According to the official release published on December 11th by the venture arm of the Cardano project, EMURGO, the company has, in cooperation with Metaps Plus, launched the first cryptocurrency pre-paid card based on Cardano’s ADA cryptocurrency.
The new ADA-based card is usable in 30,000 offline merchants in South Korea, among which are some well-known convenience stores such as GS25 and Emart24. The card comes in two forms – a mobile gift card and a physical gift card.
It was reported that Metaps Plus received 200 pre-orders for cards available in denominations of 100 and 1,000 ADA.
At the moment, the card is usable only in South Korea, and it is still unknown if EMURGO will be making a move to release something similar in other countries.
The move for wider adoption
Talking about their new venture, EMURGO’s CEO, Ken Kodama expressed his satisfaction with the completion of the integration of ADA with Metaps Plus.
“This means people will be able to make purchases via mobile app, but there is even more than that. Now with the ability to charge ADA onto a CRYPTO CARD, people in Korea will be able to take their ADA and physically hold it in their hands and use it in their daily life,” he said, also revealing hopes to see the widespread adoption of this new method of payment.
“EMURGO was the only partner ready with deep understanding into offline payment integration and strategic focus to provide a practical application for cryptocurrencies,” stated the CEO of Metaps Plus, Seungyeon Kim. “We plan to develop this product further to ensure we have solid use cases for broader offline adoption with Korean online and offline merchants,” he concluded.
Market remains unimpressed
Even though the release of the prepaid card can be considered as a noteworthy move, investors failed to recognize it as such as the price of ADA continued to decline, probably due to the overall market conditions.
Throughout the last seven days, ADA lost 5.44% of its value and is currently worth $0.029, as in the previous 24 hours all parameters show that it has been massively oversold. Despite the recent drawback, Cardano still sits just outside the top 10 cryptocurrencies, with the market capitalization of $754 million and $10.5 million of daily trading volume.
Numbers are not everything
Nevertheless, Cardano remains one of the most promising projects in the blockchain development industry. Earlier this month, the development team working on Cardano, IOHK, announced the Cardano testnet, which will be very helpful for the developers of the blockchain as well as for 3rd party developers.
Furthermore, EMURGO has teamed up with Ripple, NEM, and Fetch.AI on the “Blockchain for Europe” initiative focused on the wider adoption of new technologies on the European continent.
The development of Cardano is starting to show results, and it will be interesting to follow the project in 2019 and see what the team behind the project, led by the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson, have in their sleeves.
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