Cardano vs Polkadot: Which ‘Ethereum killer’ should you look out for?

The altcoin market space as a whole saw an unprecedented amount of development and adoption over the past year. As altcoin market dominance rose from an almost negligible share to above 55% at the time of writing, some solid projects like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) took their spots in the top 10 alts. 

There’s been much debate when it comes to the comparison of top Ethereum-killers like Cardano and Polkadot. Firstly their establishment as Ethereum-killers puts them in a comparative race against each other and against the king-altcoin. Further, the link between their founders, Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson who worked together during Ethereum’s early days puts much limelight on the two alts. 

This comparison resurfaced again when, recently a trader who goes by the name, ‘ADA Ape’ underlined that Cardano had outperformed Polkadot by 325% since April. 

Comparing price movement 

Both the projects have had a large growth in price in the last six months. Cardano (ADA) went from a price of $0.16 in January to its current price of $1.3 highlighting an increase of over 800%. Polkadot (DOT) had comparatively slow growth, rising from $5 in January to the current price of $16 highlighting only 150% gains. From January to mid-April, ADA represented 790% price gains while DOT saw a 430% price increase. Even then ADA’s price gain percentage had almost doubled as compared to DOT. 

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Current prices, for both the alts, are much lower than they were a month ago. Cardano reached an ATH of $2.46 and was down 44% from those levels at press time. In comparison, Polkadot’s ATH was $49.35 in May-mid and its price needs to rise 196.57% to reach a new all-time high.

How popular were Caradano and Polkadot

Both ‘Ethereum-killers’ were fairly popular this year, a recent survey highlighted that Cardano and Polkadot had 2% and 3% popularity respectively as compared to Dogecoin’s surprising 33% popularity in the US. On the other hand, Google Trends highlighted that search volumes for Cardano were higher than that of Polkadot. 

Source: Google Trends

Cardano’s web search was at its peak (100 mark) from May 9-15, while DOT’s web search at the same time was just 10. Looking at the social volumes for the two alts, it could be seen that Polkadot’s social volumes were high in January 2021 whereas ADA’s was higher in February and May. 

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Source: Santiment

Both Cardano and Polkadot are rapidly upgrading their ecosystems. Earlier his month, Polkadot team outlined a schedule and some recommendations for the rollout of the Parachain Slot Auctions on Kusama. As for Cardano, in a recent discussion,  IOHK’s Kevin Hammond highlighted that the transition between Alonzo blue to Alonzo White is scheduled for the coming week. 

A recent NASDAQ comparison between ADA and DOT inclined a little towards Cardano while highlighting the pros and cons of both but couldn’t settle on one as the winner. However, Hoskinson on Lex Freidman podcast was of the opinion that ADA was better than DOT because: 

“The big contrasts between the two systems though, we actually are made of multi asset. We have a different accounting model. I think our base ledger is far more expressive. Our rate of evolution with proof of stake is much faster than theirs because they’re based on derivative work, and we already have Ouroboros Omega and other things there.”