Solana is a VC-funded business, while Ethereum is more akin to a protocol, a la Bitcoin.

If you put any stock in Satoshi's vision of cryptocurrency supporting decentralization, censorship resistance, and freedom, etc., there is no comparison between Solana (or Ripple, Binance, etc.) and Ethereum

Solana is conventional finance with a "crypto" veneer. Ethereum was a good-faith, second step expanding upon Satoshi's vision.

Peg still below $1.00 at $0.77 two weeks later.

Pretty safe to say yet another algorithmic stablecoin is done.

Exchange/ Swap tokens are nothing more than loyalty rewards, minus the redeemability. Right now all you can do to "redeem" the token is to unload it on the next "greater fool" who doesn't realize the token's true value.

SwapSpace allows you access to multiple swap services and doesn't have a token. They started a business! and take a very small % of the trade as a fee. These "reward tokens" are a gimmick that was enabled by leverage-fuelled bull markets, FOMO and widespread financial and econkmic illiteracy among crypto users.

It won't be long before folks learn to see the difference between protocols, currencies and applications. Then all these pointless tokens end up in the bin where they belong.

For Cardano's ecosystem there are several IDO, NFT, exchange and swap sites. You can explore the various options and offerings starting at:
https://www.cardanocube.io/
https://www.builtobcardano.com/

Memecoins do not have investors, they have speculators.

Memecoins do not have founders, they have confidence men, grifters, and collaborators.

You need to define "best". There are arguments for speed, decentralization, governance, "Five-Eyes"/FATF compliance/ greater regulatory compatability, etc.

This is like ask8ng "who makes the best pizza"... You need to establish the ideal/ best criteria before you can judge protocols against them.

A cryptocurrency that has any link to gold or claim to be digital [insert asset], will require massive overhead, regulatory oversight and ties to the established financial system.

You will need to hold physical gold _somewhere_ . That facility would have to comply with all the national and local laws, be audited, insured, the asset physically stored, etc. It will be a registered company someplace, It with bank accounts, lawyers, and Lord knows what else if the intent is to have a cryptocurrency redeemable for physical PMs.

Shipping, employees, payroll, HR Departments, office space, diversity consultants, etc.

I see no opportunity to add value to the current precious metals ownership structures. In fact, all I see is added costs for no meaningful benefit.

Code audits are helpful but they are by no means definitive proof of anything. More than a few projects that were audited by established and respected teams have gone on to have exploits discovered upon release.

The most recent publicised one I can think of was critical exploit in MinSwap's smart contract(s) discovered by Wingriders (a competitor swap/dex on the Cardano network) once they went open source.

It is impossible for exhanges to know the full etory of all of the 10s of thousands of crypto projects that have launched. The best they can do is set up certain reasonable criteria and parameters for the project to meet, and then allow the free market to pick winners and losers, and warn each other of potential scam projects.

When $DOGE first launched, it was done as a joke. Some may have considered that a "scam" by some estimates. But over time the joke started to take itself more seriously, and is now a top 20 project.

Who can say for certain where the ultimate value lies in each different protocol or project. Consumers need to take more active responsibility in evaluating projects, not less.

China's CBDC and social credit system applied globally?

I will pass, thanks.

6.5 Trillion $LUNA are already minted, with 2 Billion UST still to be redeemed for $1 USD worth of $LUNA each. You're looking at Quadrillions of $LUNA eventually.

Its worthless.

This post aged ... poorly. LOL. Over the course of two weeks.

Algorithmic stablecoins backed by cryptocurrency are all done now.

There is no way for it to recover at this point.

Expect all other algorithmic stablecoins to follow.

All eyes should be on the grey-market miasma that is USDT at this point. It was backed by commercial paper and some cryptocurrency.

Unless the Fed suddenly reverses the upcoming rate hikes it just announced last week, or some unimagined bailout is revealed (e.g., $3,000 stimulus checks), the global economy is dead.

BTC will fall below $10K, and the stock markets will drop another 50% from where we are now. The amount of leveraged long bets in this system is literally beyond calculation, and those liquidations will amplify the depth of this market crash.

Microstrategy aside, we are in a massive negative feedback loop of untolled thousands of leveraged crypto longs being liquidated while their equity positions are facing the same problems.

This is the scene in the film Margin Call where Jeremy Irons informs everybody that "You don't understand! This!Is!It!"

The key difference is the US Federal Reserve had interest rates back then around 4-5%, a balance sheet of about $50 BILLION, and no meaningful inflation to address. I.e., they had unlimited tools to work with to fix it.

There is nothing that any central bank can do this time. This time, it really IS it.

The Cardano network has an airdrop/faucet protocol called "DripDropz" ( https://dripdropz.io ).

If you have some ADA delegated to a Cardano stakepool (helping secure the Cardano network) you are eligible for any number of airdrops and/or faucet drips of some tokens/assets launched on Cardano's blockchain. There is a new, clean "Drip" every Cardano "Epoch" (5 days) (actually, not all "Drips" or "Drops" require having an active stake).

How it works is: you submit a public ADA wallet receive address, and DripDropz lets you know which tokens/assets you are eligible to claim, and how many. You can claim up to 10 different token/asset types per "Drip" (net fee of 2 ADA per Drip).

To claim your Dripped tokens/assets, you mark of your desired tokens, and send 5 ADA + 0.17 ADA xAction fee to an address DripDropz.io gives you. In return, DripDrops sends you a transaction that has all the selected tokens/assets and a refund of ~3.15 ADA (net=2 ADA).

You can Drip multiple times, though you can only Drip one of each token/asset per Cardano Epoch. I.e.:

1. Submit ADA wallet receive address to DripDropz.io; 
2. Find list of 50** eligible tokens to start; 
3. Select the 10 best tokens and submit the first Drip of Epoch (requires 5 ADA); 
4. Wait for the transaction to process; 
5. Receive your 10 tokens from step 2, plus 3.1 ADA refund (net fee 2 ADA); 
6. Resubmit ADA wallet receive address to DripDropz.io in that same Epoch; 
7. Find list of 40 eligible tokens (50 minus the first 10 already Dripped assets); 
8. If still worthwhile, select the 10 next-best tokens and submit the next Drip of Epoch (with 5 ADA); 
9. GoTo Step 4, Repeat.

At the start of the next Epoch, all the tokens/assets are reset for Dripping.

** hypothetical number

The various projects on DripDropz are here: https://dripdropz.io/explore-projects

Cardano is sort of the bastard network at the moment, so their tokens, NFTs and protocols are all fairly new and/or finishing up development. And as such, they are not valued terribly highly. Hardly any are currently worth anywhere near the 0.2 ADA you would pay as part of a 10-token Drip.

If Cardano remains the red-headed stepchild and never meets its potential to be a leading smart contract platform, many of the tokens, tools and protocols won't amount to more than clutter in your wallets.

But there's a chance some of these dripped tokens might be worth something in the fairly distant future. Especially if Cardano lives up to its aspirations.

Hope this helps.

PS - I recommend the Eternl Cardano light wallet to get started using Cardano. But check out all wallets here: https://www.cardanocube.io/collections/wallets

I would recommend trying out Exodus. They have many additional tools and it is super easy to use.

Their fees on swaps are kinda steep compared to using your own non-cusodial option like SwapSpace, but for sheer simplicity and versatility, Exodus is great.

Crypto is not becoming more centralized.

Investors/users/the public are embracing more centralized blockchain protocols and investments.

On the retail side they're choosing speed, price and less responsibility. The institutional side is choosing all that as well as being additionally motivated by threats of governmental oversight.

There are decentralized (or perhaps "less centralized") options to choose from, but they are nowhere near as popular (by MC and TVL) at this stage. Decentralized networks will always take longer to execute, and require much more personal responsibility and accountability on behalf of users. It has only taken a single, greedy mistake to transform a decentralized, crypto-libertarian into a CeFi statist.

Whether or not the original raisons d'etre for cryptocurrencies is ever fulfilled is, as yet, an open question. "We, the people" are the ones who will provide the answers, and those answers are increasingly "CeFi > DeFi".

Yo7 need to qualify whar "best" would mean.

Decentralization, stability, transparency, governance, investor vs. whale vs retail ownership, etc., are just some of the factors you would have to weigh to determine what the "best" alternative to Ethereum would be.

Tell us where you think Ethereum was lacking, and which factors are most impoertant

It's just a momentum-driven, short-squeezing melt up that is happening alongside the equivalent market action in the NASDAQ and tech sectors of Western equity markets.

When that equity bubble bursts on the next piece of bad news, this cryptocurrency mini-bubble deflates as well. Being so much more volatile, however, crypto markets will end up swinging well below the most recent troughs of the past month.

Crypto swings are always more volatile than the tech sector their performance tracks alongside.