CEO of the Cardano Foundation: Strategy for the next 50-100 years

• According to Frederik Gregaard, Cardano is pursuing a strategy that will allow the project to survive for the next 50 to 100 years.
• Cardano’s governance system will play a decisive role in finding a broad adaptation among institutions and companies.

In an interview with Crypto Valley, the recently appointed CEO of the Cardano Foundation, Frederik Gregaard, spoke about the future of Cardano and the crypto market in general. The blockchain expert, who held the position of Head of Digital Finance for the “Big Four” company PwC for over four years, explained that the Cardano Foundation’s intention is to establish Cardano in the market not in the short term, but in the long term.

We are looking at how we can stay around for the next 50 to 100 years.

As Gregaard further explained, he currently sees around 10 different blockchain and DLT projects that could gain a foothold in the corporate world. Especially third generation blockchains, like Cardano, will be important for companies. But also Ethereum, which is “just upgrading”, will be successful, because according to Gregaard the need for solutions is enormous and will not be solved by a few projects or technologies.

We will see on the short term a range of third generation blockchains succeeding, beeing able to prove that they tackeled the famous problems we had around the first and second generation blockchains.

When asked why Cardano is better than other blockchain projects, Gregaard also explained that IOHK has taken a step backwards to create a more secure architecture than other blockchain projects. The scientific basis is revolutionary and will ultimately promote business adoption:

The issue with research and foundational research is obviously to bring it out into the masses and public. That normally takes you 20 years. And Cardano is trying to do this in 5 to 6 years. That’s alone is quite groundbreaking. But I like the architecture behind Cardano […]

I think there is something around the vision combined with the architecture towards the use cases and where they have not cut corners, this is true unique for Cardano. And I am very much looking forward to Cardano launching its full potential and its full product so that we can actually start testing that in the enterprise environment.

Turning to the last aspect, enterprise adoption, Gregaard said that companies currently still prefer permissioned blockchains because they are closer to the current centralized systems and provide greater security on many issues, such as decision-making in a decentralized system or hard forks. A key role in finding broad adoption will therefore be the governance system that Cardano is currently working on, Gregaard said:

The enterprise community, I think what they are looking for is assurance. Whatever technology stack they will be choosing, this will be around for more than 10 years in the same format and in 20 years. […] Cause let’s face it, most of the large institutions, when they choose a technology stack, they will stay with it for decades. […]

You are responsible for whole countries monetary systems, its monetary supply and stability, so you don’t just change a system because you want to try something new. […] Therefore, where we have to do a lot of work is around the governance system of Cardano which is being developed right now.