I still believe Cardano will reach the top 3 coins in terms of market cap in 2018. I have been recommending Cardano to my followers since it was priced at $0.027 and it passed $0.5 today. I believe that it will reach at least $5 by the end of 2018.

Here’s why:

What is Cardano?

Cardano is founded by the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson, and has been developed to compete directly with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cardano's blockchain is similar to Ethereum's mirroring the fact that decentralised applications (DAPS) and smart contracts can be built on the blockchain.

However Cardano focuses on a few fundamental elements:

- First blockchain to be developed from a scientific philosophy:

Cardano originated in 2015, over the past few years the team have been doing academic research globally by leading academics as well as professional engineers to address fundamental issues with scalability, sustainability and regulation on Cryptocurrencies as well as develop their own blockchain technology.

- Regulatory and Compliance focus

Cardano really focuses on complying with regulations that our current banking sector have in place, one of the main issues with cryptocurrencies is that banks do not know where the funds have come from.

For example, Jane sends Dave 10 BTC, Dave then converts that 10 BTC into USD and sends it to his bank. His bank will see that all of a sudden he has $60,000 coming into his account so they will freeze his funds and question him as to where they came from. His response would be something along the lines of 'I got sent it online from a friend'... without data that verifies who sent Dave the money, why they sent him the money and how they got the money in the first place, banks are very reluctant to let such transfers take place.

One of Cardano's goals is to implement into their blockchain a method of verifying transactions location, purpose and origin through a secure method of transferring user data across the blockchain - which will only be viewable by certain parties. This will abide with acts such as the Anti Money Laundering Act, Anti Terrorist Funding Act and various Data Protection acts.

- Scaleability

Cardano has really considered the implications of scalability into their project.

As more users are interacting with the Cardano blockchain, the transactions per second will increase. This therefore increases the computing power needed to quickly process the transactions that are taking place. Currently, many blockchains require a copy of the entire blockchain while processing a transaction, which will slow down transaction time drastically as user adoption increases. Cardano aims to mitigate this scalability issue.