What happened
Few people were hot on cryptocurrency investments this sweltering weekend; Cardano (ADA -0.54%) was one of the rare exceptions. After its co-creator nailed a concrete date for a major upgrade of the blockchain platform, investors traded it up through the weekend. As of mid-afternoon Sunday, its value had risen by 4% over the preceding 24 hours.
So what
Friday morning, Cardano's co-founder, Charles Hoskinson, announced that that upgrade is going to occur on Thursday, Sept. 22. It will take the form of a hard fork, i.e., a new, separate, and non-backward-compatible blockchain from the original, which is titled Vasil.
The pop in Cardano's value was due in no small part to a cocktail of relief and hope. Vasil's launch was originally scheduled for June and subsequently experienced more delays.
Cardano has attracted much investor interest since its launch in 2017. Hoskinson was a co-founder of Ethereum, currently the leader in decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. Cardano is being developed basically to be a faster and more efficient dApp and smart contract platform.
According to a post on the site of Input Output Global, the so-called "driving force" behind Cardano, Vasil "will bring significant improvements using Cardano's hard fork combinator (HFC) approach and enhance the network's performance by increasing throughput, script efficiency, and reducing latency in block transmission."
Now what
Crypto investors have been starved of good news lately, with negative macroeconomic trends such as inflation favoring assets considered to be relatively safer and less speculative. With its creators' goal of making a low-friction blockchain, perhaps even one that can usurp Ethereum, Cardano is already a compelling crypto play. Fresh news of the impending upgrade is getting investors that much more excited about its prospects.
