By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
Cardano native token ADA has been recording gains, pushing the cryptocurrency project to the place of the third-largest digital asset by market cap.
The Cardano blockchain has become a multi-asset chain following its hard fork, which is the “Mary” protocol update on the 1st of March. The hard fork, the “Mary” protocol update, was eventually completed after a long wait. After the Mary update launched to mainnet, the blockchain said it represents a major milestone in its ongoing rollout.
Before the Mary update, Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson, referred to the upgrade as “historic” in a video update. He said that the transition would be easy for node operators. According to Hoskinson, the node operators would only need to update their software and download the latest version of Daedalus to enjoy the new upgrade. He added:
“We’ve been testing it for almost a month, and the test looks good, exchanges are happy.”
Speaking further, the executive said there would be more upgrades in the coming weeks.
Before becoming a multi-asset blockchain, Cardano had undergone one of its two scheduled hard forks, the Mary upgrade. Coinspeaker had earlier reported that Cardano would no longer charge execution fees to transact native tokens on the blockchain.
New Features as Cardano Becomes Multi-Asset Blockchain
Now, Cardano said the new Mary update also comes with core Goguen features of native token functionality, apart from the multi-asset feature.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!: We can confirm that the #Cardano ‘Mary’ protocol update was successfully applied to the #Cardano mainnet tonight at 21:44:51 UTC via a managed hard fork combinator event.
Welcome to the beginning of an exciting new multi-asset era on #Cardano $ADA 1/4 pic.twitter.com/vk3qDrIIds
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) March 1, 2021
Following the successful Mary hard fork, users of the Cardano blockchain will be able to create new native tokens to operate on Cardano. Also, users will use the native tokens to directly conduct transactions on the Cardano blockchain.
In a blog post published by Cardano on the 18th of February, the blockchain mentioned the latest features that would come with the update. Cardano said it would begin to provide several tokenization options.
Recently, Cardano native token ADA has been recording gains, pushing the cryptocurrency project to the place of the third-largest digital asset by market cap. On the 27th of February, ADA briefly reached a new all-time high of $1.45. Before then, the crypto asset had its previous record high of $1.30 in early 2018.
With a market cap of nearly $40 billion, ADA is currently down 2.17% to $1.23. The third-largest cryptocurrency has spiked significantly, about 240%. Over the past year, ADA has grown more than 2,500%.