Cardano upgrade delays tied to ‘boring’ academic approach — CEO

Cardano has come under fire from critics for delays in the rollout of features and network upgrades. This slower-paced cadence, however, appears to be a badge of honor to Cardano Foundation CEO Frederick Gregaard, who said that the network is “boring,” considering the platform’s academic approach.

“Cardano is boring. We are boring because we are based on academic peer-reviewed papers, [and] we are sharing that across the globe,” Gregaard told Cointelegraph on the sidelines of the recent Cardano Summit in Dubai.

The executive pointed out that the pieces of research that Cardano has “spent years of doing and implementing” are already being used by some of the fast-moving blockchain platforms, which he feels “incredibly proud” of:

“If they take some of the core principles we’ve researched and invented, this is good for the earth… [and] humanity at large because this makes more resilient, more adaptable blockchains around the world.”

Gregaard added that the trend is also important with the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) that would require the industry to have computable data. He added:

“I say, ‘Sorry, we are boring.’ But we are one of the oldest projects. We are very big… We are the one who has the most changes on GitHub, and we have not been down for over 2000 days… Boring sometimes is good.”

Cardano’s recent significant updates, including the layer-2 scalability solution Hydra in May and the stake-based multisignature protocol Mithril in July, resulted in network upticks following their launch. More recently, in the third quarter of 2023, while Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) activity remained flat, its total value locked (TVL) was up 198% year-to-date, data from blockchain analytics firm Messari shows. The network’s TVL, which ranked 34th at the beginning of the year, now sits at 15th among all the networks reviewed.

As the ecosystem prepares for the upcoming Voltaire, the final era of the Cardano roadmap that focuses on decentralized governance, Gregaard said the ecosystem’s aspiration levels on on-chain governance “is way higher than other projects,” but they try to take the learnings from other networks, including MakerDAO. He said:

“This is about capturing the essence of the vision and mission and the culture of Cardano….