Cardano ranks the highest among the proof-of-stake chains such as Polkadot [DOT], Avalanche [AVAX], and Tezos [XTZ] as per a report.
With 1182047 delegators, ADA leads the PoS rooster of chains. At the same time, open-source blockchain platform Polkadot has over 33,646 staked wallets (called Nominators), and smart contract poineer Avalanche 22,890 individual staked wallets occupy the second and third spots respectively.
The greater the number of delegators, the higher the degree of decentralization, and vice versa. Here is what “delegations” mean.
Holders of ADA tokens can transfer the stake attached to those tokens to a stake pool through delegation. It enables holders to participate in the network and receive rewards proportional to the amount of stake delegated even if they lack the knowledge or willingness to manage a node.
One interesting thing to note is Avalanche, although having less staked wallets than Polkadot, has a higher staking ratio. Comparing Polkadot’s 998 validators to Cardano’s 3,202 stake pools/validator nodes, the latter has a much larger number of validators.
“Cardano PoS Is Better Than Ethereum’s”
A few weeks back, an ADA stake pool administrator provided the following explanation on why Cardano’s PoS is superior to Ethereum’s.
On Cardano, users can stake from their own wallet to a pool. On ETH you have to send your tokens to a contract that can be hacked. The only way to keep your tokens on $ETH [locked up] is by having 32 $ETH and the technical knowledge to set up a node. Your tokens won’t be unlocked until the Shanghai upgrade. Users on Cardano can withdraw their rewards or stake at any time.
For the uninitiated, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade would address the gas issues by introducing changes in the network’s L2 protocols and is due to launch sometime after the deployment of the Ethereum merge, most likely in early 2023.
Another factor cited by experts is that Cardano‘s high degree of decentralization is supported by the relatively modest size of its full node and the minimal hardware requirements, as evidenced by a large number of stake pools and users running full nodes.
Even though the network meets the security and decentralization requirements, like all public blockchains, Cardano struggles with scalability too. It is expected that the vast majority of these improvements will be incorporated in the forthcoming Vasil update on September 22.