Emergence of Cardano as Ethereum’s Fierce Contender

The rivalry between the major contributors of decentralized apps namely Ethereum and Cardano is becoming more intense and serious. Cardano (ADA) has emerged as a fierce contender for Ethereum within this space.

Both, being decentralized open-source networks of blockchain, are fully equipped to host smart contracts. However, Ethereum has been playing this field since 2015 and, as a matter of fact, dominates the field in terms of smart contracts. On the other hand, ADA came into being in 2017, which is two years after Ethereum’s launch.

Smart contracts on both of these networks are primarily established by developers. However, ADA is in the process where it wants to adopt a mechanism that will enable ‘non-developers’ also to open smart contracts. This would mean that the developers as well as any person will be fully entitled to create decentralized apps of their own. Though the mechanism hasn’t been put in place and is under development, yet ADA is regarded as “Ethereum’s fierce contender”.

Cardano is confident that it has the capability of making its decentralized apps more efficient and easy to use than those of Ethereum. In addition, Cardano wishes to lower its fees and make it cheaper than any other network, especially Ethereum. It is further committed to lending more speed for the transactions with top-notch scalability.

According to many experts, the competition between the two was certain. The reason for this was that the founders of Cardano namely Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood were amongst the founders of Ethereum.

But for engaging in a competition with Ethereum, Cardano still has too much ground to cover. In terms of size, Cardano is way too smaller than Ethereum. So far Cardano has been able to have only 62 decentralized apps running on its network. On the other hand, the number of decentralized apps at Ethereum is over and above 2,997. In terms of market cap, Ethereum is also in the lead of Cardano. Cardano’s present market value is just above US$ 45 Billion. However, the market capital of Ethereum is far greater than Cardano’s and is hovering above US$ 442 Billion.

In terms of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), again Ethereum is far ahead of Cardano. Over 9 million Ether coins have been locked into the DeFi whose worth exceeds US$ 33 Billion. However, the data with regard to total ADA coins locked into the DeFi are not known.

However, the good thing about Cardano is that it wants to take the competition with Ethereum to the next level. Undoubtedly, the technology available with Cardano is more advanced than Ethereum’s 1.0. Also, the feature of giving the choice to users to establish and scale their own apps is going to be a game-changing feature for Cardano. Such a feature is apparently lacking in Ethereum. Ethereum is criticized for charging exorbitant fees while Cardano wishes to further lower its fee, which is already cheaper than others.