Solana Emerges As Top Ethereum Contender, How Does Cardano Fit In?

Cardano and Solana are the leading contenders for Ethereum – the top smart contracts platform. Competition into the space has been much welcomed as it brings some much-needed diversification in the space.

Solana blockchain has seemingly taken top contestant position as activities grow, while Cardano has not had much in the way of activities on its blockchain since the launch of smart contracts capability.

As Cardano launched smart contracts capabilities on the network less than two months ago, it will obviously take some time for developers to test and deploy their applications on the blockchain.

Regardless, Cardano is behind its competitors due to the delay but remains a strong a contender in the space. The blockchain has maintained its position as the second leading smart contracts platform. Although, Solana has come for the crown and it is winning the fight.

Solana Takes The Lead At 4th Largest Crypto By Market Cap

During several months this year, Cardano held 3rd place on the crypto top 10 projects by market cap, before being pushed out by BNB last month. ADA’s strong performance in top 10 was mainly due to the run-up in the digital asset in August that saw the price of ADA break above $3 for the first time. Its market cap skyrocketed with this rally to over $75 billion.

Recent trends have however not been favorable for Cardano. The coin had not seen any significant movement after crashing back down to the low $2. While the broader market had rallied, ADA had remained mostly stagnant and Solana was fast to take the opportunity to climb up.

Solana (SOL) has had a profitable couple of months with the advent of its decentralized finance (DeFi) marketplace and this has played into the high value of the asset. Thursday saw the price of Solana hit a new all-time high, pushing its market cap past $70 billion mark, considerably higher than that of Cardano.

At the time of writing SOL trades at $242, with a market cap of $73.5 billion.

With its new market cap, Solana climbed to the 4th spot on the crypto top 10, while Cardano slid down to 6th place behind Tether (USDT). Taking into consideration that SOL has a considerably lower circulating supply than ADA, it far exceeds the latter in terms of value.

Winning With DeFi

Solana is quite a lot ahead of Cardano when it comes to decentralized finance (DeFi). While developers are still struggling to get DApps and DEXes on the Cardano ecosystem, the DeFi space on Solana has been in full bloom for some time now. Users can lend, borrow, yield farm, and more on Solana while protocols that provide these services are still awaited on Cardano.

Solana has over $14 billion in TVL (Total Value Locked) on the network, with over 37 billion total transactions. Since the DeFi space has not yet arrived on Cardano, TVL on the network remains at zero.

Future expectations for Cardano, however, remain high. In the meantime, Solana seems to be taken to be the choice of the two for DeFi – making it the top competitor for Ethereum in the space.