Cardano’s Shelley testnet shows a lot of promise

While most of the top-20 cryptos are angrily in the red today, Cardano (ADA) has been making steady gains over the last few days.

It’s currently up by around 3% in the last 24 hours, making it one of the very few green coins today. So why is ADA baulking the bearish trend?

Shelley testnet sees 100+ staking pool registrations

Implemented to bring about the full decentralisation of Cardano, the recently released Shelley testnet is already showing a lot of promise.

According to one Cardano enthusiast on Twitter (liked and retweeted by both The Cardano Report and Cardanians.io), in just two days, more than 100 staking pool registrations were recorded on the Shelley testnet.

This is significant not only because the testnet has only just been released, but also because no incentives are being offered yet.

As another Twitter user pointed out in the same thread, this large number of registrations is also without Windows users, and more than 80% of people still use Windows. He went on to say:

“This is about to start snowballing, I just feel sorry for the people who bought high and will likely sell too quick.”

The Cardano Shelley testnet was finally launched last month after some delay. Incentives for staking ADA are meant to be coming later in November. However, it seems there are plenty of Cardano fans who don’t need incentives to spur them on.

Is Cardano superior to EOS?

Another reason behind the rising ADA price could be the surprise endorsement from the generally respected cryptocurrency rating agency Weiss Crypto Ratings last week.

In an unexpected and apparently bias tweet, Weiss posted a vague statement saying that Cardano was “vastly superior” to EOS:

The rating agency merely said that it would post “more details on this in subsequent tweets”.

This left many people in the cryptocurrency community fuming over the lack of neutrality and professionalism from the supposedly neutral rating agency.

However, Weiss made good on its words, adding in subsequent tweets that not only does EOS have “problems with centralisation”, but that lately the network has also failed to process any transactions for people who don’t have sufficient EOS locked up and staked. It also:

“Reintroduced fees by introducing #REX, which is also broken and stuck at maximum capacity. And we’re just scraping the surface here.”

Not everyone’s in agreement

While the registrations for staking pools on the Cardano Shelley testnet are a good sign, the debate still rages on over whether ADA is better than EOS.

Most notably, China fails to agree with Weiss regarding Cardano’s superiority. It still ranks EOS as the number-one cryptocurrency on its CCID index.

China holds EOS in far higher esteem as the number-one cryptocurrency project in the market. This is based on various different factors including technology and applicability.

ADA is all the way down in 31st position, while the CCID considers Bitcoin as the 11th most important cryptocurrency.

Whether it’s the successful launch of the Shelley testnet, the promise of staking as the way forward for consensus mechanisms and maintaining a secure network, or the Weiss tweet, ADA holders are smiling.

It will be interesting to see what happens to its price as we inch closer to the mainnet launch next year.