Cardano Price Rises: Will Africa-Targeted Cryptocurrency Really Be Able To Outperform Ethereum?

By Charlie Banister On Oct 13, 2021

ADA has been one of the top performing digital assets in the last few weeks, and Cardano price has more than doubled in no time. However, the Ethereum price is also doing very well, and many Cardano investors have concerns as to whether the coin, which is often referred to as “the Ethereum killer”, can really overtake ETH in the long term. But what exactly is behind the recent Cardano price spike, and can ADA really beat Ethereum?

Why is the Cardano price increasing?

The Cardano price is rising because we finally get to know the release date of the long-awaited Alonzo hard fork of the ADA blockchain. According to the latest announcement by Nigel Hemsley, Cardano’s Head of Delivery, the ADA network’s Alonzo update will be released on September 12th.

Alonzo is a major upgrade from Cardano, adding the functionality of a smart contracts platform to ADA. In other words, thanks to Alonzo, Cardano users can take advantage of features such as DeFi (decentralized finance), dApps (decentralized applications) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

So far, Cardano’s main selling point has simply been the fact that ADA transactions were extremely cheap and very fast, especially when compared to Ethereum, which is notorious for its high fees. Since Ethereum was not created with DeFi in mind, it has problems with efficiently processing DeFi protocols during times of high network activity.

But while Cardano is much faster than Ethereum, ADA has so far been useful for nothing but sending and receiving transactions. In other words, Cardano users couldn’t enjoy features like DeFi, DEXs, dApps, or NFTs.

Alonzo is radically changing this and allowing blockchain developers to create all kinds of custom tokens and decentralized applications using the Cardano blockchain. Thanks to the new upgrade, Cardano can finally become a real competitor to Ethereum and could even outperform ETH one day.

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IOHK, the company behind Cardano, has been investing heavily in the development of the African blockchain ecosystem for years. The ongoing Cardano Africa campaign started in 2017 and has already launched many successful projects that focus on delivering blockchain-based innovations.

Cardano has worked in partnership with SingularityNET to develop an Africa-based Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as partnering with Word Mobile to improve the information infrastructure in remote and hard-to-reach areas of Africa. Another important project is the pan-African technology incubator Iceaddis, which supports local tech startups in 5 African countries and plans to expand to a further 20 countries in the near future.

IOHK has also worked with charities like Save the Children and even government agencies like the Ethiopian Ministry of Education. Cardano’s rollout in Ethiopia is particularly impressive as it will help over 5 million teachers and students achieve a secure, blockchain-based digital identity.

Cardano’s numerous investments in Africa reflect the enormous potential of this continent in terms of the global adoption of blockchains. Many African countries consistently top the charts of cryptocurrency popularity, so in the long term, Cardano’s commitment to investing in Africa could help make ADA immensely one of the largest digital assets in the world.

Can Cardano really become an Ethereum killer?

Ethereum has had a lot of problems over the past few years. Most importantly, the ETH blockchain has proven to be quite inefficient when it comes to accommodating advanced DeFi features like dApps and DEXs. Ethereum’s high fees have resulted in many projects migrating to other blockchains, mainly the Binance Smart Chain.

With the release of the Alonzo Hard Forks, Cardano will soon be able to provide the same functionality of a smart contracts platform as Ethereum, but in a much more efficient way, as ADA transactions are generally much faster and cheaper than ETH transactions. Cardano is already one of the biggest coins out there, but the introduction of the Alonzo upgrade can help it become one of the undisputed leaders of the blockchain ecosystem.

But will Alonzo be enough to make Cardano outperform Ethereum? It will definitely not be easy as ETH is one of the longest-tested and best-established blockchains on the market. In the long term, however, Cardano’s massive engagement in Africa could prove crucial. With Ethereum not interested in such huge infrastructure investments, Cardano could eventually gain the upper hand.