Like Solana, Cardano is a competitor to Ethereum for smart contracts powered by blockchain techniques. But critics of Cardano have said it is too centralized for a cryptocurrency.
As a result, Solana has overtaken Cardano in total market cap, and Avalanche (AVAX) is far behind. The market’s favor for Solana has been particularly pronounced in the returns of the same coins over the past 24 months.
Solana’s fast network and low fees have also boosted its reach up the market cap charts. But Chang’s update aims to address network speed for Cardano by increasing the blockchain’s throughput capacity.
Meanwhile, additional security measures will help protect network users from common Web3 threats in the wild.
By overcoming these objections to the ADA and creating a product with more autonomous governance, can Cardano weed out the skeptics and achieve the kind of market gains that Solana has?
Here are five signs it might be:
1. Cardano adopts Crypto’s decentralization goal
Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson launched Cardano in 2017. Since then, it has suffered from the public perception of being an overly centralized blockchain.
This has been due in part to the design of its network and the centralization of its main actors and interest groups. A Reddit post on /r/Cardano from August 2021, for example, once lamented: “Cardano is not decentralized, has no smart contracts, does not scale, has centralized government and is just a fad !”
Most recently, in May 2024, the founder and CIO of European crypto fund Cyber Capital wrote an incendiary tweetstorm excoriating Cardano for having “Genesis keys,” a multi-sig wallet that can unilaterally change the rules for the whole network
But with the arrival of the Chang fork, the Genesis keys are now dead, and the anonymous peers of the network who hold tokens will maintain the governance of Cardano.
2. Cardano investment analyst Price Predictions
If Cardano price predictions from cryptosphere investment analysts are any indication, the native token could be in for a wild ride ahead.
Popular Elliott Wave Theory trading analyst XForceGlobal recently posted an ADA price target of $3 for some time in mid-2025. Cardano made “an 18,000% run in its last bull run,” he wrote the analyst
For an ADA price prediction, there is popular Crypto X analyst King Crypto Aryan’s recent $75 target for the top of the bull cycle in 2025. For the price of ADA to soar so high , is targeting $500,000 BTC by 2025.
While these price predictions are fabulous, they show the bullish belief of the ADA token community that there is a parabolic upside for the asset.
And as XForceGlobal pointed out, Cardano’s price has provided this kind of performance before.
3. Speed of the Cardano network
Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha” and the most successful stock investor in history, once said that stocks are more than just lines that move up and down on a chart. They represent shares of real companies engaged in commercial and industrial activities.
SOL, ADA and ETH are more than financial instruments for internet traders and thrifty investors. They are programmable tokens to use decentralized applications powered by the blockchain. Therefore, cost, speed and ease of use influence its market valuation.
Cardano’s blockchain was already faster than Bitcoin and Ethereum before Chang’s update. Capable of processing over 250 transactions per second (TPS) with ADA, Cardano could surpass Bitcoin with its 4.6 TPS and Ethereum 1.0’s 15-45 TPS.
But with Chang’s upgrade expected to increase Cardano’s capacity to over 1,000 TPS, the network will perform on par with Solana.
With Solana recorded at 1,053 TPS in May 2024, Chang could place Cardano at the top of the list of Web3 platforms for transaction speed.
4. Network Use and ADA Staked
The Cardano blockchain has enjoyed exceptional active development and network usage in recent months. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Cardano had the most development activity of any blockchain, according to Forbes.
Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, recently told Forbes: “The number of smart contracts on Cardano increased by 67% in just three weeks in March 2024, adding 9,671 new contracts, demonstrating the rapid growth and adoption of Cardano’s smart contract platform.”
Meanwhile, Cardano is extremely safe from blockchain attacks, as well as financially from the point of view of the percentage of ADA staked. According to data from Coinbase, there is 65% of the $12 billion ADA economy (about $8 billion in crypto exchanges at the time of writing).
Compare Ethereum, for which 28% of the Ether supply is staked, and the community spirit doesn’t seem as rabidly dedicated. Today, Cardano’s stake percentage has the energy of the orange moon boy Hoskinson once said when roasting Bitcoin.
5. Right whales swallowing Chang
Blockchain markets are always taking advantage of the next best thing.
Whale-sized support for Cardano’s price is surging around Chang’s update. In fact, the big wallet whales added 170 million ADA tokens to their wallets in a 48-hour period at the end of August.
This shows a lot of enthusiasm for Chang and Cardano for some big money in Web3.
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