Cardano Could Shape ‘Big Three’ of Mainstream Cryptocurrencies, Says Morningstar Analyst

• Avinandan Banerjee
• July 30, 2021

Amy Arnott who is a portfolio strategist at Morningstar, a financial services provider dealing with Cryptocurrencies, has expressed her opinion on the future of the cryptocurrency named Cardano (ADA). She opined that there is a strong possibility that Cardano (ADA) could claim its position as one of the largest and biggest three cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap, along with Ethereum and Bitcoin, and even go mainstream at one point.

While speaking with Business Insider, Arnott mentioned that Cardano, the cryptocurrency that was created by Charles Hoskinson, who is also the co founder of the popular Ethereum, has a lot of potential as an altcoin and seems promising enough to form the ‘big three’ of cryptocurrencies which are mainstream, alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. She said that Cardano shares some similarities with Ethereum in the context that it is mainly a protocol that has immense potential applications in terms of technology. Moreover, there is a lot of enthusiasm surrounding Cardano and a few other stable coins.

Arnott mentioned that institutional investors are more than willing to invest in cryptocurrencies because their belief in the asset value of cryptocurrencies reveal that they consider cryptocurrencies to be an actual asset class. She added that while this trend is in a continuous process, we will be witnessing several cryptocurrencies becoming increasingly mainstream. She further added that in future, she would like to see an index fund for cryptocurrencies that would be rendered into an Exchange-traded Fund or an ETF which will enable investors to acquire better exposure to the entire ecosystem as a whole.

Arnott mentioned that the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC has not yet approved any ETF on cryptocurrencies yet in the United States of America. As a result it becomes extremely cumbersome for mainstream investors to gain proper exposure to the world of cryptocurrencies. According to her, an ETF like that could actually help in lowering the volatility witnessed in the cryptocurrency space. Not only that, she believes it would attract many traditional investors with a considerably lower risk profile. 

She also states that the volatility may also be stemming from the fact that there is a general difficulty in determining an adequate price for these cryptocurrencies. Some people have even termed Ethereum as a ‘digital gas’ for its ability to power NFTs and Decentralized Finance applications. She believes that it does have some utility that should be able to determine a certain price floor.

The same thing should be viable for Cardano also, the moment it starts providing support for Smart Contracts on which new Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications can be built. As far as reports suggest, the ADA network is going to be available in the capacity of a browser along with being mobile friendly. A new upgrade is being done by a team of experts who are working on the project. This upgrade will enable the network to allow running the Plutus application backend in the world’s most widely-used programming language, which is Javascript. 

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) which is a company behind the Cardano blockchain, announced the launch of Alonzo Blue 2.0’s testnet only last month. Alonzo Blue is actually just a single part of a plethora of upgrades that will enable the Cardano blockchain to access the benefits of hosting smart contracts. This will, in turn, empower the developers to construct decentralized applications on the network. The Alonzo hard fork belongs to the Cardano network’s ‘Goguen’ era. The term Goguen era is inspired from the name of an American professor of computer science from the University of Oxford and the University of California. The Goguen era was preceded by the Shelly phase. This is when the Cardano Blockchain had evolved into a decentralized blockchain and those who were serving as members of the community, eventually became validators of the Cardano blockchain.

Alonzo has plans to unveil itself in the form of three distinct phases: blue, white and purple. The public will learn about each of them as they gradually unveil along with the successful completion of the integration process of the upgrades. This process will roughly take about 90 days to complete. The entire process is expected to reach completion by the end of August. The upgrade will include a converter which will allow ERC20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain  so that they can smoothly operate on Cardano.