Why Cardano (ADA) Founder Predicts Big Ecosystem Growth in 2021

IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson shared his prediction for the future of the Cardano ecosystem, in which he sees a project rivaling Ethereum in terms of the number of assets and dApps running on the platform.

This time next year I predict there will be hundreds of assets running on Cardano, thousands of DApps, tons of interesting projects and lots of unique use and utility. 2021 is going to be so much fun watching Cardano grow and evolve. The community is definitely ready to innovate

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 26, 2020

Cardano is on something of a roll of late. The latest updates from the team have confirmed the Shelley mainnet is on track for launch on July 29, 2020.

In a recent blog post, it was also mentioned that a revised Daedalus test wallet is in the works and 300 independent stake pools would be available to choose from once staking goes live.

This was enough to send ADA to a new year-to-date high of $0.16. But Bitcoin’s move above $10k yesterday sent many alts down, including Cardano.

Currently, ADA is priced at just below $0.14, down 8% in the last 24-hours.

Cardano daily chart with volume. (Source: tradingview.com)

Critics Offer Differing View Against Hoskinson’s Vision of Cardano

Many critics have come out in disagreement with Hoskinson’s bold prediction for the future of Cardano.

Alex Saunders of Nugget’s News injected a dose of reality into proceedings by calling out claims that thousands of dApps will be running on the platform by this time next year.

Saunders questioned the popularity of Cardano’s programming language, Haskell, among the developer community, saying the knowledge base simply isn’t there to meet the claims.

However, Saunders believes the Cardano network will one day be home to thousands of dApps. But that this will take more than a year to achieve.

I'll take the other side of that bet. There is no way earth you'll have 1000s of dApps in 1 year. There's not even that many devs familiar with your system. I do think you can get there in 5. Sorry @IOHK_Charles let's keep it realistic. $ADA

— Alex Saunders 🇦🇺👨‍🔬 (@AlexSaundersAU) July 26, 2020

Others weren’t as diplomatic in their critique of Hoskinson’s prediction. Larry Cermak accused the IOHK CEO of trying to pump the price of ADA. He followed up by doubting the quality and usefulness of future dApps on the platform.

What a weak pump attempt. I’d take the other side of that bet any day. If there are some dApps, most of it will be meaningless activity and Cardano still won’t accrue any fees

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) July 26, 2020

Ethereum vs. Cardano Showdown

The fight to eclipse Ethereum as the top smart contracts platform is heating up.

Developments at Cardano are building steam, and while Ethereum has had a five-year head start, uncertainty over the release of ETH 2.0 brings doubt on whether the project has what it takes to fend off the competition.

Although the prospect of thousands of dApps running on Cardano seems ambitious at the present time, developers IOHK are making moves now to turn Hoskinson’s vision into a reality.

IOHK previously announced the launch of a $20 million development fund to provide money for projects to build on the Cardano ecosystem.

The “cFund” is run in partnership with Wave Financial Group, who will assess applications and distribute payments of between $250k-$500k to each worthy applicant.

As well as that, in a recent update from Hoskinson, he informed viewers of his plans to build an ERC20 converter with the hopes of snagging dApps from Ethereum.

“So basically what this means is that this team is going to go to Ethereum, take all of the existing ERC-20 token and build a converter to redeploy them on our testnet once we have the native assets standard deployed.”

Although Hoskinson’s vision for Cardano can be described as grandiose, plans are in place to make it a reality. With that, betting against them would be foolish.