Cardano recently celebrated
the third anniversary of its Mainnet launch. In the run-up to this
occasion, Cointelegraph had the opportunity to discuss the project's
future plans with the Cardano Foundation’s incoming CEO, Frederik
Gregaard.

Gregaard, who has not yet officially assumed the post of
CEO, assured us that he would take on this new role sometime before
Nov. 1, though he did not yet know the exact date. Currently, he is
finishing his tenure at PwC, where he heads digital financial services
for the multinational network. Gregaard believes that there is a natural
sense of prejudice against open-source public blockchains, which he
refers to as a "trust gap."

Whereas the entire crypto space is
barely 10 years old, many established corporate players have been around
for decades, if not centuries. They may have business plans that cover
longer time horizons than the existence of projects like Cardano. In
addition, it is no secret that the average life expectancy of a crypto
project tends to be low. This has only been exacerbated by the many
crypto-related scams and illicit connections (often amplified by the
media), which has created an unbecoming reputation for much of the space
in the eyes of corporate users. If a major company chooses to rely on a
blockchain for one of its core use cases, it needs to be sure the
chosen protocol will continue to receive proper maintenance for the
foreseeable future. The lack of surety around this promise has led to
what Gregaard refers to as a "trust gap" — and one of his core missions
will be to make this gap a relic of the past:

“When you
have an open project like this one, to convey this certainty to the
larger corporations that we are going to be around in the next 10 to 20,
30 years. So you can build on us also for the long term, that we are
sound both in terms of finances, but also in terms of team and people.”

Although
Cardano has been criticized for chronic development delays (much like
its older sibling, Ethereum), this year may be different. The platform underwent a mainnet upgrade, known as Shelley,
earlier this year that brought on staking and pools. Yet according to
Charles Hoskison, two more important upgrades are expected this year:
Goguen, which will add smart contracts, and Voltaire, which will
introduce decentralized governance. With this in mind, we asked Gregaard
about the industries he sees as most promising for the adoption of
Cardano.

He said that even with the current state of Cardano’s
development, it can be used to tackle a number of cases that exist as
part of what he calls “financial services plus”:

“Financial
services plus — that includes treasury and insurance and so on. I see a
lot of use cases there which we can actually start tackling already
now.”

Gregaard also believes that COVID-19 has led to an
acceleration of digital adoption. “It gave us five to six years of
digital adoption of worldwide consumers, including enterprises in half a
year,” he said. Yet it also revealed certain inefficiencies within the
healthcare system:

“And I think one of the large problems
we are having today is that most of the states, they say they trust
each other. Most of the hospitals and institutes, they say that they
kind of we are all on the same page, but when it actually comes to real
life. When it comes to life and death and the security of your country,
stakes go up, right?”

In his view, Cardano could be leveraged for a number of use cases in this space,
like tracing the origins of medications or recording patient
vaccination records. Though, he admits that this is a heavily regulated
industry rather than low-hanging fruit. Still, gaining traction in these
big, well-established industries is essential for Cardano if it really
intends to stick around for the decades to come.