Cardano is approaching one of its largest-ever growth opportunities.
Bitcoin passed one of its largest-ever hurdles last year.
The next 18 months will likely look very different for these two assets.
10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin ›
If you ask investors which they would rather own — a hulking blue chip asset, or a smaller and unproven upstart — many will prefer the latter option without thinking. After all, it’s easy to fall in love with the idea of grabbing a multibagger, and it’s also easy to forget how many lottery tickets inevitably expire worthless.
But is that the right lens to analyze whether it’s Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) or Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) that has more upside in store for those who buy it right now? Let’s investigate which of these assets is better positioned to grow and find out.
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At this point, Bitcoin is the monetary heavyweight of crypto, and it’s also a major financial asset with widespread acceptance in the traditional financial sector.
It represents more than half of total crypto market value, and it has a market cap of $1.8 trillion. Its tokenomics are brutally simple, with its supply capped at 21 million coins, and its new issuance coded to cut roughly in half every four years through the halving. Roughly 95% of that fixed cap has already been mined, so new supply is now only trickling in at the pace of molasses left outside in January (which is really slow).
The possible sources of demand for the coin have exploded since the arrival of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January 2024. The approval of the ETFs, long hailed as a major mark of the cryptocurrency’s maturity as an asset, have made buying and holding Bitcoin available to practically every investor. But in the context of evaluating the coin’s upside, it’s also worth mentioning that there isn’t necessarily another similarly important catalyst anywhere on the horizon.
So, in that vein, what does “upside” really mean for something this large?
A 10X move from here would imply a market cap for Bitcoin eclipsing most categories of global wealth, and approaching that of gold. That isn’t impossible if investors continue to believe that Bitcoin is a store of value that’s so reliable as to be “digital gold.” But for the record, during the ongoing inflation flap of the last 12 months, gold’s price rose 53%, and Bitcoin’s price was flat, so the narrative here does not really match the price action.
Still, if you assume that institutional adoption continues and that spot ETFs keep taking up coins, a world where Bitcoin is 3X to 5X higher a decade from now is entirely plausible, and in fact fairly probable.
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