Cardano Meets Mary Today as ADA Still Occupies 3rd Spot by Market Cap

Cardano (ADA)’s Mary update is coming today, bringing native tokens, decentralized finance (DeFi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the network. Meanwhile, ADA is keeping its recently conquered 3rd stop by market capitalization.

“‘Mary’ is almost here! Native Assets are Coming to Cardano, announced the March 1 post by blockchain technology company and Cardano’s founding entity, Emurgo. “Mary is expected to fully launch on the Cardano Mainnet shortly,” said the accompanying post.

The Goguen ‘Mary’ update – named after author Mary Shelley – brings native assets to the network and allows developers to create custom tokens or migrate existing projects to Cardano. It’s an important step in Cardano’s transformation into a decentralized, multi-asset (MA) smart contract platform, which aims to allow a wide range of services and solutions such as DeFi, NFTs, stablecoins, etc.

User-defined tokens in Cardano are native to the Cardano protocol, not treated any differently to ADA by the network, and are fully tradable to ADA, said the team. Therefore, “project tokens launched on Cardano do not need smart contracts built on top of its blockchain to be issued,” while “transactions between native tokens do not generate high fees, making DeFi applications even more affordable” – arguably rising as a competitor to Ethereum (ETH) as the more popular network deals with high fees.

As reported, on February 3, the primary development team behind Cardano IOHK announced a successful fork, saying that the Goguen ‘Mary’ native token upgrade has been applied to the testnet, with the mainnet to follow.

The Cardano network’s transition from the Shelly Era to the Goguen Era is happening through three upgrades, starting with two hard forks: Allegra activated in December 2020, bringing production-ready code for engineers to start testing, followed by Mary, then Plutus.

Meanwhile, earlier today, the team announced the release of their multi-asset Daedalus wallet to the Cardano public testnet.

Tomorrow evening UTC we’ll release a #Daedalus Flight wallet, timed with the Mary hard fork. Then, after final user experience testing with our community of power users (and any last UI tweaks) and we’ll do final integrations and release a full Daedalus for everyone! Onwards! 3/3

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) February 28, 2021

At the time of writing (14:02 UTC), ADA trades at USD 1.26 and is up by almost 3% in a day and 14% in a week. It rallied by 262% in a month and 2,555% in a year. ADA flipped binance coin (BNB), becoming the third-largest cryptoasset by market capitalization (USD 40bn) late last week. However, BNB is up today by 20%, pushing its market capitalization above USD 38.6bn.
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