The biggest opportunity came for us to buy more.

Cardano Updates

First, I want to come to some ada statistics to show us how the blockchain changes over time. More apps are being used and created and starting to come out on the blockchain.

There are about a hundred or so dapps that want to launch at the start of next year, and all are frantically trying to be the first to launch to get brand recognition and some early hype before they actually launch.

Because of this, we see a flurry of test nets and launch updates, and this also means that more people are being drawn to Cardano actually to use the blockchain.

This isn’t my opinion but just something I infer from the charts that you can see right. Here the total ada wallets staking ada has actually fallen dramatically as a percentage of the total wallets. And this is actually a very good sign.

It shows me that many new users are coming online and creating new Cardano wallets to use applications and not just to invest and stake ada.

Staking rewards are great for long-term hodlers, and you may as well stake your Cardano anyway if you have them in a wallet, but the reduction in the percentage of what it’s staking compared to the total number of wallets.

This means that wallets have actually been created for the purpose of using applications.

That means more people are being drawn to Cardano to use products and services, which is positive for the long-term health and uptake of the blockchain overall.

Cardano also just reached over a million wallets delegating ada. And we can see the total amount of wallets and new wallets created is rising at a good pace.

So we have more people coming on to invest and delegate ada and even more people coming on just to use the applications that are starting to launch.

Sundaeswap

Sundaeswap is running their test net and hoping to get a working product out by early 2022.

You can actually go ahead and use the test net yourself by getting a nami wallet and then linking it up with the testnet website, which is at testnet.Sundaeswap.finance.

You’ll get a bunch of play tokens that you can muck around with to go through and add liquidity or swap.

Sundaeswap looks like an easy to use the app, so this will be a go-to for many to actually swap tokens and add liquidity into pools to earn some passive income. Other dexs like Ergodex are looking to launch around the same time as Sundaeswap.

Sundaeswap definitely isn’t the only dex looking to launch on Cardano for sure. Ergo actually have already released their dex on their own blockchain that actually uses the utxo model just like Cardano.

Whether it’s Sundaeswap ergodex or one of the many other dexs starting to launch on Cardano, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that until dexs are launched, there isn’t much incentive for developers to go ahead and create new tokens and projects as they really can’t be easily traded.

There are definitely loads in the works, but these are the first lot of applications, and once Cardano’s up and running, then you’ll get the second and third generations that can do things a lot easier.

It’s an important step for Cardano, and it can’t come soon enough to make Cardano a useful blockchain.

Sundaeswap a dex is actually already launched on the Cardano mainnet.

Erc-20 convertor

The first Erc-20 converter is being tested as well. This will enable the wrapping of Ethereum based tokens on Cardano. So any token currently listed on Ethereum can also be wrapped and then traded on the Cardano blockchain.

This is important because it’s the quickest way for Cardano to try and siphon off some value from Ethereum, which has worked for other chains like polygon and, more recently Avalanche.

It’s not the prettiest solution to bridge assets as you usually still need to pay Ethereum fees actually to send the token somewhere to then get that wrapped.

Still, once you do, you have the token on Cardano, and then you can use Cardano apps and send it around for.

For Cardano specifically, this is important as, like it or not, the quickest way to get tvl on Cardano is to attract some of the value from other chains.

The process of attracting your own new capital is much more labour intensive and a much longer process in general.

The one thing I will say about lower fees is that this argument is becoming increasingly difficult to justify for many other chains like avalanche Solana and Cardano.

The emergence of roll-ups on Ethereum in a few different forms, like optimistic roll-ups and with zk roll-ups, will end the fee debate once and for all.

It’s still unclear how this will all play out, but the landscape is changing where we have many layer two dapps and protocols on Ethereum that will make it easy to swap and send tokens for.

Milkomeda

Cardano dapps aren’t stopping there with the Ethereum connections. Milkomeda is close to a beta product release, so pretty much a working product to enable Ethereum dapps actually to use Cardano to settle transactions.

With Milkomeda, Ethereum developers will be able to launch their applications on the Milkomeda side chain, which will be EVM compatible. So eth dapps won’t have to build separately for Cardano, which, to be fair, is an entirely different system.

I’d actually say this is the more important project out there for the ones I’ve mentioned. Most developers are on Ethereum, meaning that they develop using solidity and develop for Ethereum’s account-based model.

It’s incredibly difficult to switch from that over to Cardano’s model, which requires a totally different design. That is too costly and too time-consuming and so making a side chain that helps solidity and EVM developers just launch the same dapp but settle transactions on Cardano is beneficial for everyone.

Final Words

There’s going to be about 100 dapps launching on Cardano over the next three to six months, with, of course, many after that, and I’ve seen this happen too many times before on other blockchains.

The launch of dapps the accumulation of tvl and the inevitable rise in the value of the native coin. All this is happening at the start of 2022 for Cardano, which is why I’m happy to buy some and just wait it out to see what happens.

The landscape is more difficult as the launch of eth 2.0 next year, and scaling solutions make Ethereum even stronger.

Many of the reasons why anyone would move from Ethereum, mainly to find lower gas fees, will actually disappear, and rival chains will have to have their own value add.

For Cardano, that’s a strong coding language, an easily scalable chain and a strong trust base with ada that actually has a capped supplier just the same as bitcoin.