After clocking gains of nearly 1,200 percent this year, outperforming heavyweights Bitcoin and Ether, cryptocurrency Cardano has managed to hit a key milestone of 20 million transactions.

This was achieved without a single outage in the four years of its existence. However, Cardano has been facing criticism from users lately for the slow ushering in of key upgrades to its network.

Cardano had reached two million wallets online with an uptick in traffic as of the end of November. Its daily transactions surged to over 200,000 per day at the end of last month from less than 10,000 per day at the same time last year. This, in turn, prompted the developers to reconsider the size of each block on the blockchain to accommodate more transactions in each block.

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Anticipating a robust growth in network traffic, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced an increase in the size of the blocks. IOHK, the company behind Cardano, is an engineering firm that develops cryptocurrencies and blockchains for government entities, institutions, and corporates on the Cardano blockchain.

Cardano is now focussing on optimising network growth and scalability. With an increased block size, it is equipped to handle more transactions per second, thus significantly improving throughput.

Like Ethereum, Cardano blockchain allows for execution of self-executing smart contracts. The decentralised blockchain has a multitude of other uses in the banking and financial sphere. However, what makes it different is the speed of transactions; it processes about 250 per second versus Ethereum's 30 per second, according to a Nasdaq report.

Cardano's cryptocurrency ADA currently has more than 33 billion coins in circulation. However, the number of coins has been capped at 45 billion. A cap on supplies is expected to drive gains.

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However, ADA has been on a downtrend for some time. The crash is likely due to a trading platform eToro announcing it will delist the coin by the end of the year in the United States due to regulatory concerns. eToro said: “US users will not be able to open new ADA or TRX positions starting on 26 December 2021."

At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency was trading at $1.58.

(Edited by : Thomas Abraham)