Over the long run, investing in the stock market has been one of the most-effective ways to build wealth and achieve financial independence.
But in the short-term, cryptocurrencies have absolutely run circles around Wall Street.
Leading the charge, at least in terms of internet search buzz, are Bitcoin .
Bitcoin has had a banner year in that it’s hit an all-time high and was anointed by El Salvador as legal tender.
And then there’s the ultra-popular meme coin Shiba Inu, which gained as much as 17,300,000% in 15 months.
It’s the scalability of their blockchain networks, as measured by transactions per second .
Since Shiba Inu is an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s also tethered to a transactional ceiling of 13 TPS.
By comparison, Cardano was tested at roughly 250 TPS four years ago, but this looks to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Solana’s proof-of-history protocol creates a record of an event happening between specific times, rather than relying on validators to talk to each other and assess the time that’s passed between events.
The ultimate goal for blockchain technology is to provide faster transactions at a fraction of today’s cost, all while democratizing the process to include folks who might otherwise be excluded from basic banking services.
It’s something of a Catch-22: Businesses won’t make the leap until the technology demonstrates broad-based scalability, yet no evidence of broad-based scalability will be seen until businesses give blockchain technology a trial run.
Dating back more than a quarter of a century, bubbles were observed with the advent of internet, business-to-business commerce, genomics, marijuana, 3D printing, and so on.
As a crypto skeptic, I find the solutions Cardano and Solana are cooking up very exciting.