It’s been a little more than three months since Cardano’s Alonzo fork was implemented, but the blockchain is already gaining popularity among developers.
Cardano was the most developed crypto project on GitHub in 2021, according to data provided by CryptoRank and Santiment, with over 140,000 events.
Kusama and Polkadot rounded up the top three, coming in second and third with about the same amount of events across the year. Cardano’s development activities outpaced Ethereum’s by a large margin, with the latter landing in fourth place. A GitHub event is defined by Santiment as, among other things, creating an issue, generating a pull request, commenting on an issue or pull request, or forking/starring/watching a code repository.
Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson announced last week in a live YouTube session that there are roughly 127 projects in progress on the Cardano blockchain. Furthermore, Hoskinson anticipates that the number of ADA users will more than tenfold from the current 2 million, owing to the growing popularity of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
Post-Alonzo, Cardano’s technological innovation is also gaining traction. The layer-two Hydra improvement, which routes transactions off-chain to staking pools without splitting the ledger itself, is one of the blockchain’s major works in progress. In theory, it might allow for advanced linear scalability of the network with hundreds of “hydra nodes” processing hundreds of transactions apiece.
Another noteworthy remark is the initial stake pool offering (ISPO), an innovative fintech funding mechanism specific to the Cardano blockchain. In this system, blockchain enthusiasts delegate their bitcoins through a protocol in exchange for tokens of the new project they sponsor. The ADA staking incentives, on the other hand, go to the creators. Because funds do not leave the delegator’s wallet, the process is quite secure. Genius Yield, for example, had its ISPO pools hit $118 million in less than 24 hours.
