Speed Kills: Solana Blows Past Cardano To Become 5th Largest Crypto

According to CoinGecko, SOL, the native coin of the smart contract-enabled blockchain Solana, has risen in price by 7% in the last 24 hours to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Cardano can’t keep pace

This has surpassed Cardano, which has been unable to keep up with its fellow projects like Solana and Avalanche. Cardano was up barely 2% on the day and has lost 8% of its value in the last week. Solana now has a market cap of more than $64 billion, while Cardano has a market cap of $63.5 billion.

Solana has been faster to market than Cardano, moving quickly to bring the main features of Ethereum—smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, NFTs, and far more adoption—to a faster and less-congested network. 

Indeed, Cardano is now facing increasing criticism on social forums and many investors are expressing concern. Cardano had a years-long head start on projects like Solana and Avalanche only to see their advantage squandered. Delayed rollouts, coding issues with the complex Haskell language and an overall lack of adoption have many losing patience with Cardano.

Cardano’s fundamental price flaw

Solana is looking to build off a recent ATH of $219.05 while Cardano is treading water at $1.98. One fundamental flaw with Cardano’s ability to pump its price is the fact that they issued 45 billion ADA tokens. That’s a huge supply and while it may make Cardano cheap to buy, it’s also going to be really difficult to ever move ADA above $3. 

In short, Cardano investors need to forget about ever seeing a $200 ADA.

Solana Issues: Not a problem for investors

Despite the fact that Solana’s network speed has been accompanied by potential security issues and several days of network outages this year, the metrics remain positive. SOL hit an all-time high of $219.05 just eight days ago, and the current price of nearly $213 is only slightly lower. Furthermore, according to the crypto stats website DeFi Llama, the value of crypto assets in Solana DeFi applications is at an all-time high, allowing people to swap assets, earn interest, and borrow funds without the involvement of a third party.

Final thoughts

Cardano had a rocky smart contract launch in September, followed that up with a lackluster “Summit”  and has yet to establish a comparable ecosystem of decentralized applications. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, a co-creator of Ethereum, has been touring East Africa (seemingly forever) to generate interest in the network. His IOHK labs recently signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Burundi, a country rife with systemic corruption. The market responded, and as is often the case with Cardano news releases, the price of ADA dropped.

What do you think? Are you still bullish on Cardano? Leave us a comment below. Thanks!

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