There are about 900 existing cryptocurrencies in today’s crypto market. That said one can only imagine how coveted a position in the top ten must be. But one particular Altcoin is no longer coveting this ranking. The infamous Cardano has officially passed a $73B market cap, making it the 6th biggest crypto in the world by market value.
Cardano has always shown great price action in the past. The altcoin founded by Charles Hoskinson, a former co-founder of Ethereum, has earned a lot of hype in 2021. Dubbed the “Ethereum-killer” Cardano has had its price rise by 16.80% in the past 7 days. So could it possibly live up to its nick-name and steal ethereum’s market share?
Can Cardano Beat Ethereum’s Marketshare?
September marked a peak-season for ADA, the native cryptocurrency on the Cardano blockchain. During this month, it reached an all-time high of $3.10. This was a 26% rise from its previous-all time high of $2.46 in May. But it doesn’t end at that. In an analysis by Coinbase, the coin’s price increased by 12.47% in the last 24 hours.
Cardano is a blockchain project that has more than 70% of its total currency staked for network validation. This is a really impressive rate when compared to Ethereum which has around 5% of its total supply locked as validators. Ethereum also relies on a highly energy intensive work consensus model to verify transactions. This leaves it with a capacity to handle only around 15 transactions per second. Cardano on the other hand can theoretically handle thousands of transactions per second.
Nevertheless, Ethereum still remains ahead of Cardano, with a market cap of over 520 Billion. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that Cardano still hasn’t incorporated smart contracts. This means their ecosystem isn’t yet capable of supporting NFTs and decentralized exchanges.
Incorporating smart contracts is definitely on Cardano’s to-do list, but even when incorporated, it will still take time for the coin to gain the liquidity and adoption that Ethereum has. Even so, the fact that it is steadily rising through the ranks leaves crypto enthusiasts with a lot of expectations.