Cardano is a blockchain. A decentralized third-gen proof-of-stake blockchain specifically that prides itself on academic peered review research for its development. Cardano is designed with security in mind. Written in Haskell, one of the hardest programming languages to learn.
How is this distinguishable from Ethereum or Polkadot? Will they coexist?
Development, adoption, and future proofing with a growing supporting community are the basic factors that allow these platforms to thrive and grow.
Communities
LunarCRUSH is great insight on social media showing what Cryptocurrencies are trending. Chatter about coins is important. The more retail and institutional investors and businesses that get interested in alt coins, create wallets or adopt for their business, the larger the community grows and keeps itself relevant and current. Usually, you can find Cardano in that list.
Ethereum and Polkadot will also make their way into trending. Always Do Your Own Research. Beyond chatter, its good to understand the tokenomics of each. I am no maximalist by any means. But to grasp the idea of supply, and current price, is important. Lets use these 3 as an examples in the below chart.
If coin price is Market Cap divided by available coins, its easy to see why Polkadot, relative to Cardano commands a price nearly 29x their current valuations. Cardano with 31.98 billion coins vs Polkadot’s 932.56 million coins, has much more value to spread out across its available supply of coins.
Development
Development and upkeep is important for the blockchain. Developers and the community help thwart attacks on the blockchain by hackers.
Cardano’s Ouroboros features mathematically verifiable security against attackers.
The protocol is guaranteed to be secure so long as 51% of the stake – in the case of Cardano, $ADA – is held by honest participants, which, in addition to other novel concepts, is achieved through random leader selection. The protocol continues to evolve through new iterations and rigorous security analysis.
Two charts where Cardano is already number 1:
- Top blockchain by code commits
- Largest value staked
Yet, while Cardano is leading on this list, Ethereum and Polkadot are also in the top 5 amongst largest values staked and top blockchains by code commits.
Partnerships and Adoptions
In the short term this may be where Ethereum and Polkadot have a leg up on Cardano.
Ethereum
Over 100 active DeFi apps, dozens of NFT platforms and games, many genius teams working to scale, an array of top-notch data platforms, & more.
Polkadot
According to PolkaProject there are 428 projects currently being built within the Polkadot ecosystem as of this writing. Polkadot is also number 3 on commits by developers.
Cardano
Below is Cardano Ecosystem Map Consisting Over 150 World-Class Organizations. “Haters” of Cardano often say that it is a ghost chain, or a blockchain that has no dapps or userbase.
However, in the developers desire to keep the blockchain as hack resistant, and goal of releasing a furbished project, rollout of smart contracts within Cardano has yet to happen discussed next.
Originally tweeted by Crypto Discover (@CryptoD_Angelo) on March 26, 2021.
Future Proofing
Cardano will be going through exciting updates in Q2-Q3 2021.
IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson made headlines after publicly revealing the official roadmap of the upcoming Alonzo upgrade. The new protocol update will come in the form of a hard fork around July or August, bringing smart contracts to the Cardano blockchain.
Hoskinson affirmed that developers would be able to deploy their decentralized applications on the network as soon as late April when the testnet would launch.
Cardano – Africa Special
Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson recently shared an update on the network’s much-awaited ADA-Africa special event. According to Hoskinson, the Cardano-Ethiopia event will take place on April 29 at 16:30 UTC. – you can register to attend via https://africa.cardano.org
Hoskinson believes the deal will add over 5 million users to Cardano
Conclusion
Firstly, Ethereum is center stage when it comes to smart contracts. It leads by far in smart contracts. However, recent issues with Ethereum’s gas prices reveal a severe problem in that the cost to move Ethereum or ERC-20 tokens in general is expensive.
Ethereum developers plan to have the gas problem solved with Ethereum 2.0. The release of this ranges from 2022-2023.
Secondly, The Polkadot Relay Chain will not support smart contracts natively. However, parachains on Polkadot will support smart contracts. There are already announced projects such as Edgeware, and thanks to the Substrate built-in contract pallet, it is likely that more parachains will support this feature.
Lastly, Cardano has created an ERC-20 converter, meaning anyone with an ERC-20 project can simply drag and drop their project onto Cardano once Goguen is released and continue to work on it without missing a step. Projects such as SingularityNET have already begun working on Cardano after being exclusively on Ethereum.
I do not believe Cardano will be the “Ethereum Killer” , however I do believe it will be able to take some user base away from Ethereum.
All of these blockchains have different aims and that is to remember
- Cardano worked on the interoperability but also towards the confidentiality concern for banks and institutions to be able to use the blockchain
- Ethereum 2.0 is updating to keep its leading position, and solve the gas fee dilemma
- Polkadot worked on the interoperability before the scalability answering properly to their nickname the mother of all blockchain and allowing the blockchain to communicate together
Cardano – $ADA looks strong – Solid Hodl Portfolio holding by Stock_Conquer on TradingView.com
