ADA Cryptocurrency Surges Over 474% In 2021 As Cardano Announces Protocol Upgrade

The Cardano blockchain’s native cryptocurrency ADA ADA/USD has rallied over 474% in 2021.

What Happened: ADA was up over 7% in the past 24-hours while Bitcoin BTC/USD, Ethereum ETH/USD, and most altcoins were down by the same amount.

This may come down to the fact that the belief in the project has grown significantly over the past year. Cardano’s community has grown stronger after the protocol rolled out several updates that enabled more functionalities for users on the platform.

According to the announcement published earlier this week, another crucial update is said to take place in a few days.

IOHK, the company developing Cardano, said that the ‘Mary’ hard fork event would take place on March 1.

Why It Matters: IOHK revealed that the upgrade would bring the much anticipated native tokens and multi-asset support to the platform.

IOHK anticipates that this will bring new use cases to the Cardano platform that so far hasn’t had much of a presence within the DeFi ecosystem as Cardano is not smart contract compatible just yet.

However, the new use cases and utility that the new protocol update will bring has inspired confidence amongst the Cardano community.

“Native assets could be used to mint non-fungible tokens, or ‘NFTs’, which can be used to represent a huge range of unique real-world and digital assets.”, said the Cardano Foundation in a blog.

NFTs have been a fast-growing space in the realm of crypto, with artists, celebrities, and professional athletes all creating their own collectibles.

According to IOHK, native tokens representing NFTs, stablecoins, wrapped assets, and lending protocol utility tokens will all be instrumental in bringing the world of DeFi to Cardano.

Image: fabio via Unsplash