Cardano (ADA) set a new high, surpassing $2.64 in the early hours of Sunday morning and has jumped 1.367% in 2021.
Cardano’s high prices make it the third largest cryptocurrency in the world with an estimated value of over $82 billion, with Binance coin following at $69 billion. Of course, it still has a long way to go before it manages to surpass Ether, the value of which exceeds 380 billion dollars.
The token released in 2017 has had a steady upward trend in recent months attributed to the long-awaited software upgrade that would help cryptocurrency compete with Ethereum. Investors who support Ether are looking for alternatives and these are mainly users who do not agree with the high “gas charges”, one of the problems that the EIP-1559 protocol upgrade is trying to address.
The token has been steadily rising this month, rising to 85%, following the announcement by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson that the network called Alonzo is being upgraded. The upgrade will allow the blockchain to accept smart contracts, such as buyer-seller agreements that helped Ethereum dominate the DeFi market for automated lending and cryptocurrency trading, valued at $100 billion. The upgrade is scheduled for October, while it was originally expected for September.
The ADA was launched in May, following the statements of Elon Musk against the environmental footprint of bitcoin and the announcement that Tesla will stop accepting the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, due to the huge amounts of energy required for its extraction.
The cryptocurrency market has “taken a hit” and has not yet fully recovered, but ADA was one of those that saw it’s price rise to new highs as investors rushed to invest in more environmentally sustainable tokens.
In fact, according to Hoskinson, Cardano uses just 6 gigawatt hours of energy per year, not even 0.01% of the 115.85-terawatt hours that bitcoin is estimated to need.
