Cardano Vs Solana: Which Cryptocurrency is the best buy

Cardano and Solana are similar in many aspects; they are both smart-contract-enabled projects, give their communities access to many features in their respective Decentralised Finance (DeFi) ecosystems and are cryptos that allow staking.

The scalability issue solved by Cardano and Solana has made the two cryptocurrency projects direct competitors to Ethereum, which has the apparent advantage of a head start.

Just as Bitcoin and Ethereum, Doge, and Shiba Inu follow the path of friendly rivals, so do Solana and Cardano. Solana and Cardano have enjoyed years of cumulative rise in the crypto market. The roadmap of Solana and Cardano entails the vision of two innovative projects that have left their marks in the sand of time.

A comparative analysis of Solana and Cardano will outline the strengths and weaknesses of these projects to guide investors in deciding on a better buy. Solana is popular because of its fast transaction speed, which is yet to be overtaken by Cardano or Ethereum. On the other hand, Cardano is unique because of its remarkable Proof of Stake validation mechanism.

It is no secret that the crypto market is filled with new, established, innovative, and dubious projects, each claiming to be the best among its peers. According to Coinmarket cap, over 9300 crypto projects exist today, and most of these coins fall within the popular category of 'Shitcoins' - coins that have shown little or no value.

Thus, the market term DYOR is used to motivate research among investors before investing in any crypto asset like Solana or XRP because proper research will show any cryptocurrency asset's value and potential. Adequate research is needed to minimise risks and avoid dubious projects. For instance, an objective analysis of Shiba Inu's price prediction can help investors make an informed decision.

Similarly, an objective comparison of Solana and Cardano will give investors an overview of what to look out for in future investments.

 What is Cardano?

Cardano is among the top cryptocurrency projects that have successfully implemented the proof-of-stake (PoS) validation mechanisms. Cardano serves as a blockchain network powering a native cryptocurrency token called ADA. ADA is also among the best crypto to buy in 2022.

The crypto project was founded in 2017 by known names in the crypto space, Charles Hoskinson and Jerry Wood - both were co-founders of the Ethereum network but left following a disagreement on how to move the company forward.

Cardano is a worthy comparison to Solana because of its uniqueness among other cryptocurrency tokens and coins. The Cardano network features a secured and two-layered architecture that allows processing transactions and deploying smart contracts, thus, harnessing its potential interoperability.

Its proprietary validation mechanism, Ouroboros Proof of Stake, delegates validation powers to ADA holders, who are simultaneously rewarded for delegating their tokens to the validation network.

ADA, the native token on the Cardano network, has a limited supply of about 45 billion, with only about 33.5 billion ADA tokens in circulation already. At this writing, ADA maintains the bottom list of the top 7 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Although the Cardano network maintains a clear and ambitious roadmap (which was streamlined in 5 phases), there are still concerns raised by the crypto community at large.

 Analysing Cardano Network: The good and bad

Cardano has espoused momentum since its launch in 2017. The network has crossed multiple milestones on its path to deliver the perfect blockchain network. The price of the ADA token once charted from $0.03 to $1.20 between late 2017 and early 2018, giving early investors an ROI of about 3900%. As seen in 2021, the ADA token also rose from a mere $0.15 to over $2 in a short period.

Some of the unique features offered by Cardano made it comparable to Solana because Cardano saw the limitations of the Ethereum network and sought to provide a network with scalability, low transaction fees, environmentally friendly and low processing time.

Using a carefully peer-reviewed and mathematically guided model, Cardano solved the problems faced by ethereum. Implementing its Ouroboros Proof of Stake mechanism reduced the proposed energy required to run the network by about 99%.

While the Ethereum network could only handle about 15 transactions per second (TPS), Cardano was launched to process more than 250 TPS.

The PoS mechanism also brought about low transaction fees, a desirable feature in the crypto market. There are reports that Cardano charges about 0.1 ADA per transaction.

The Cardano blockchain supports other products like tracking agricultural products, verifying, storing credentials and assessing counterfeit products.

The Cardano team is known to be research-based and data-driven. It mapped out its roadmap in 5 eras; Bryon, Shelly, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire. The team has been reported to miss multiple deadlines and has sacrificed the first-come advantage over perfection and error-proof.

For instance, the Alonzo hard fork was launched recently on September 12, 2021, to enable smart-contract on the Cardano network. It sure took a long time for a network that has established itself since 2017, unlike other projects like Solana that could deploy smart contracts almost since its inception.

As critics pointed out the slow-movement of Cardano in terms of deployment, Johnny Lyu, CEO of crypto exchange KuCoin noted that it is only suitable for the development team to take their time and avoid mistakes that can lead to hacking.

Analysts believe that Cardano's slow and steady steps are necessary to prevent what happens when Smart contracts are fast-tracked, as noted on the Binance smart chain network, which has recorded over 800 million dollars loss due to hack activities in 2021 alone.

Considering the speed and approach taken by Cardano, Mr Lyu was also quick to point out that it may take more than two years for Dapps to operate at a full scale on the Cardano blockchain.

On the issue of smart contracts, Cardano uses the eUTXO model as its accounting technology. The eUTXO model has faced criticism and praise from analysts. The Founder of Five Binaries, Marek Mahut, seemed satisfied with the eUTXO model when he claimed that the eUTXO provides an approach to write secure smart contracts easily.

As Cardano faced criticism about the eUTXo model, the issue was later addressed by Charles Hoskinson and his team. He later accused the media of spreading fake information about the eUTXO model.

 Solana explained

Solana is an open-source blockchain network that allows the deployment of Decentralized apps and the execution of smart contracts with SOL as its native cryptocurrency token. The Solana network was founded in March 2020 by a group of computer programmers led by Anatoly Yakovenko.

Talking about the tokenomics of SOL, there is no data on the maximum supply of SOL tokens, but about 489 million SOL tokens were released into circulation; however, about 260 million has entered the market.

Cardano may have been the first proof of stake mechanism, but the Solana network tweaked its blockchain to implement the first-ever proof of History (PoH) with the popular PoS.

Solana veered into the crypto market with a plan to solve the problem faced by Ethereum and Bitcoin - scalability, fast transaction and low transaction cost.

Anatoly Yakovenko solved these problems by pioneering PoH, making it possible for Solana to process over 50,000 TPS with low fees compared to 250 and 15 TPS recorded on the Cardano and the Ethereum network.

Proof of History alongside Proof of Stake reduced the time needed for validators to process a transaction. In essence, it lessens the workload of the PoS by the encoding of time itself into the blockchain. This process is called time stamping, and it works to alert the network about the sequence and order of occurrence on the Solana blockchain.

Traditional institutions have praised the high speed of transactions on the Solana network; in January 2022, the Bank of America voiced to clients that Solana could become the VISA of digital assets.

 The best Buy: Cardano vs Solana

Cardano and Solana have enjoyed a good ride since their formal debut. Both have achieved comparable ROIs since their Initial Coin Offering (ICO); Cardano has returned over 445X while Solana sits behind Cardano with about 434X.

The above figure is a favourable tilt for Solana, which was launched at least 2 years after the unveiling of the Cardano network.

Solana and Cardano have frequently been tagged the Ethereum killers, but Solana resonates with this belief with its high transaction speed, scalability and low transaction fees. Notwithstanding the most optimistic appraisal of the Solana network, it is not without blemish.

Solana's price prediction shows a green future; however, Since its launch, the Solana network has experienced more than six outages, leaving users stranded with transaction backlogs. Analysts suggest that the Solana team prioritised scalability over security following the 17-hour outage that required the help of engineers and more than 100 validators.

The Solana team quickly blamed the denial-of-service attack noting that Solana is an entirely new venture and does not come with its virtual machine. Another school of thought believes outages are a common phenomenon in a nascent project like Solana; that is why Sergey Zhdanov, COO of crypto exchange EXMO UK believes that if users were concerned about hiccups, they would have abandoned Ethereum by now.

Decentralisation is a sacred issue in the crypto ecosystem and is a worthy comparison when talking about Solana VS Cardano.

Marie Tatibouet, the chief marketing officer at Gate.io, revealed that the outage issues experienced by Solana affect trust, noting that Solana had suffered from more centralisation issues in the past year because the team had chosen scalability over security.

The Solana network relies heavily on the Solana Foundation to develop core nodes for validating transactions on its blockchain. Even though anyone can become a validator on the Solana network, it is overly expensive due to the transaction throughput.

The above reality leads to a certain degree of centralisation, which might lead to a price pump or dump and even a 51% attack on the network because power was left to a few individuals - the very antithesis of cryptocurrency.

The reverse is the case in the Cardano network, which has once reported a 100% decentralised block production on the Cardano network.