ADA Rallies After Founder Says He Is ‘Very Obsessed with DeFi’

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 1 min read

Despite smart contract rival Ethereum (ETH) already dominating the space, Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson hinted strongly that decentralized finance (DeFi) is an area of intense focus for Cardano, saying in a live streamed ask-me-anything (AMA) session on YouTube recently that he has become “very obsessed with DeFi lately.”

Charles Hoskinson. Source: a video screenshot, Youtube/Charles Hoskinson

As of this writing (11:57 UTC), ADA, currently ranked as the 10th most valuable cryptoasset, was up by nearly 6% over the past 24 hours, trading at USD 0.123 per token. For the week as a whole, however, the token was more or less unchanged, trading up a slight 0.4%.

Source: Coinpaprika

In the video, Hoskinson said that information about his team’s work on DeFi “has started to leak out” despite their plan to make official announcements about it later, and mentioned a new stablecoin project on Cardano as one example of such a project, saying:

“This is going to be an algorithmic stablecoin and we think it will be significantly better than MakerDAO.” He also added that “this is just one of many DeFi things going on right now, but we’re not going to announce any of that until a little bit later.”

But despite keeping a lid on most of the things the team is working on in terms of DeFi, Hoskinson also came back to the issue later on in the video, when he reiterated that DeFi is something he has taken “a very keen interest in.”

Hoskinson then went on to explain that although Ethereum is without a doubt the first mover in the DeFi space, this is not necessarily a problem for Cardano:

“First mover advantage is actually a disadvantage in DeFi,” Hoskinson said, while explaining that this has to do with the potential for mistakes and other problems for the original blockchain:

“You actually want to be an imitator, in the second mover category. I think we’ll have a lot, lot more luck than the first mover […] and that there will be a mass exodus,” the Cardano founder said, before declaring that Ethereum is “just too inflexible” and that “Cardano is much better suited as a platform.”

Watch the entire AMA video with Charles Hoskinson below (talks about DeFi from around 9:30):