Skip to content
Active Currencies: 17,312
Market Cap: $2.240T
Bitcoin Dominance: 56.34%
24h Market Cap Change: $0.96

Age-old Cardano debate resurfaces: Which side are you on?

Many prominent industry observers have trained their guns on Cardano's network capabilities in the past.

Age-old Cardano debate resurfaces: Which side are you on?
  • A crypto influencer questioned Cardano’s high market value despite lower network utilization.
  • Cardano’s market cap to TVL ratio was one of the highest in the space.

A crypto influencer enraged the supporters of popular smart contracts chain Cardano [ADA], sparking a heated debate on the network’s fundamentals.

What happened?

In a controversial X (formerly Twitter) post that went viral, MartyParty questioned the rationale behind the ADA token commanding a $23 billion-plus market valuation despite having much less network utilization.

The influencer went one step further by advising his followers to dump the token and shift to a “performing” blockchain token.

These remarks weren’t taken well by the Cardano community, who jumped to counter Marty’s arguments.

Some of them even called the transaction per second (TPS) data highlighted by him as outdated, adding a community note under his post with a link to the updated source.

Not the first time

Over the years, many prominent market observers have trained their guns on Cardano’s network capabilities and the justification behind it having a disproportionately larger market cap.

Just last month, Bitcoin [BTC] advocate and BitMeX co-founder Arthur Hayes threw shades at the network.

The Cardano community has energetically countered these arguments every time, with some questioning the use of TPS metric to gauge the network’s performance.

Others have drawn attention to the technical intricacies of a single transaction on Cardano.

Does the argument hold merit?

AMBCrypto assessed Cardano network through Santiment’s asset valuation metric, NVT Ratio. When compared to Ethereum [ETH], Cardano’s NVT Ratio has been on the lower side in recent months.

This meant that its market valuation was lower than the value being transmitted on the network, in other words an undervalued asset.

Cardano NVT Ratio
Source: Santiment

That being said, Cardano’s DeFi growth has lagged well behind its market cap increase.

As of this writing, its total value locked (TVL)  was just $418 million according to DeFiLlama, significantly lower than chains with similar market caps.


Read Cardano’s [ADA] Price Prediction 2024-25


These findings have led critics to question the network’s potential in building effective decentralized apps (dApps).

Meanwhile, ADA fell 4.5% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.65 as of this writing, according to CoinMarketCap.

Disclaimer: AMBCrypto's content is meant to be informational in nature and should not be interpreted as investment advice. Trading, buying or selling cryptocurrencies should be considered a high-risk investment and every reader is advised to do their own research before making any decisions.

Aniket Verma works as a journalist at AMBCrypto. Contrary to most who are primarily interested in merely tracking price movements of cryptos, his focus is on examining the niche intersection between cryptocurrencies and traditional finance. A so-so Bitcoin maximalist, Aniket has a strong disdain for memecoins and the unfounded frenzy they seem to generate every market season. Coming from a strong engineering background, Aniket previously worked as a Content Manager for TV9 Network. Before his stint over there, he was an Associate Multimedia News Producer at Reuters.

AMBCrypto was founded in 2018 with a mission to simplify and bring the latest blockchain and cryptocurrency news to our readers. We have quickly grown into the digital news source for an emerging generation of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, reaching more than a million readers on a monthly basis, across the globe.