What to Expect 

The announcement presents a lot of benefits for ADA holders and investors through this partnership. 

“This custody agreement allows us to offer the same secure storage solutions that can be found in traditional finance to ADA holders, without sacrificing what makes Proof of Stake blockchains special – being able to participate in the network”-  stated the tweet. 

The Custody partnership also helps ADA to be able to store their coins on the Coinbase “Custodys institutional-grade, battle-tested cold storage” wallet while also maintaining control over the ability to delegate stakes. 

This means that ADA holders get to store their coins on the exchange and still stake with Coinbase Custody without having to worry about the security of the coin. 

Whether or not this could lead to a potential listing for the ADA, we will find out not too long anymore but it’s only fair to assume it would. 

Staking

This is simply the act of locking cryptocurrencies in order to receive rewards for helping secure the network and create blocks on the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The larger the amount of coin or token locked, the larger the reward. 

Recently on Cardano 

Cardano is setting up for it’s Shelly Network upgrade and has also launched the Daedalus wallet for Shelly. The blockchain summit just concluded. 

The version 1.0.0 of the Daedalus wallet will offer basic functionalities and is designed only for the stake pool operator testing. This means that more updates will come with other versions which will allow ADA holders to store and hold their coins in the wallet, for now the wallet is only for stake pool operators.

These versions released will allow stake pool operators to create, delete and restore Shelly wallets and transactions on the mainnet. The wallet can be downloaded from Github and funded using the Shelly testnet faucet.

Feedback is highly anticipated and stake pool operators are encouraged to quickly download the Daedalus wallet and give it a try. Feedback gotten from the Pool operators will help them input more development. You can find a list of what they expect you to try out on their forum.

More updates should be expected as the Shelly Mainnet rolls out, new features will be added to the testnet which would allow stake pools to be viewed, stakes can be delegated and earnings can be checked. Support for Byron Legacy wallets will be added and also allow movements of funds from the Byron wallet to the new Shelly wallet

Data from Google trends has shown that there is a lot of growing interest on the project and it is at the highest peak since this year. This could only be as a result of expected developments from Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), a research and development company headed by Charles Hoskinson. With the announcement of Shelly mainnet, the Cardano’s network upgrade which will bring about Staking to the platform has got people making research and reading about ADA. 

Cardano is also one of the projects out there with African partnership. They have a partnership with the government of Ethiopia to help develop the Agricultural sector of the country. 

DATA SEARCHES. 

Analysis from LunarCRUSH shows that about 6,000 social media posts were published which had mentioned Cardano within 24 hours. 

The overall media engagement showed that over 10.7 million posts, comments, retweets were made across all social media platforms.

Google trends data has shown that the current search rate for Cardano is at its peak compared to the last 2 years. 

Not only has the social media presence and trend increased, the amount of wallet addresses holding ADA also grew. In a recent data report by Blockchain analyst IntoTheBlock, showed that more people are now holding ADA in their wallets, address has also grown amounting to 385,080 late last week. 

ADA Bullish?? 

There’s a lot happening with ADA recently that might suggest a coming Bull rally, some of them as stated in the article. You could also check out this Video below by JRNYCrypto.