This article looks at the latest news regarding Cardano and its ecosystem as of 13 July 2021.

Yesterday, the operator of the NEO stake pool (which was launched in mid April and is based in the Netherlands) revealed that their 14 year old son had written a note requesting that his allowance be paid in ADA.

What is especially cute is the question the boy asks at the bottom of his handwritten note: is this a smart contract?

The “Alonzo” hard fork will “bring exciting and highly-anticipated new capabilities to Cardano through the integration of Plutus scripts onto the blockchain. This will mean support for smart contracts in Cardano, thereby addressing a major criticism of Cardano and opening the door to a whole set of new and exciting decentralized finance (DeFi) apps.

Alonzo’s second alpha testnet, Alonzo White, is expected to launch this week and to run for 2-4 weeks (according to IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson).

Also, yesterday, the Nami wallet, which is a free and open-source browser based wallet extension (currently available for Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and any other Chrome-based browser) for Cardano, was launched by Berry stake pool (the project which brought NFTs to Cardano and started the first stake pool on a Raspberry Pi).

Nami supports storing and sending multiple assets, delegating ADA to stake pools, minting tokens, and more. Private keys for a user’s wallet are encrypted with the wallet password and stored locally.

Nami’s developers say that “the main difference to current wallets is, that Nami can be injected into the browser context and be connected to any website in order to interact with dApps (decentralized apps).”

Finally, yesterday also saw popular pseudonymous analyst and trader “Crypto Capo” (“@CryptoCapo_” on Twitter) reiterated his bullish stance on Cardano, once again predicting that ADA will outperform Bitcoin and that investors should ignore short-term corrections to ADA/USD.

And last month, he said that he expected to see the ADA price to break $10 by the end of 2021.

According to data by TradingView, currently (as of 10:10 UTC on July 13), on crypto exchange Kraken, ADA-USD is trading around $1.2960, down 3.79% in the past 24-hour period.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.