Cardano Adds Over One Million ADA Wallets Within 5 Months, Hoskinson Reveals Why “Hydra Is A Necessity”
In roughly five months, the Cardano network has added more than one million ADA wallets.
Announcing the news, the Cardano Foundation noted that “it wasn’t long ago” when the blockchain celebrated reaching one million wallets. “Achievement unlocked, over two million ADA wallets,” the foundation said in a tweet.
Notably, the journey to two million Cardano (ADA) wallets was achieved approximately five months after reaching one million ADA wallets in May 2021. Interestingly, the platform took more than three years to get to the one million mark.
In May, the network started the gradual rollout of the Alonzo upgrade meant to bring smart contract capabilities to the decentralized platform.
Reaching two million ADA wallets coincides with the development of a layer-two scaling solution called Hydra. In September, Cardano said Hydra would improve the protocol’s scalability.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, anticipates the blockchain to experience high traffic from decentralized finance (DeFi) activities on the platform.
According to Hoskinson, “Cardano is going to get hammered by an enormous amount of traffic. Hydra is a necessity for that.”
Hydra Does More Than Increasing the Transaction Speed
In an ask-me-anything session streamed live on YouTube on October 30, the Cardano founder disclosed that they “are going to keep adding resources to Hydra” and bring more developers on board because the layer-two Cardano scaling solution is “a high commercial priority.”
Blockchain scaling options such as Hydra operate off-chain to enhance the platform’s overall performance. Cardano, for example, uses sharding to improve network performance.
This path supports Hydra nodes without splitting the main chain. In this case, the blockchain’s processing power is calculated by multiplying the processing power of a single node by the total number of nodes.
Cardano aims at achieving a speed of one million transactions per second (TPS). Other advantages of Hydra include reducing latency, storage needs, and maximizing throughput.
Hoskinson added that the layer-2 Cardano scaling option is in the research stage but headed to version 1.0.
Institutional Investors Drill More in ADA Funds, Amount of ADA Staked Rises
The rise in ADA wallets signals a surge in interest in ADA from retail and corporate investors. Towards the end of last month, corporate investors drilled $5 million into ADA funds.
The interest is also evident in the number of ADA staked. According to PoolTool, the total ADA staked is worth slightly above 49 billion USD and represents 72.28 percent of the coin’s total supply.
There were close to 3,000 active staking pools and over 930,000 total stake addresses at the time of writing.
Currently, the Cardano founder is concentrating on his Africa tour to boost Cardano’s adoption. Last week, the executive tweeted that Ethiopia is “on schedule” to have academic records of five million students receive digital identification on the Cardano network.
In the same week, Hoskinson signed an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with the Burundian government. The Cardano executive tweeted about the news saying that they “signed a great MOU.”
Before announcing the news, Hoskinson had tweeted about a “great meeting with” the country’s president, Evariste Ndayishimiye, which focused on the “future of Burundi’s digital transformation.”
Don’t hand Cardano “To the Wrong People,” ADA Wrestles with SOL for the Fifth Position
While the interaction between Burundi and Cardano received praises from the Cardano community, a section of Ndayishimiye’s critics were not as excited. For example, a Reddit user noted that the blockchain project is being handed “to the wrong people.”
However, another Reddit user responded by saying that Cardano focuses on developing “public infrastructure” that requires joining hands “with public officials.”
As investors embrace Cardano (ADA) and Hydra moves closer to version 1.0, ADA is struggling to keep its fifth position on the list of leading cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Solana (SOL), the sixth coin on the list, is putting pressure on ADA. On CoinMarketCap (CMC), ADA has a market cap of 69.97 billion USD while SOL’s stand at 68.74 billion USD.
In the last 24 hours, ADA gained more than 7%, while SOL rose by over 13%. Interestingly, on other CMC-like platforms such as CoinGecko, Solana has already flipped Cardano to become the fifth leading cryptocurrency.
According to the crypto data aggregation platform, SOL beats ADA by more than one billion USD in market cap.
For instance, SOL has a market cap of $68.55 billion, while ADA has $67.16 billion. Note that CoinGecko draws data from 517 exchanges while CMC features 417 cryptocurrency exchanges.