As the Shelly upgrade approaches, Cardano leap by 60%

Cardano has surged over the last week and is now up by nearly 60%, now ranking 10th on CoinMarketCap

Last week Cardano co-founder, Charles Hoskinson, announced that the network’s long-anticipated upgrade introducing its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus would be going live in early July. The announcement referred to Shelley, a protocol upgrade incorporated in Cardano’s roadmap and which will see network participants stake their coins for rewards.

Since Hoskinson’s announcement on the Shelley update via a podcast, the price of the altcoin has spiked to see Cardano become one of the best performing tokens on the crypto market.

A look at the charts shows that the ADA/USD pair has gained nearly 60% since, and is currently ranked as the 10th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

At the time of writing, Cardano has jumped 10% in the past 24 hours to see its market cap hit $2.2 billion. That puts it ahead of Tezos, with $2.1 billion, and EOS, with $2.5 billion, in market capitalisation.

Shelley is expected to launch by July 7 this year, likely the reason the token has surged from $0.055 to $0.088. It is the highest price Cardano has hit since June 2019 when the altcoin came close to breaching $1.00.

Intraday trading volumes have also surged in the past week, rising from about $108 million worth of trades on May 24, to over $880 million at the end of the month. Volumes are now around $665 million and could peak as Shelley draws closers.

The digital asset touched its all-time high price at $1.12 in January 2018.

Biggest protocol change in crypto

IOHK, which has been developing Cardano since 2017, has for the last two years worked on Byron and Shelley- two protocols earmarked for staking on the network. The former has been live for about two years, but the transition will see the platform switch to the latter.

Shelley is a Haskell-based protocol that many supporters say will usher in a new chapter in the token’s price trajectory.

Although IOHK has on several occasions delayed the launch of Shelley, it appears this time the upgrade will happen as scheduled. Hoskinson said developing the protocol has “been a long time coming and it’s been a difficult year,” but he believes what the team has worked on is “the world’s next operating system.”

According to Charles Hoskinson, the cryptocurrency’s upcoming change in protocol will be the biggest to occur in the crypto space.

“This is like Ripple changing its consensus protocol […] No cryptocurrency has really done this to this scale after they’ve rolled out,” he noted during the podcast.

Other altcoins to gain massively over the past week and are looking bullish are Stellar (28%), Ethereum (17%) Tezos (11%) and Bitcoin Cash (over 10%).