The Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) cryptocurrency is on a roll. As of this writing on March 3, the smart contracts specialty coin had gained 62% in 24 hours. It's up by 48% over the past week.
Larger and older smart contracts platform Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) is moving in the opposite direction. Despite a modest jump on Monday, the digital coin is trading 11% lower in seven days.
Should you expect Cardano's momentum to drive the coin much higher, or is Ethereum positioned to come back swinging? Let's take a look.
Ethereum was the first smart contract system out there. Developers of decentralized applications have largely been trained on this blockchain ecosystem's programming methods and languages, making it a de facto industry standard. It's the largest developer community today with more than 16,000 programmers registered in the latest Electric Capital developer report. Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) comes next with about 6,450 names. That's a substantial competitive advantage, and several smaller cryptocurrencies are working to make their smart contract systems compatible with Ethereum's standards.
In other words, Ethereum is pretty much guaranteed to remain a driving force in the cryptocurrency market for years to come. Even if another blockchain comes up with a technically superior solution, it won't be easy to overcome Ethereum's enormous head start. The first killer app in the Web3 era will almost certainly be Ethereum-based.
That's the basis of Ethereum's market value, second only to Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) in the crypto world. Its long-term returns should not spring from social media hype or a restricted coin supply. It's all about real-world usage, which should follow when people are ready to adopt decentralized apps for everyday tasks such as bank-like services, online games, and privacy-oriented media platforms.
Again, other smart contract systems may snag a small part of this enormous future market, but Ethereum is the name to beat. And it won't be easy.
Cardano is one of those alternative smart contract solutions, started in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. He left the Ethereum project before the first coin was minted, hoping to take the project in a more commercial direction. Cardano is indeed more commerce-minded, with more limited access to the program code and a centralized approach to the system's development.
So it's a very serious platform for blockchain developers. However, it comes with just 449 developers in the Electric Capital report. Its core development language is Haskell, a deeply academic system with a steep learning curve. Like Haskell, Cardano is directly based on academic research. The whole package is very powerful in theory, but difficult to use in practice -- especially if you started out with Ethereum's simpler Solidity language.