What’s coming for Cardano in 2021?

• According to Charles Hoskinson, Voltaire, Hydra, Ouroboros Omega, the IELE as well as Daedalus 2 will be released for Cardano in 2021.
• In addition, the IOG CEO promises “tons of dApps” and an approval of the vision for “Cardano 2025”.

The Cardano (ADA) price has made an incredible start to 2021. After ADA was still trading at $0.18 on 01 January, the price briefly managed to rise above $1.20 yesterday. With this, ADA not only broke through the 10x mark since the beginning of the year, but also recorded a new all-time high, which still dated from 04 January 2018 and was at $1.15.

A key driving factor for the price was undoubtedly the strong development progress as well as the announcements in the pipeline about partnerships and projects, including those in Africa. With the transition from the Shelley era to Goguen, Cardano will become a smart contract platform that will also support native tokens. As the recent success of the Binance Smart Chain in the DeFi sector and the subsequent pumping BNB price has shown, DeFi could also become a massive factor for Cardano.

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s inventor, has repeatedly stressed in recent weeks that DeFi offers a huge potential, which is why IOG will put a focus on it. And as Nicolás Arqueros, CTO at Emurgo, outlined in November, Cardano will achieve scalability for DeFi applications of “millions of users” through its expanded UTXO model.

Hoskinson now revealed in a new tweet that 2021 will hold much more in store for Cardano than the community previously knew. The Cardano creator tweeted:

Ya’ll ready for 2021? It’s just February.

For 2021? Sure, smart contracts, Voltaire, lots of hydra action, full prism integration, DCF, cardano 2025 approved by the community, ouroboros Omega published, IELE with mainstream languages, tons of DApps, Daedalus 2 and mobile, hundreds of tokens on Cardano. I miss anything?

What’s next for Cardano in 2021?

The first item in Hoskinson’s list – smart contracts – is unsurprising, as the last of three hard fork combinator events, “Alonzo“, will complete the full activation of Goguen, allowing developers to create native tokens and smart contracts on the mainnet.

Yet more interesting is “Voltaire”, the fifth and final era of Cardano. The Voltaire era will provide the final pieces needed for the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system. Through the implementation of a voting and treasury system, network participants will be able to use their participation and voting rights to influence the future development of the network. As a result, Cardano will be fully decentralized.

In addition, Hoskinson promises “lots of Hydra action.” Hydra is a layer 2 solution that will give the Cardano network scalability of over one million transactions per second.

Atala PRISM is a decentralized identity solution from IOG that allows people to own their personal data and interact with organizations seamlessly, privately, and securely. As Alan McSherry revealed in October 2020, IOG has “over 30 potential opportunities” related to Prism.

Ouroboros Omega is a new consensus algorithm, a project in which “all the ideas that IOG has had over the last 6 years are coming together,” Hoskinson revealed two weeks ago.

The IELE targets the potentially “23.6 million developers” IOG wants to address in order to draw more developers into its ecosystem than Ethereum, with its estimated 60,000 Solidity developers. IELE is a dedicated virtual machine for Cardano that runs and verifies smart contracts. It also provides a human-readable language for blockchain developers. Cardano’s developer website goes on to say.

IELE was designed using formal methods to address security and correctness concerns inherent in writing Solidity smart contracts in Ethereum. When you write a smart contract in IELE, it is more secure and is easier to verify for correctness. You benefit from an easy-to-use and readable language structure – and the overall performance is improved.