Nathan Ferguson 
Thanks to a poorly aged tweet from Cardano’s leader, Charles Hoskinson, the so-called ‘ghost chain’ debate has begun again.
Sometime in July of last year, Charles had tweeted that by this time in 2021, there shall be hundreds of various digital assets operational on Cardano (ADA), as well as thousands of decentralized apps (dApps), along with many interesting projects in addition to unique utility and usage. He went on to state last year that 2021 will be the year that Cardano evolves even further and will experience exponential growth. He concluded the aged tweet by claiming that the community is absolutely ready for more innovation in the DeFi space.
Hoskinson shuts down critics
The CEO of IOHK took to Twitter to effectively shut down all of his critics, who once again brought up the tweet from 2020, which many have since claimed has not aged that well. As part of his defense against these accusations and would-be naysayers, Charles stated that there are already, in fact, ‘thousands’ of the aforementioned assets currently on Cardano’s proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.
Most of the criticism had come from Ethereum (ETH) supporters and holders, and the animosity shared between Hoskinson and Ethereum is no secret by this point. Charles had co-founded Ethereum several years ago but had left the project to work on Cardano following heated disputes with the other co-founders. As such, Cardano skeptics alongside ETH holders have now claimed that Hoskinson’s project has not actually achieved most if not all of the goals that he said his project would achieve by July of this year and have hence stated that Charles only has a couple of weeks left to successfully deliver on his previous promises.
Cardano going ahead with its developments
Despite the criticism, Cardano continues to perform well, with ADA currently ranked as the 5th largest crypto by overall market cap. Its price has also increased by 6.4% since last week.
Cardano’s blockchain had managed to add native tokens a few months ago following the Mary hard fork launch. Moreover, although it is true that there are just about 6,860 assets currently on Cardano, only 2 of these recorded over 10,000 transactions on a monthly basis. As such, most of the tokens that are issued at the top of the blockchain failed to record any kind of substantial activity.
Nevertheless, there is still hope as the highly anticipated Alonzo upgrade is set to be fully launched this upcoming September, through which the complete capabilities of smart contracts shall finally be added.
