Is Cardano superior to Ethereum 2.0?

Cardano (ADA) often dubbed as “ethereum killer” was started by one of the co-founders of ethereum, Charles Hoskinson. He was an early adopter of the Proof-of-stake algorithm and integrated that in Ouroboros protocol in Cardano. Cardano is managed by IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong), an engineering and research company owned by Charles and Jeremy Wood (previously his colleague at Ethereum).

Cardano has a very very strong foundation. It embraces the philosophy of openness in software development and implements features using an evidence-based method. Not to mention that in the last few years, Cardano’s research team has published more than 100 academic research papers, all the way from distributed systems to programming languages and game theory.

With extremely strong leadership and an excellent team of developers, Cardano has made significant progress over the years and now headed towards a highly anticipated hard fork named Alonzo (named after US mathematician Alonzo Church). This will enable developers to build smart contracts on Cardano. A much-awaited feature.

Is Cardano superior to Ethereum 2.0?

While Cardano is branded as “Ethereum Killer” but in a recent video interview with Yahoo Finance, Charles mentions that Ethereum is actually “killing itself” by replacing the current proof-of-work blockchain with Ethereum 2.0, a new proof-of-stake iteration.  

Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2) which is anticipated to be launched by end of 2021, is an all-new revamped version of ethereum that solves major problems in the parent blockchain. Ethereum 2.0 has some fundamental changes like “proof-of-stake” and “sharding” that make it a whole new blockchain bringing more speed, high efficiency, and scalability as compared to its parent blockchain.

On this, Hoskinson claims that Cardano is the market leader in PoS, and it’s “leading the fight already”: 

We are leading that fight. We were first to the market…Engine doesn’t make a BMW a BMW. It’s a part of it, but you need a whole ecosystem, a whole collection of things.

Charles Hoskinson

Governance, interoperability, and user bases are other major reasons why Cardano will become superior to ethereum because ethereum 2.0 has “bowed out” on governance and it will make it hard for the ecosystem to evolve once its founders retire or lose prominence.

Charles highlighted the Bitcoin use case—which he compares to a “wood-powered steam engine”— as an example of a system that is evolving way too slowly.

You have those Bitcoin core developers who desperately want to evolve the system even though core developers want to implement multiple improvements like smart contracts and side-chains, they can’t get anything done.

Charles Hoskinson

On the same lines enabling on-chain governance is a vital part of Cardano’s roadmap. Ethereum is also less interoperable than protocols like Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos that make special provisions for sidechains like Polygon (MATIC). On the other hand, Cardano provides an ERC20 tokens converter that allows developers to switch to its proof-of-stake blockchain from ethereum.

Charles also mentioned that both Ethereum and Cardano have different user bases on top of different technologies and philosophies:

We are bringing millions of people in Africa that simply Ethereum doesn’t seem to care about…

Charles Hoskinson

Cardano’s ADA token has seen steady growth over the past few months and despite the recent market crash and bearish sentiment, ADA maintained its value and had hardly any effect of the crash while all other altcoins sank along with bitcoin and ethereum drop. This also tells why Cardano has a long way to go.