Cardano Fuelled Again by Stablecoin and Smart Contract Progress

Cardanos native token ADA today resumed its price rally as work continues on the smart contract-enabling “Alonzo” upgrade, and a new paper is published that details the technical underpinnings of a Cardano-powered stablecoin.

As of press time on Thursday (09:09 UTC), ADA was up by 5.1% over the past 24 hours, trading at USD 2.12. The latest move means that the token has now risen by 18% for the past 7 days, and close to 90% for the past 30 days, per data from CoinGecko.

The rally today follows a bull-run for ADA that has been largely driven by the much-anticipated “Alonzo” upgrade of the platform, which is said to finally enable smart contract functionality on Cardano.

Commenting on the progress of the upgrade yesterday, the team at Cardano development firm Input Output said that the open source project has now seen 3,100 new commits for the week on the collaborative code repository GitHub, as they “edge ever closer to smart contract deployment.”

And while Alonzo moves forward, Cardano fans also welcomed the release of the new Djed stablecoin whitepaper on August 18.

The stablecoin, which has been in the works for the Cardano blockchain for some time, was first teased by Cardano founder and Input Output CEO Charles Hoskinson last month, with select screenshots from the paper.

With the full whitepaper now released, however, more details on the project, described as “the first formally verified stablecoin protocol,” are emerging.

In the whitepaper, Djed is described as an “autonomous bank that buys and sells stablecoins for a price in a range […],” thus making it a crypto-backed algorithmic stablecoin. For now, the coin is designed to be pegged to the US dollar, but Input Output made its clear in its summary of the paper that it can also work with other currencies “as long as there are oracles providing the contract with the corresponding pricing index.”

Algorithmic stablecoins without fiat-backing is something the crypto space has struggled with for some time, with several projects having failed over the years. Perhaps best-known among these was Iron Finances TITAN token, which Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban famously got burned on.

A successful solution to this challenge could thus be promising for the Cardano blockchain, as it seeks to compete with Ethereum (ETH) and take on the decentralized finance (DeFi) space.