The ongoing rivalry between Cardano and Solana took a playful turn recently, sparked by a humorous fake news article. Nansen CEO, Alex Svanevik, shared a satirical piece on X, claiming the founder of Solana-based protocol Solend (now Save Protocol) had been arrested for attempting to smuggle 20,000 condoms into Singapore. This bizarre report added fuel to the ongoing banter between both crypto communities.
The fabricated article hinted the condoms were for Solana’s Breakpoint event in Singapore, a major crypto conference. Svanevik humorously compared it to “bringing 20,000 steaks to a vegan festival.” Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, jumped in on the fun. He remarked that the Solend founder simply wanted to “safely” use Solana’s blockchain, a playful jab at Solana’s past struggles with network outages.
Solana has faced a string of outages, most recently in February 2024, when the network went down for five hours. A similar outage occurred in September 2023, lasting 17 hours. Solana has also struggled with congestion during periods of high demand, notably in April this year and in early 2022. Despite these problems, Solana boasts impressive transaction speeds, often processing over 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), with average fees hovering around $0.00025 per transaction.
Cardano vs. Solana: A Battle of Words
This isn’t the first time Hoskinson has taken a jab at Solana. Following Solana’s February outage, he subtly critiqued the network, and last year he questioned Solana’s choice of name for its hackathon, “Grizzlython.” This feud stretches back to 2022 when Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko made a derisive comment about Cardano, further igniting tensions between the two communities.
In response to the fake news, Solend’s founder, Rooster, joined in the fun, sharing the article with a joke about Singapore’s bail laws. He even posted a photo of a branded condom, adding, “At least one made it through customs.”
The rivalry between Cardano and Solana continues—this time, with a bit of humor.
