Bitcoin (BTC) seems to have broken out of the $4000 market for the moment – there’s no telling whether it will last – but the market is at the very least in a slightly more upbeat mood about its state in the near-term future. Tom Lee of Fundstrat has given the market a rough timeline of about 6 months, pointing to the 200 day average for another positive cycle in the market, which, if investors had their way, would also see many altcoins rise in price.
As Forbes reports, one coin that’s been doing particularly well despite is Cardano (ADA), which is currently at the end of its Byron phase, having launched version 1.5 of the Cardano mainnet, and poised to move into its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) implementing Shelley phase. Version 1.5 lays the foundation for the Shelley era’s implementation of PoS, which Cardano claims will match the security of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work mechanisms.
When considering consensus mechanisms, PoS and PoW both have their trade-offs. Should Cardano manage to find the best of both worlds, it would make for a stellar feature on an already respected platform.
At the time of publication, Cardano is up nearly 18% over the past 7 days, and 66% over the past 30 days. Few other coins have performed well in March, with Binance Coin (BNB) doing rather well as well, no doubt in part because of news of decentralized Binance DEX and the successful launch of ICOs on Binance Launchpad. The Ledger Nano S also recently began supporting the Cardano token.
However, if Cardano is going to challenge bitcoin, it won’t be anytime soon. The “flippening” doesn’t appear like it’s going to happen any time soon, as projects are busy developing the technologies running their platforms and ecosystems. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, a favorite with the cryptocurrency community for his candid live streams and activity on social platforms, has himself said that the Cardano team will be “building for a long time”,
…dealing with issues like the Cardano Foundation and having to go through a change of leadership – these were all things that we overcame. They prove that we’re resilient, and they prove that we know how to execute, and that we’re going to be here for a long time. And that we’re going to be building for a long time.
The thought echoes that of Block.One CEO Brendan Blumer, who said that Ethereum-rival EOS will also need time for development. Most analysts and experts agree that it will be at least a few years before crypto projects can offer something commercially viable on a large scale, given the current technical limitations of the technology.
Perhaps investors are hoarding up on tokens that have some merit to them, in the hope that when the market thaws and enter its bull run again, they will have made great gains.
