A major upgrade to the Cardano blockchain was introduced on Friday.

While the rest of the market stayed flat, ADA – the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap – gained 15% to $ 1.64 in the past 24 hours.

ADA / USD | Source: Tradingview

At current prices, ADA is returning to the threshold reached on Wednesday at the high of $ 1.77. ADA is still a long way from the all-time high of $ 2.46 that the project hit 2 weeks ago (May 16).

On Friday Cardano started the introduction of the Alonzo-Testnet (Testnet). The update, named after computer scientist and mathematician Alonzo Church, adds smart contracts to the blockchain, which means that Cardano is firmly on the way to integrating decentralized applications into its blockchain. Alonzo’s mainnet should go live at the end of August.

“The main technical path, the integrated path, the orchestrated path and the community path will be achieved in the next 90 days,” said Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, in a statement. Update YouTube earlier this week.

The smart contract functionality will help Cardano compete directly with Ethereum, the second largest crypto blockchain by market capitalization. Ethereum has supported smart contracts since its launch in 2015, and the decentralized financial industry on the platform has grown by around $ 60 billion since January last year.

While new features often lead to price increases, ADA fell after Alonzo’s announcement on Friday, the price collapsing along with the rest of the market, by about 8% in 6 hours. However, today’s rally added 44% to ADA over the past week.

ADA’s market cap is currently $ 52 billion, about $ 2 billion more than BNB, which ranks 5th in the rankings. ADA’s market cap is $ 10 billion less than stablecoin USDT and about $ 127 billion less than ETH’s market cap.

Minh Anh

After decrypting

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