Cardano or Polkadot : which altcoin is offering best returns?

The altcoin market has grown at an unprecedented pace in terms of development and adoption over the past year. The market share of altcoins in Crypto Universe rose from an almost negligible to above 55% thanks some solid projects like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) that took up spots in the top 10 alts.

There’s been much debate when it comes to the comparison of top Ethereum-competitors like Cardano and Polkadot. Both the projects have had a large growth in price as well as popularity in the last six months.

Comparing prices

Cardano (ADA) went from a price of $0.16 in January to its current price of $1.3 logging an increase of over 800%. Polkadot (DOT) had comparatively slow growth, rising from $5 in January to the current price of $16 recording a 150% gain. From January to mid-April, ADA represented 790% price gain while DOT saw a 430% price increase. Even then ADA’s price gain percentage had almost doubled as compared to DOT.

Current prices, for both the alts, are much lower than they were a month ago. Cardano reached an ATH of $2.46 and was down 44% from those levels. In comparison, Polkadot’s ATH was $49.35 in May-mid and its price needs to rise 196.57% to reach a new all-time high.

Rating the Social Buzz

A recent survey highlighted that Cardano and Polkadot had 2% and 3% popularity respectively as compared to Dogecoin’s surprising 33% popularity in the US. On the other hand, Google Trends highlighted that search volumes for Cardano were higher than that of Polkadot.

Cardano’s web search was at its peak (100 mark) from May 9-15, while DOT’s web search at the same time was just 10. Looking at the social volumes for the two alts, it could be seen that Polkadot’s social volumes were high in January 2021 whereas ADA’s was higher in February and May.