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Like Solana, Cardano is an Ethereum competitor for smart contracts powered by blockchain techniques. But Cardano critics have said that it is overly centralized for a cryptocurrency.
As a result, Solana has overtaken Cardano in total market capitalization, and Avalanche (AVAX) is close behind. The market’s favor for Solana has been especially pronounced in meme coin returns over the past 24 months.
Solana’s fast network and low fees have also galvanized its sweep of the market cap charts. But the Chang Upgrade seeks to address network speed for Cardano by ramping up 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 ADA and creating a product with more autonomous governance, can Cardano shake off the skeptics and make the kind of market gains Solana has?
Here are five signs it can:
1. Cardano Embraces Crypto’s Decentralization Meta
Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson launched Cardano in 2017. Since then, it has suffered from a public perception of being an overly-centralized blockchain.
That has been due in part to its network design and to the centralization of its key players and stakeholders. A Reddit post on /r/Cardano from Aug. 2021, for example, once lamented, “Cardano is not decentralized, has no smart contracts, it doesn’t scale, it has centralized governance, and it’s just a fad!”
More recently, in May 2024, the founder and CIO of European crypto fund Cyber Capital wrote an incendiary tweet storm excoriating Cardano for having “Genesis keys,” a multi-sig wallet that can unilaterally change rules for the entire network.
But with the advent of the Chang fork, the Genesis keys are now dead, and the network’s anonymous token-holding peers will maintain Cardano’s governance.
2. Investor Analyst Cardano Price Predictions
If Cardano price predictions from investor analysts around the cryptosphere are any indication, the native token could be in for a wild bull ride ahead.
Popular Elliot Wave theory trading analyst XForceGlobal recently posted a $3 ADA price target for some time in mid-2025. Cardano did “an 18,000% run in its last bull run,” the analyst wrote.
For a wild card ADA price prediction, there’s popular Crypto X analyst King Crypto Aryan’s recent $75 target by the top of the bull cycle in 2025. In order for ADA’s price to skyrocket so high, he’s targeting $500,000 BTC by 2025.
While these price predictions are fabulous, they show the ADA token community’s bullish conviction that there is a parabolic rally ahead for the asset.
And as XForceGlobal pointed out, Cardano’s price has delivered this kind of performance before.
3. Cardano Network Speed
Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha” and history’s most successful stock investor, once said stocks are more than just lines that wiggle up and down on a chart. They represent shares of actual businesses engaged in commercial and industrial activities.
SOL, ADA, and ETH are more than just financial instruments for Internet day traders and saver investors. They’re programmable tokens to use decentralized apps powered by the blockchain. Therefore, cost, speed, and ease of use factor into their market valuation.
Cardano’s blockchain was already faster than Bitcoin and Ethereum before the Chang upgrade. Able to process over 250 transactions per second (TPS) with ADA, Cardano could outrun Bitcoin with its 4.6 TPS and Ethereum 1.0’s 15 – 45 TPS.
But with the Chang upgrade expected to boost Cardano’s capacity to over 1,000 TPS, the network will have throughput on par with Solana.
With Solana clocked 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 Usage and ADA Staked
The Cardano blockchain has enjoyed outstanding active development and network usage in recent months. For example, in Q4 2023, Cardano had the most development activity of any blockchain, according to Forbes.
Gracy Chen, Managing Director 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 secure from blockchain attacks as well as economically from the standpoint of the percentage of ADA staked. A whopping 65% of the $12 billion ADA economy (worth some $8 billion on crypto exchanges at the time of writing) is staked, according to Coinbase data.
Compare Ethereum, for which 28% of the Ether supply is staked, and the community spirit just doesn’t seem as rabidly devoted. Today, Cardano’s staking percentage has that orange-pilled moon boy energy Hoskinson once called out when roasting Bitcoin.
5. Cardano Whales Gobbling Up Chang
Blockchain markets are always capitalizing on the next best thing.
Whale-sized support for Cardano’s price is surging around the Chang upgrade. In fact, large wallet whales added 170 million ADA tokens to their bags in a 48-hour period at the end of August.
That shows an enormous amount of enthusiasm for Chang and Cardano from some big money in Web3.