Over 70% of ADA staked as Cardano smart contract launch approaches

Earlier this year, Cardano announced the launch of its highly anticipated hard fork named Alonzo that will enable developers to build smart contracts on Cardano. The launch is planned for August this year and as it is getting closer to the release, over $31 billion worth of ADA is currently been locked up in the stake pool.

Last month IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) also launched a testnet for the Cardano Alonzo smart contracts platform and successfully tested the first smart contract on it.

Cardano pool tracker utility tool PoolTool shows that holders have locked up over $31 billion worth of ADA into 667,456 staking addresses. The total stake addresses represent an 11% increase since early June 2021 when Cardano passed the 600,000 addresses milestone. These addresses are split between 2,665 active pools, according to PoolTool.

Also read - Cardano is launching smart contracts

According to CoinMarketCap data, at press time the total market cap of Cardano (ADA) stands at $43billion that also means the $31 billion worth of Cardano that is staked represents more than 71% of the total supply. This is more than the total locked value of Ethereum in the ETH 2.0 smart contract which stands at about $14 billion at press time as per the data from Etherscan.

With ETH 2.0, Ethereum will move from PoW (Proof-of-work) to a much-awaited PoS (Proof-of-stake) consensus model with the hope to scale the network, increase the transaction speed while lowering down gas fees that have lately become a growing concern for the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world. However, it is still unclear when the development will complete for ETH 2.0. It was earlier planned by end of 2021 but the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik is not happy with the progress.

45% of platforms built on Ethereum name scalability and high gas costs among the top three problems constraining mass DeFi adoption.

Cointelegraph’s DeFi Adoption 2020 survey report

On the other hand, Cardano (ADA) is already built on the PoS model and it has a much stronger technical foundation than its counterparts. It also solves most of the core challenges that existed in the Ethereum blockchain when it comes to scalability and transaction processing. And with the missing piece - the smart contract coming to Cardano blockchain next month, it is already leading the race with Ethereum.

Also read - Cardano (ADA) awesome curated resources

Cardano is also building a converter that will allow ERC20 tokens to run on its proof-of-stake blockchain. ERC20 convertor will be a very critical component in competing against the number one smart contract platform, Ethereum.