Why Decred and Cardano Are the Strongest Hedges in the Crypto Market Today — Contrarian Island Episode #2

If you’re passionate about cryptocurrencies and the ways that they can benefit society, chances are you at least have some Bitcoin or Ethereum in your portfolio, if not both.

What you might not know, however, is that Bitcoin and Ethereum each have younger cousins in the crypto market — coins that were conceived and developed by some of the same people who worked on the originals in their early years, and saw faults and weaknesses in them that could be improved upon with new coins.

In the latest episode of cryptocurrency podcast Contrarian Island, Daniel Frumpkin and podcast host Matt, go into depth discussing their thoughts on cryptocurrency investment strategies during the bear market.

They talk about why Bitcoin still has by far the most compelling case to make exponential gains in the years ahead, exploring the addressable market for Bitcoin and how it stacks up with competitors like gold, government bonds, and collectibles.

Daniel shares his unique perspective on Bitcoin as a traveling remote worker (aka “digital nomad”). He explains how much easier life would be living and working abroad if Bitcoin were a widely accepted medium of exchange, but also why he believes that optimizing for the store of value use case is more important from a short to medium-term investment standpoint.

After getting into some slightly more technical discussions on future scalability with the Lightning Network and its limitations given the current Bitcoin protocol specifications, the topic shifts to a project that Matias and Daniel both share an affinity for: Decred.

Decred was created and built by former Bitcoin developers who recognized that Bitcoin’s lack of a governance system could prove detrimental in the future. As they were being proven right with hard fork after hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain in 2017 and 2018, Decred swiftly became an industry leader in governance.

Decred’s governance system allows token holders to propose new ideas for improving the project, a blockchain industry first. After a proposal is made, token holders can buy tickets that allow them to vote on whether or not the ideas get funded, and even select the engineering or marketing team that will carry out the work from a pool of applicants.

Bitcoin and Decred share many crucial characteristics, maximizing decentralization, censorship resistance, security, and trustlessness. What sets Decred apart is governance, and that’s what makes it a strong hedge against Bitcoin in the years ahead, as well as a good bet to perform well even if Bitcoin succeeds alongside it.

In the smart contract space, the waters are a bit muddier. There are still some good reasons to be bullish on Ethereum, including the growing Decentralized Finance movement and the overall size and strength of the Ethereum development community across the globe.

With that being said, Ethereum is far from perfect. Scalability is still a big concern in the short-term, and many millions of investor dollars have already been lost due to buggy code.

That’s where Cardano comes in. The founder of Cardano is Charles Hoskinson, who co-founded Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin and was a big part of its early development. Hoskinson recognized some faults in Ethereum, and created Cardano to solve those big issues.

Cardano’s programming language, Haskell, is safer and less buggy than Ethereum’s Solidity. Additionally, all technical features of Cardano’s platform must pass through a rigorous academic peer review process, ensuring that the platform is solid from the foundation up.

The smart contract space is full of many questionable platforms, but Cardano easily stands out as a legitimate contender to become the leader of the space in the years ahead.

Ultimately, anybody who has significant amounts of their portfolio invested in either Bitcoin or Ethereum should take a deeper dive into Decred and Cardano. And a great place to start is with this in-depth talk between Daniel and Matt.

Contrarian Island is a rising podcast in the cryptocurrency space. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Music, or Google Play. Follow Contrarian Island and Daniel on Twitter.