With its price down by 84% in the last five years, Cardano's (ADA 1.19%) price chart probably isn't very inspiring to anyone. The network has one of the widest gaps between its market cap ($10.3 billion) and on-chain economic activity in the entire crypto sector. Its total value locked (TVL), a measure of how much capital works on a chain in decentralized finance (DeFi), is just $139 million.
There are three coins that are better buys than Cardano because they offer what it doesn't. Here's why each deserves a closer look.
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1. Ethereum
Imagine everything Cardano aspires to be -- a smart contract blockchain with a large and skilled developer population, plenty of moneyed investors, lots of on-chain capital, sensible governance practices, and a bustling on-chain ecosystem that's a center for experimentation as well as value generation.
It already exists, it's called Ethereum (ETH +1.18%), and it has $45 billion in TVL, which is to say that it has the deepest DeFi liquidity in crypto by far.
CRYPTO: ETH
Key Data Points
It also develops and deploys major updates faster while capturing a large share of the attention available in the entire sector. Its upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, expected mid-2026, will introduce parallel transaction execution and cut its transaction fees, even beyond the handful of prior updates directed at that end. That's an issue Cardano hasn't exactly made any progress on in the same period.
It's true that Cardano was originally developed in part as a response to the perceived drawbacks of Ethereum. It just hasn't ever managed to surpass its bigger and older sibling, and as of right now, there isn't any evidence to suggest it ever will.
2. Hyperliquid
One area where Cardano struggles is in value accrual. Activity on its network doesn't necessarily cleanly flow through to holders earning a return.
Hyperliquid (HYPE 2.75%) doesn't have that problem. It's a new blockchain that's built specifically as a venue for a type of crypto-financial derivative called perpetual futures, or perps for short. It uses nearly all of the trading fees generated by traders on its platform to buy back its own HYPE tokens and then burn them, reducing the outstanding supply and creating a strong link between utilization and holder returns.
CRYPTO: HYPE
Key Data Points
On May 7 alone, it generated more than $346,000 in fees. What's more, its market cap of about $10.8 billion is in the same neighborhood as Cardano's.
But Cardano has no analogous mechanism strongly connecting chain usage to ADA demand. No ADA is burned or bought back from the open market, unlike Hyperliquid. Its fees are redistributed to validators and other participants, not removed from the circulating supply to increase the value of the token and provide a return for holders.
And that makes it less tempting to buy than Hyperliquid.
3. Solana
Speed and cheapness matter a lot for blockchains, which are intended for large-scale use in payment processing or other transaction-intensive applications.
Per the real-time data, Solana (SOL 0.06%) processes over 1,350 transactions per second (TPS) with transaction fees below a fraction of a cent, and with transaction settlement times on the order of one second each; its theoretical maximum throughput is on the order of 65,000 TPS. Cardano processes less than 1 TPS on average, and its theoretical maximum is just 18 TPS. Its fees range from $0.04 and $0.40 or so, depending on the transaction.
CRYPTO: SOL
Key Data Points
There's simply no getting around the fact that Cardano is light-years behind Solana in terms of its speed, cost, and throughput. And Solana has multiple planned upgrades, including Alpenglow and Firedancer, that target throughput and speed specifically, whereas Cardano's near-term upgrades are focused more on governance than on closing the performance gap. To make this even less of a contest, Solana's TVL of $5.8 billion is vastly larger than Cardano's, too.
Could Cardano make technical adaptations to lower costs, speed up, and attract fresh capital to its chain, such that it might grow significantly from here? Of course. But as of now, Solana has all the pieces organized and working in concerted action, whereas Cardano hasn't gotten started, which is why Solana is a more appealing investment.
