Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed some of the company’s plans for the upcoming new year during a 30-minute talk on YouTube last Christmas Eve. Hoskinson said during the talk that for the second half of 2022, they want to figure out how to create an “end-to-end microfinance transaction on Cardano.”
He says that the team working on the network will introduce a system in charge of creating decentralized products and services. Hoskinson uses Hyperledger and Linux as an example, saying that they want to form a formal open-source project.
Developed in 2015 and officially launched a few years later in 2017, Cardano was created as a potential Ethereum alternative. It’s a proof-of-stake blockchain, and network validators are needed to process transactions for Cardano’s native coin, ADA. According to market capitalization, Cardano is the sixth biggest crypto, which is $51.18 billion.
Many people have commented how the network still hasn’t reached its goal of becoming decentralized. In 2020, Cardano’s development foundation, IOG, explained its plans on decentralizing its block production. This goal wasn’t met until only this year in April 2021.
In April 2021, the network became entirely governed by the community. By September of the same year, Cardano officially launched its smart contracts, opening up even more possibilities and capabilities for the network, especially regarding DeFi applications.
Instead of relying on third parties to offer financial services, DeFi protocols rely on smart contracts. By “financial services,” we mean trading, lending, borrowing, and the like. According to data from DeFi Llama, an analytics service, these protocols can lock more than $260 billion over multiple blockchains.
As of December 2021, Cardano still doesn’t have any public DeFi applications. However, Hoskinson believes that this won’t stop the network from gaining widespread activity by the new year.
Proposals
At the moment, Cardano developers are working on improvement proposals. These proposals are community-governed enhancements for the network, and they’re expected to launch in 2022. Some of these enhancements include Cardano’s human-readable information, along with a native web wallet that can communicate with decentralized finance protocols.
According to Cardano’s founder, a rollout of the recent testnet would improve the network significantly. He says that there’s ongoing testing for peer-to-peer, specifically with the stake pool operators. This framework can help ensure that the network is more decentralized than before, as it has 11 operators working as test subjects.
If you don’t know what a testnet is, it’s a blockchain that runs on a similar software as the mainnet. As a result, developers can quickly test out features and apps before launching them to the general public.
As soon as testing is done, network validators can interact with one another directly, allowing them to process block data rather than relying on nodes that IOG has set up.
