Cardano’s Mary upgrade and token gains are poised to compete with Ethereum, while metrics suggest that Ethereum is still king.
The Cardano Foundation's coin ADA, hit its all-time high of $0.97 on Feb. 12, having started the year trading at $0.18, thus entailing 438% gains year to date. Apart from the macro trends in the cryptocurrency industry driving up the price of flagship assets, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) translating to other altcoins, such as LINK, DOT, etc., Cardano’s growth could also be attributed to the network updates that Cardano has been running on its blockchain network.
On Feb. 3, Cardano’s development firm Input Output Hong Kong successfully conducted a hard fork and also applied the Goguen native token upgrade, known as the Mary upgrade, to Cardano’s testnet, which transforms the blockchain into a multi-asset network similar to Ethereum.
The team expects to have launched the mainnet by the end of February. The other features of the Goguen update will roll out simultaneously in accordance with the different phases of the Cardano roadmap.
In terms of functionality, this upgrade would equate Cardano’s native tokens to ERC-20 fungible and ERC-721 nonfungible tokens on Ethereum. For the first time, users on the Cardano blockchain will be able to create their own tokens, be it fungible tokens or NFTs. In addition to these similarities with the Ethereum blockchain, there are design differences between Cardano’s native tokens when compared to Ethereum tokens.
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