Cardano for Enterprise

In this post I’d like to explain why I think Cardano will be the number one choice for Fortune 500 companies and governments looking to develop their own blockchain solution going forward.

Firstly a brief history of Cardano..

Cardano originated when founder Charles Hoskinson left Ethereum, another popular crypto project for which he was a co-founder, to start his own crypto project. Charles views Bitcoin as 1st generation blockchain technology – it’s a store of monetary value but not much else, Ethereum as a 2nd generation blockchain – it can store monetary value but also do smart contracts (more on what that is in another video), but it’s not great for large scale usage (you may have heard about the gas fees complaints about Ethereum), and Cardano as a 3rd generation blockchain that can store value, has smart contracts, and most crucially is scalable. I could write a whole other article on this but I want avoid getting to into the technology angle in this post. In addition, Cardano has famously taken the slow-but-steady academic research based approach to developing its blockchain, a strategy that has been much derided when compared to other chains that have taken a launch something first then fix it later approach, as is now the case with Eth 2.0 work on Ethereum, due for completion either end of 2022 or in 2023 (best guess).

Cardano meanwhile is launching its smart contract capability in September of 2021 with testing currently underway.

So why should companies and governments be paying attention to Cardano? Here are my top 5 reasons:

1. Security: Cardano takes research and testing very seriously. Blockchain technology have been plagued with bugs in the past such as the Bitcoin Value Overflow bug, Polkadot Parity bug (locked up $98m in funds) or the numerous Ethereum bugs. Now let’s be fair here – Cardano smart contracts are not yet launched so it’s hard to say they won’t suffer a similar fate, but security and mathematically provable outcomes is central to the idea of how it has been built. By coding in its native programming language, Haskall, developers can prove whether a certain outcome is indeed impossible. This rigorous focus on building a secure blockchain is critical for enterprises looking to trust millions if not billions of dollars of money, to a blockchain protocol.
2. IOG and the Cardano Foundation: IOG is a professional company, run by Charles Hoskinson, tasked with building out the Cardano blockchain and is also actively involved in building commercial solutions on top of it. The Cardano Foundation are the not-for-profit legal custodians of Cardano, who help advocate for blockchain and crypto across business and government. Unlike other chains where there is no central entity that companies can work with, in Cardano, companies can partner with a professionally run organization that understands the mundane issues corporations have to deal with in the real world such as security and regulatory compliance. This has already lead to the implementation of a supply chain solution for the tracking of beef in the agricultural industry (see BeefChain).
3. Atala Prism: This is the identity solution built on top of Cardano. Asking users to prove ones identity in a non-invasive and secure way, is a critical need for a lot of enterprise blockchain solutions. In fact the more I brainstorm possible use cases for blockchain, the more it seems an identity solution is needed. And this is something that I have not seen mentioned in many other blockchain projects. Atala offers a truly revolutionary solution to building decentralized identity for millions of users
4. Scalability: Speaking of millions of users, Cardano has recently signed a major deal with the Ethiopian government to store educational achievements of its students on the blockchain. This deal is expected to bring in 4m users into the blockchain and will be one of the largest real world usage of the blockchain technology on any chain to date.
5. Continued innovation and longevity: For the past several years Cardano has been ranked as one of the most actively developed public blockchain projects and the IOG team have a long list of further innovations they want to introduce, all of which originate from academic based research. This strong tie to the academic community, also churns out more people who understand Cardano and can develop on it. It also has one of the strongest (and dare I say intelligent) communities out there in the crypto world. Through Project Catalyst, the community has access to millions of dollars worth of funds at their disposal to vote on and invest in new projects that help grow the ecosystem. All this means Cardano has a growing pool of passionate developers that are continuing to add to the Cardano ecosystem. This adds re-assurance to companies and governments that want to invest in a solution that will likely be around for decades to come.