Cardano simply does not have the characteristics of these two coins.
Despite its crowd of very tenacious incumbents, Cardano (ADA +2.32%) only has a market cap of $13.8 billion, making it much smaller than even Dogecoin, (DOGE +2.80%) with $20 billion, as well as bigger chains like Solana, (GROUND +1.65%) which has a cap of $71.3 billion. Perhaps surprisingly, I predict that this state of affairs will remain largely the same through the end of 2026, with Dogecoin and Solana continuing to maintain, if not significantly expand, their lead over Cardano.
Let’s take a look at why these competitors are likely to stay in roughly the same places on a relative basis through 2026.
Image source: Getty Images.
Dogecoin could remain above Cardano without being a buy
For some investors, Dogecoin’s advantage over Cardano may seem strange. After all, it’s just a coin, and Cardano is an entire smart contract blockchain with its own (limited) decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and community of app developers. But the dog-themed room has a few perks that more serious assets lack, at least for now.
Notably, as of late November, Dogecoin now has U.S.-listed spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that allow people to buy exposure through regular brokerage accounts. Although some Cardano spot ETFs are being considered for approval, Cardano currently does not have any assets, so it cannot obtain capital inflows from the same sources, thus limiting its size.
Today’s change
(2.32%) $0.01
Current price
$0.37
Key Data Points
Market capitalization
14 billion dollars
Daily scope
$0.37 -$0.38
52 week range
$0.35 -$1.16
Volume
487M
ETFs can make capital a little stickier than one might expect for a coin, because they reduce onboarding friction and make purchasing a push of a button instead of a complicated system of setting up crypto wallets and funding them. And Cardano can build more and ship more, while still losing this particular fight if investors continue to prefer the easier exposure route.
But none of this constitutes a reason to invest in Dogecoin, and there isn’t really an investment thesis for holding it in general.
Today’s change
(2.80%) $0.00
Current price
$0.13
Key Data Points
Market capitalization
22 billion dollars
Daily scope
$0.13 -$0.13
52 week range
$0.12 -$0.43
Volume
1.1B
Solana’s lead over Cardano could increase
While Dogecoin’s advantage over Cardano lies in its distribution, Solana’s advantage lies in better distribution, as well as more capital and more efficient technology.
In crypto, chains that host the most usable liquidity (capital) tend to continue to win, because liquidity attracts developers, and when developers create applications that people want to use, then they attract more liquidity. Solana has approximately $8.7 billion in total DeFi value locked (TVL) and approximately $15.7 billion in stablecoins parked on-chain. Cardano only has $180 million in DeFi TVL and around $38 million in stablecoins in circulation – a negligible sum that is not enough to support a significant expansion of its ecosystem business. So even if Cardano suddenly became home to a killer decentralized application (dApp) that drove its DeFi TVL and stablecoin base to increase 10x overnight, which almost certainly won’t happen, it would still be very far behind Solana.
Today’s change
(1.65%) $2.05
Current price
$126.32
Key Data Points
Market capitalization
$71 billion
Daily scope
$123.90 -$127.18
52 week range
$96.70 -$293.31
Volume
4.2B
Solana’s advantages in speed and cost are more likely to reinforce this situation rather than lead to its stabilization over time. As of December 15, Solana was processing approximately 1,155 transactions per second (TPS) on its chain, compared to approximately 0.7 TPS for Cardano, with average transaction fees close to $0.0075 for Solana compared to approximately $0.134 for Cardano, and block processing times of approximately 0.4 seconds compared to approximately 20 seconds for Cardano. Solana’s throughput is therefore considerably higher, its costs are much lower, and it is also considerably faster than Cardano. That’s far too many huge gaps for the smaller network to close before the end of 2026 or even 2028.
Cardano could continue to improve, and there is a chance that it will close some of the technical gap in the long term – if it continues to limp along. The hardest part is filling the capital gap, because liquidity is as much social as technical, and it takes time to persuade users to move. And right now, the only real offshoring is the flow of capital and users from Cardano to Solana.
