What is ADA Cryptocurrency and How to Buy Some FastDownloadSubscribe
What is ADA Cryptocurrency and How to Buy Some Fast

What is ADA Cryptocurrency and How to Buy Some Fast

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What is ADA Cryptocurrency: In a Nutshell

ADA cryptocurrency lets users run smart contracts and decentralized applications on Cardano, a blockchain platform founded by Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum. What sets Cardano apart is its focus on strict academic research to ensure the development of a secure, fast, and scalable blockchain.

What is ADA Cryptocurrency? (Longer Explanation)

Prefer a video explanation? Watch our What is Cardano YouTube video below. Otherwise, read on!

Whether it deserves its reputation or not, crypto has a rather wild image.

There’s Bitcoin’s errant youth as a currency for black market operations, the dozens of high-dollar hacks, the 2017 ICO boom that took in billions and gave us few workable projects. Bitcoin’s recent one day, 50% drawdown was a doozy. That’s crypto for you, always something crazy happening… But not Cardano (ADA).

So what is ADA cryptocurrency?

Founded by Charles Hoskinson (co-founder of Ethereum), Cardano has adopted a unique ethos: the project is being developed via rigorous, peer-reviewed research. Cardano is betting that a group of Ph.D. wielding academics can create a better blockchain than the ad hoc models of other popular coins like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Cardano believes that ultimately the best smart contract platform will come from academia, not from a young Canadian-Russian who gives keynotes in fascinating fashion.

Ultimately Cardano hopes to become the preeminent Proof of Stake, smart contract platform. Speed, scalability, reliability, the IOHK foundation (the organization behind Cardano) believes that they can accomplish it all. Ethereum has quite a head start though so Cardano certainly has a lot of ground to make up.

That being said, Cardano is led by a talented team with a great long term vision for the project (in his talks Charles Hoskinson often comes across as intelligent, thoughtful and driven).

If you’re interested in investing in Cardano we’ll show you a few of the easiest ways to pick up some ADA today!

Buy Cardano (ADA)

The fastest way to get Cardano (ADA) is to trade some other cryptocurrency for it. Bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever else you’ve got, you can trade it for ADA through the Exodus wallet.

what is ada cryptocurrency - you can buy it in exodus mobile app
Buying ADA using the Exodus mobile app. Download Exodus Cardano wallet here.

Aside from being to hold and exchange to/from ADA, Exodus also has the following features:

  • Support for over 100 crypto assets
  • Focus on premium design and ease of use
  • Allowing you to exchange your cryptos right from your wallet - without creating an account
  • Giving you the ability to sync your wallet between desktop and mobile
  • Having 24/7, fast human support if you ever need help

You can also use Exodus to stake Cardano, and earn rewards on your ADA, and 5 other cryptocurrencies. For the latest staking rates, visit our super useful Exodus status & assets page.

If you don’t already have ADA, you can use services like Cash App, Coinbase, or Kraken to buy popular cryptos like Bitcoin or Ethereum before sending to, and exchanging in Exodus.

Cardano Wallet (Where to Store Cardano)

The best place to store Cardano is anywhere but an exchange! Even the most secure exchanges can get hacked, or, hackers can even target individual users by stealing their login information.

For the best places to store ADA, consider Exodus (desktop and mobile) or read our article on where to store Cardano for other options.

Screenshot from Exodus Desktop

ADA Cryptocurrency News

Cardano has been dominating the crypto headlines recently, as Charles Hoskinson makes the media rounds, drumming up interest in Shelley.

CryptoPanic is a great news aggregator for general news. For Cardano specific news you can check out the Exodus Cardano wallet page.

Shelley is Cardano’s name for their new Proof of Stake powered mainnet. Like Ethereum, Cardano is transitioning to POS this year. For those unfamiliar with ADA, the Cardano team has elected to roll out their blockchain in five parts.

  1. Byron - Cardano functions as a normal blockchain, akin to XRP in that consensus is achieved via a federated system with powerful, centralized nodes voting to approve transactions
  2. Shelly - Transition to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism
  3. Goguen - Addition of sidechains and smart contracts
  4. Basho - Improvement of the computation layer
  5. Voltaire - Addition of a treasury and also a governance system

Reaching step two and bringing Proof of Stake to Cardano is actually a pretty big deal. There are not that many truly decentralized POS coins and if Cardano can achieve a high throughput while maintaining decentralization, it would be an excellent technical breakthrough.

In other news, Charles Hoskinson has not been shy recently about singing the praises of Cardano, claiming that they have the highest quality code out of any crypto project. This may be the case, but it seems like perhaps a more worthwhile metric might be most value transferred, or most users, or most transactions sent in one month.

Great code is good but having a blockchain that people want to use is the golden ideal. That being the case, now that Cardano has Proof of Stake they should find it easier to attract new users as POS coins tend to be very popular.

After Tezos introduced their staking protocol, for example, Coinbase created a service that allowed users to stake on Tezos and the coin had an incredible run on the price charts. Speaking of price charts…

Cardano Price Charts

If you’d like to keep track of Cardano’s price one of the easiest ways to do so is right through the Exodus Cardano charts.

The Exodus charts are clean, simple, and easy to use.

In terms of price action, the Cardano price regularly moves in and out of the top 10 crypto rankings for market cap. If their Proof of Stake protocol proves popular it’s likely that ADA will move into the top 10 and stay there for the long term.

The Future for Cardano

As of May 2020, Cardano is a smart contract platform that doesn’t support smart contracts. This is not due to incompetence but rather the methodical, painstaking development that is happening behind the scenes. If Silicon Valley’s motto is move fast and break things, Cardano’s motto is move slowly and make sure it’s perfect.

There is definitely some value in this as cryptocurrencies are money and with a market cap of over $1 billion, it makes sense that the Cardano team doesn’t want to do anything that could lead to a breach in security.

Ethereum has taken a different approach. Ethereum’s model is to ship, ship, ship. Ethereum is slow, it has bugs, and because of The DAO’s poor code Ethereum was forced to deal with a crippling hack that ultimately led to a contentious hard fork.

To this day the Ethereum network gums up when traffic is high and creating smart contracts isn’t quite intuitive as it could be.  

Yet despite these problems Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency by market cap and it recently even exceeded Bitcoin in terms of value transferred (this due largely to stablecoin usage).

So the final question is: once Cardano releases their Goguen upgrade and the chain starts supporting smart contracts, will they be able to catch up to Ethereum? Cardano’s code may objectively be of a higher quality and it may be easier to build on Cardano, but will it be possible for ADA to overcome ETH’s network effect and first mover advantage?

Time will only tell, however, we can safely say that with Charles Hoskinson and the whole team at IOHK, Cardano is in capable hands and the project’s approach to peer-reviewed code is very interesting. They might be following a slower release schedule than other projects but when IOHK does release something it tends to be top notch work.

We hope this article explained what Cardano ADA is sufficiently!

If you want to be a Cardano early adopter, download Exodus to secure, manage, and buy ADA.


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