Why Cardano Is Skyrocketing Today
Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) is up 20.6% in the past 24 hours to $1.87 per token as of 10:30 a.m. EDT. On Aug. 10, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano and the co-founder of Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), said he would pinpoint an exact date for the announcement of the Alonzo hard fork this Friday. After the fork, Cardano would enable the execution of smart contracts on its network -- enabling transactions between parties without using an intermediary. The update that will place Cardano on par with Ethereum in this aspect is set to launch before the Cardano Summit in September.
Hoskinson founded Cardano in 2015 as a for-profit competitor to the non-profit Ethereum network. Cardano offers greater environmental sustainability than the latter via its proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. Under this setup, miners would not need to use ludicrous amounts of electricity to solve complex algorithmic puzzles with their GPUs to validate transactions. Instead, the owners of Ada tokens validate transactions, earning "interest" or staking rewards in the process. Cardano's Ada is currently the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the second-largest network operating on a PoS protocol by the same measure. Investors are betting the next update will place Ada over the edge compared to Ether.
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Source Fool.com
