Take a look at why Cardano is leading the crypto market gains among all blue-chip cryptos

Cardano has earmarked 11 different ways to scale in 2022, which include but are not limited to improvements in memory and CPU parameters for Plutus, block size increases, pipelining, input endorsers, node enhancements, on-disk storage, sidechains, the Layer 2 Hydra scaling solution, offloading computation and the Mithril solution. Also, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson recently shared that there has been a 369% rise in the daily on-chain transaction volume for Cardano as compared to other chains that had notable declines in this aspect.

The price of Cardano (ADA) crypto token jumped by over 30% from US$0.5167 to US$0.6744 between Monday and Tuesday in the previous week. In the last 7 days, Cardano's price has increased by 26.3 percent. While ADA is still far behind its all-time high of US$3.09 the current rally has come as a relief for cryptocurrency investors and traders after weeks of crypto crash gloom. The overall crypto market cap has crossed the US$1.30 trillion mark in the last 24 hours with Cardano leading the gains among all blue-chip cryptos.

What is the Reason Behind Such a Spike?

One of the major reasons why Cardano is witnessing a spike in its value is the fact that data shows that there has been a significant increase in the issuance of native assets on the network. Over five million assets have now been minted on the Cardano blockchain network which is home to the ADA token.

Cardano price started surging after Iagon launched its Ethereum-Cardano bridge for the second largest stablecoin, USDC. With this, USDC and ERC-20 IAG tokens can now be bridged from Ethereum to the Cardano network. The cross-chain bridge in the crypto world allows the use of crypto assets of one blockchain on another. It is expected that the inclusion of USDC in Cardano will further strengthen its Defi ecosystem. According to a CoinDesk report, the fundamental catalyst behind the surge in ADA price is the rise in the issuance of native assets on the Cardano network. As per the available data, over five million assets have now been minted on Cardano. Also, an upcoming network upgrade in June is expected to increase the scaling capabilities of the Cardano network.

The imminent Vasil hard fork is another factor that may have pushed Cardano blockchain's ADA token's price up. Vasil hard fork will be a network upgrade that will improve the Cardano blockchain's scalability. The hard fork is set to take place in June. A hard fork in blockchain technology is a significant modification to the network's protocol that validates previously invalid blocks and transactions, or vice versa. In layman's terms, a hard fork happens when nodes of the most recent version of a blockchain no longer accept prior versions, resulting in a permanent separation from the previous network version. It is interesting to note that the Vasil hard fork is a much-awaited scalability upgrade that will significantly improve the blockchain network's throughput, giving it an edge over other blockchain networks.

Dubbed "Vasil," the so-called hard fork event will tentatively take place on June 29, 2022. As a result of the euphoria surrounding this upgrade, traders have started speculating more on ADA's upside prospects, resulting in its better performance than other top-ranking digital assets.

For instance, ADA's price rose by over 14% to US$0.64 on June 6 compared to the 6% gains of its top rival, Ether (ETH), on the same day.

Cardano's price history also shows similar euphoric behaviors among traders in the days leading up to hard fork events. For example, the "Alonzo" upgrade in September 2021, which introduced smart contract functionalities to the Cardano network, preceded a 200%-plus ADA price rally. Similarly, Cardano's "Mary" hard fork in March 2021 preceded ADA's 1,600%-plus price boom.