Cardano featured in the latest release of the Grayscale Building Blocks, a monthly publication from one of the leading crypto funds in the world. The report focused solely on the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. An exposé of sorts. The report went through various aspects of Cardano, including its creation, leadership, community, and so forth.

Cardano is the third-largest holding of Grayscale in its GDLC Fund (Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund). This is why the asset manager has taken a vested interest in the asset and is educating its investors on one of its largest crypto holdings. In the report, the pros and cons of the network are outlined. Along with the upgrades which are being carried out on the network to put it in a favorable position to compete with other large cryptocurrencies in the market.

Competing With The Market

As time went on, the way the Cardano network was structured had unveiled a flaw in its design. Once decentralized finance gained popularity, it became obvious that the blockchain would not be able to compete on the same level as Ethereum due to its lack of smart contracts capability. Developers had then begun to work on launching smart contracts capability on the network, which became a reality on September 12th, 2021. But it came years behind other leading smart contracts networks.

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With smart contracts capability present in the Cardano ecosystem, the question becomes if users will adopt it. There already exist blockchains with booming decentralized finance markets. So they would need a compelling reason to move over to Cardano.

“The trade-off of Cardano’s approach has also resulted in its biggest weaknesses, which include: a historical lack of smart contract capabilities, an unproven track-record for how well dApps will function, a still maturing third-party developer ecosystem, lack of widespread mainnet dApps, ad lower transaction fee revenue.”

ADA price maintains position above $2 | Source: ADAUSD on TradingView.com

Since the network is yet to be tested, there is still skepticism in the community as to how well decentralized applications will work on the blockchain. Developers obviously have their work cut out for them.

Cardano Competitive Advantages

The Grayscale report also outlines the advantages of the blockchain over others. Its leadership remains one of the strongest components of the project. The Cardano community has always remained loyal to founder Charles Hoskinson, who has continued to share his vision for the project with the community at every turn. As such, inspires continued support for the asset no matter how the price may be doing.

Decentralization is also an important feature of the Cardano blockchain. A fully open-source project, the Shelly upgrade had spread the core network consensus amongst thousands of participants. Its native token, ADA, is held by millions of people around the world and can easily be bought and sold on exchanges both big and small.

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Last but not least, the blockchain has strong funding sources. Its treasury balances currently sit at $1.6 billion, giving the network a competitive advantage when it comes to growing and upgrading its ecosystem as technology in the crypto space changes.

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