Recently, due to the many announcements made by Charles Hoskinson and his team about their progress such as Mary Hard Fork, Babel Fees, African partnerships, etc. Many people have joined the ride, betting that Cardano will deliver its promises and made them rich in the process. If this is your thoughts at the moment, you're not a true Cardano investor.
I remember the last time when I first thought of wanting to join Cardano when ADA was only around $0.10. Like many of you, I always thought of investing in a project that can get me rich, but also I want to find projects that I can support and stay on for the long term that is capable to disrupt an industry and make an huge impact in our lives. One possible option was Cardano. At that time, I didn't understand the things that I've read as there are just so many technical fundamentals that are hard to grasp. I had to read the IOHK papers, watch their videos, the famous Charles Hoskinson's whiteboard lecture as my starting point until I found other youtubers such as Kaizen Crypto, Crypto Crow, Slot Leader & Big Pey whom can explain Cardano in a more non-technical, friendly way, I finally could combine the dots and unlock the big picture of what Cardano really means.
Vision of the CEO
Like many of you, I also have my doubts. It's a project with great potential, but there are no DApps, no platform to use. Where's the utility for the token I wonder. The turning point is when I watched multiple AMAs with Charles Hoskinson and then I finally put my biggest bet in investing in Cardano. To research a great project or company, CEOs do matter in how the project or company can progress, just like Tesla with Elon Musk, Microsoft with Bill Gates, Apple with Steve Jobs & Amazon with Jeff Bezos. When I hear Charles talking about Cardano and how he explain things, even though I might not 100% understand what he was saying, but I know that there's something special about him. He has a very ambitious vision that he wants to change the world and make it a better place with a well-researched and developed cryptocurrency project. He reminded me of the early days of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, he knew what he was talking about when he explained the deep fundamental problems of the blockchain system and how to solve them, and I truly stand by his vision, so I joined the Cardano ride.
There is a risk at that time. He might either be the next Elon Musk, or the next Elizabeth Holmes. However, the more I read and watched contents about Cardano, participated in the Shelley mainnet, looking out for the different stakepools, the more I realised what he meant when he said he wants to make the world a better place. Just by Shelley alone, I've already seen a lot of positive things. The fact that you can choose a mission-driven stakepool, earn a stable passive income, and then being able to move your ADA in and out of your wallet while doing so speaks a lot of volume. I have participated in many smart contract platforms, and never have I seen a project (except Algorand) that is able to stake my tokens in platform with such flexibility, controllability and freedom without high minimum amounts to stake, locking periods or withdrawal unbonding times.
I understand that these rules are in place so that investors will take the project seriously and not dumping on their coins easily when there are gains. Weirdly, Cardano is the easiest place to break these rules but yet somehow their price did not fluctuate massively compared with the likes of Ethereum, Polkadot, EOS & Elrond EGLD to name a few which have different rules to staking. Let's pull out the comparison chart to compare the price changes.
Switching to the logarithmic price charts and you can see the price actions between Ethereum, EOS, Cardano between the year 2018 to 2020 are very similar, with similar ups and downs at the same point. While EOS progress has been stagnant due to their controversial CEO, Cardano has shown the most progress in prices around the year 2021. The key point is that there's no signs showing that Cardano is dumping their coins more often with the kind of flexibility to move around their tokens than the other projects with locking requirements. Even Algorand has quite similar price changes in the year 2019 & 2020, only with a more prominent U-shape curve nearing the year 2021. This chart shows projects that does not have many requirements in locking or minimums do not destabilize the price. So why are not many projects implementing this kind of flexibility in their staking mechanism?
Community
A good CEO can bring a project forward so far, but a community behind backing the project will bring Cardano to leaps and bounds. Most of the communities that I've saw are more focused on price actions, and whether if the projects that they support can "bring them to the moon!", but Cardano is different. Their community is a bunch of civilized people and nerds who are passion about the science behind the project, while also making proposals and dreams of how they can make the world a better place with Cardano. Once you joined the Cardano community, you'll feel a sense of positivity to do great things, and they are more engaged to serious discussions and will help new investors settle down easily, making them feel like home. The ADA that you hold will bring so much more meaning than just gains, because the ADA that you delegated or the voting power that you have can help other people who are in need. That is part of the reason why you don't see a lot of selloffs from the ADA holders because they all believe in the vision of Cardano and are willing to hold on to their tokens.
Let's talk about the Shelley era, where I mentioned just now that you can delegate to mission-driven stakepools. If you've been in the delegation game long enough, you can find tons of Cardano SPOs who have missions to use the commission they earn to donate to charities such as organizations that are focused on climate change and planting more trees, helping the poor to obtain basic needs, developers to build future DApps on Cardano, data analytics on Cardano tokenomics, helping musicians with their struggles, donating to muscle dystropy groups, and many more. While current PoS platforms will ask you to delegate or stake to big-player validators, Cardano SPOs are like small businesses who has dreams of making big impacts and your delegation is helping them to reach these goals.
In addition with the Voltaire era, other governance projects vote on minor or major improvements in their blockchain system like a club meeting, while in Cardano, you are like the first-class politician sitting in parliament seats, listening to proposals that feel like policies that can improve the people's well-being and your voting power is like a election vote to have the most sensible policy to be implemented in a country, while also earning a small incentive by doing so (Feature coming soon). If you want to be a bigger player in making these changes, you can submit a proposal to obtain a funding from Project Catalyst, but it has to be structured and detailed enough that people are able to provide meaningful, constructive criticisms so that your ideas can evolve into better proposals in the future.
Cardano is not running a conventional PoS project that is competing to be the number one in the fastest transaction speeds with the lowest fees category, they are basically building a better country system, where voltaire is a government system by the people, and shelley is the combination of small or large businesses that builds an sustainable economy of helping other communities thrive and we are the catalyst to make all this happen. Cardano shows us that you don't need to be a genius to change the world, or to be the fastest man in the world to grab your necessities from a grocery store, or to have the highest battery energy capacity with the longest range to travel around the country. Cardano wants to have an ecosystem where we can be better human beings by empowering each individual that the ADA tokens that are holding are not just gains, but it has superpowers that can make meaningful impact to the community and to the world.
So to all the maximalists out there calling out on Cardano being the "Ghost-chain", "vapourware", or any other useless name-calling, do take note of these success stories:
1) Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy when they forced Steve Jobs out, and then when he's back in the helm, he fundamentally change the computing, music and smartphone industry to be the first trillion-dollar market cap company in the world.
2) Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy when their Model S was deemed not affordable, not scalable and people mocking that they will not succeed with the Model 3, and then sticking with their goals to become the world leader in the EV industry while other legacy automakers are playing catch up.
3) AMD was mocked to be in the shadow of Intel as the secondary leader in the chip industry, and now they have already produce 7nm chipsets that id demanded by many computer enthusiast out there to which Intel hasn't achieve for the past 7 years.
To achieve success takes a lot of time and refining, and many will bring other people down to see themselves succeed. You can read up articles such as this to understand why people hate successful people. Cardano do have their ups and downs, but once you keep focusing on your goals and ignoring the noise, you'll eventually reached these goals.
And speaking of the comparison between AMD and Intel, do you notice the coincidence between them and the ADA-ETH relationship? Ethereum has understood since 2017 that scalability was an issue with more people joining the DeFi space causing an unsustainable spike in transaction fees, and it was only after 3 years of delays that they finally released Eth 2.0 phase 0 to which many other platforms are already solving those issues or are ahead of this issue. Instead of these maximalists wasted their time bashing other platforms, why don't they sit down and brainstorm on how to make Eth 2.0 implement faster and solve the scalability issues earlier than the rest? It's not easy to do so? It takes time? This is exactly what Cardano is doing, building on technologies that are backed by peer-review and scientific research so that the implementation will be errorless, so that we don't need to pay so much gas fees to make a transaction, so that we don't repeat eth's mistakes, so that we don't need to have Ethereum Classic, so that it can help more people to adopt into a more decentralized, efficient and scalable way of managing our finances. Ethereum supporters should know by now that implementing new technologies take time with Eth 2.0 as the example, and they have suffered the consequences with a centralized DeFi in BINANCE Smart Chain taking a lot of their fair share.
Furthermore, instead of bashing other platforms, why not work together to make cryptocurrency as a whole to be the leader in efficient and trustless financial platforms by creating more constructive discussions about how to solve the underlying issues? Isn't that what interoperability is all about? Bridging and connecting different blockchains so that we can all work hand-in-hand to evolve? In order to not have government banning on cryptocurrency, we must show them that cryptocurrency is the right way forward to replace the traditional broken financial system. If we're mocking each other all the time, then we're only giving the government more reason to say that the crypto communities are toxic and cryptos should not be allowed to operate to maintain peace among the communities.
Also, to the old and new Cardano investors, please don't be a dickhead maximalist too. We are all here to help and support each other to succeed. Similarly goes to any other investor who are heavily invested in the technologies they believed in.
At this moment, I want to see cryptocurrencies thrive, and it feels like Cardano is on the right mindset, timing and position to do so, similarly with many other platforms who are doing great things to help solve the trilemma of scalability, sustainability and interoperability. When everyone focuses to build a better financial system together, we can sit back and relax knowing that these actions have also make us better human beings and created a better world for us to live in.
