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It’s a very young project that was started by the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson. The biggest benefit the project has is a healthy dose of hindsight: Ethereum was launched back in 2015, which means that Charles and his team had two years of ‘real world’ data to create their new project. They were able to architect something that, in theory, could solve many of the issues Ethereum is dealing with today (primarily around scaling).
In addition, Ethereum is already launched and in use, which means it limits the amount it can actually alter itself without breaking a lot of functioning apps. If something about Ethereum ends up being unworkable, than Cardano will have a significant advantage.
In addition, Cardano claims to take a scientific, peer reviewed approach to creating the project, something that is self-evident in the way they designed their white papers.
I see this scientific rigor being both a positive and negative thing. On the one hand, you have a very measured approach to creating a blockchain, which will become necessary for any system we hope to rely on. On the other hand, the team just is not concerned about being that accessible to the community or even developers. I found that understanding what Cardano offered could be quite challenging, even after spending some time reading their research.
Another negative against Cardano is that Ethereum is market leader today for platform blockchains. They have the largest development platform and the biggest user base. Even if Cardano is technically better, Ethereum developers have high switching costs and strong network effects, which gives them a lot of incentive to fix Ethereum, rather than move platforms. There could be a shake up that causes Ethereum to lose it’s top position, but it’s a huge hurdle that every competitor will have contend with, Cardano included.
One of the people I follow, Cryptocandor, has a couple of videos that goes into more detail on Cardano. If you’re interested in this project, I recommend you check them out:
Originally published at www.quora.com.