Trading platform Robinhood has re-listed Solana (SOL) at over $216 a year after it removed the crypto and sold any remaining coins for just $16.

Multiple users on X (formerly Twitter) slated today’s re-listing, which came as Cardano (ADA), PEPE, and XRP were also added to the platform.

“Will never forgive Robinhood for de-listing SOL at $16,” one user said, while crypto sleuth ZachXBT claimed that Robinhood forced its users to sell their coins, causing “massive losses.”

He asked, “What changes will Robinhood be making to regain trust so users are not forced to exit positions again in the future?” 

Read more: How Jump helped US Robinhood users trade offshore at FTX

Robinhood de-listed SOL, ADA and MATIC

On June 7 last year, Robinhood warned it would de-list SOL, ADA, and Polygon (MATIC) from its exchange by June 27. Users were allowed to buy, sell, hold, and transfer any of these three cryptocurrencies up until the deadline. 

After this, “any ADA, MATIC, and SOL still in your Robinhood Crypto account will be sold for market value and the proceeds will be credited to your Robinhood buying power.” It’s worth noting that users living in New York weren’t allowed to transfer their SOL.

ADA was worth roughly $0.28 at the time while SOL was worth just over $16. Today, ADA is worth almost $0.6 (a 114% increase) and SOL is worth over $216 (a 1,250% increase).

Read more: CHART: It’s been 262 days since Solana’s last major outage

At the time, Robinhood claimed it had reviewed its crypto offering before the de-listing. Reports noted that these tokens were identified as securities in a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing Binance and Coinbase of offering unregistered securities.

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Charles Hoskinson has placed crypto YouTube channel Altcoin Daily top of a list of crypto news outlets ranked on how fairly they treat Cardano. Coincidentally, the YouTube channel that hosted this highly impartial investigation into media biases was… Altcoin Daily.

During the video, Hoskinson stresses that the outlet’s favorable rating wasn’t given “just because we’re being interviewed.”

Indeed, according to the Cardano and Ethereum co-founder, “[Altcoin Daily] have a huge audience, you’ve always been friendly, you’re nice guys, and you try to get things right and accurate.”

Hoskinson then ranks CoinDesk a B, saying it’s been accurate and fair in reporting hard forks. Hoskinson considered buying the publisher last year, and claimed during the interview that he passed on the purchase as there would be “a mismatch of what we perceived to be the value in their expectations.” 

Hoskinson ranks Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan’s podcast in the S tier alongside Altcoin Daily. However, he puts Crypto Banter, Bankless, and ‘mainstream media’ in the D tier.

He claimed the host of Crypto Banter loves Luna and FTX while hating Cardano and described Bankless as “bastards.” He said Bankless are “not legitimate people,” and that they’re “not actually interested in having an intellectually honest conversation about Cardano.”

Read more: Debunking Charles Hoskinson’s claims about bitcoin scarcity

He then discusses ‘mainstream media’s’ political and philosophical narratives, describing outlets as following an agenda of, “We like the guy in the White House now, so what we’re gonna do is be anti-crypto.” 

He says, “If you’re going to talk about something, talk with a beginner’s mind, try to understand and acknowledge what your biases are,” before describing his own biases in crypto. He doesn’t mention any possible bias in his Altcoin Daily tier list ranking.

It’s unclear why Altcoin Daily failed to include Protos in the Hoskinson tier list but we can confirm the newsroom is distraught. 

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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently went live on Twitter to discuss the bankruptcy of crypto exchange Genesis and how parent company Digital Currency Group may sell its media arm, CoinDesk. His expressed interest in buying the company has journalists nauseous.

Hoskinson hadn’t “seen any books or financials,” but estimated it would cost around $200 million to buy the crypto news outlet. “Why am I interested in an asset like this?” he asked during the livestream. “For years I’ve thought about what would make an elite media institution and […] the things required.”

“I would like to figure out how to get back to journalistic integrity,” Hoskinson said, proceeding to discuss his belief in ‘veracity bonds.’

Hoskinson’s future of journalism: Like now, but worse!

What if journalists actually paid you for the opportunity to write articles for your consumption? What if people were financially incentivized to downvote an article? What if all of this was good for Cardano?

Welcome to Hoskinson’s version of journalism, in which ‘veracity bonds’ are meant to hold journalists accountable to the ‘truth.’

“When someone publishes something, the thing that they publish, they actually put money on the table,” he explained in the 12 minute live video on Twitter. “If it turns out that the thing that they’ve written isn’t true or is inaccurate, they actually can lose the money that they’ve bonded.”

It would be difficult to find any journalist willing to work under the strange conditions that Hoskinson described, in which every article would be an NFT and there would be a “financial incentive to fact check the fact checkers.” Indeed, it’s difficult to uphold ‘truth’ when it’s determined by easily-rigged online sentiment — one where those with the most money maintain the most influence, and one where those elite few own the news outlets anyway.

The second half of Hoskinson’s new business plan is to “give the top 100 blockchains a space to write whatever they want about their ecosystem.” In case this needs explanation, that’s not how the news works. This closely resembles a DIY public relations firm rather than a truth-seeking organization.

Can Hoskinson afford CoinDesk?

Hoskinson feels slighted by CoinDesk, and perhaps every media outlet in general. “As you know, we’ve [Cardano] been a recipient of some extremely bad media — some just because they didn’t take the time to really research and deeply get into things, and some because there was actually an agenda to defame.”

In Hoskinson’s version of reality, every negative article about Cardano has either been due to lazy journalists or those so fired up to defame Hoskinson at any cost because… well… just ’cause.

So, in the spirit of lazy journalism, I’ve decided to rely on a Forbes article from 2018 which estimated Hoskinson’s net worth to be around $500-600 million. The metric isn’t totally unreliable – Cardano is worth about the same now as it was then.

Anyway, this is a lot of money! Hoskinson himself made sure to mention he’s “still one of the richest guys in the space” during the livestream. Great, and hats off, but $600 million is nothing when you’re purchasing a $200 million entity. 

Indeed, Hoskinson would likely have trouble selling his cryptocurrencies and other illiquid assets to have enough cash to buy CoinDesk outright. It’s probably not worth the risk.

Read more: What happened to the Lifeboat Foundation’s Bitcoin Endowment Fund?

However, an attempted purchase with the help of outside investors wouldn’t surprise me, similar to how Elon Musk sought the help of Larry Ellison, the Saudi royals, and Binance chief Changpeng Zhao (CZ) to acquire Twitter. Of course, this would dilute Hoskinson’s control a bit, but it would provide him with the ability to make day-to-day decisions and take CoinDesk in a new direction.

CoinDesk deserves better

I have no doubt about the integrity of many journalists at CoinDesk. They broke the FTX story and essentially caused the bankruptcy of Genesis to happen sooner rather than later. They’re a talented group that deeply care about reporting the truth. 

It’s a real shame some rich guy thinks he’d bring a better legacy to the outlet, because I assure you he’s wrong. None of Hoskinson’s suggestions — from the ludicrous veracity bonds to NFT articles — do anything to fundamentally “fix” journalism. A new cryptocurrency oligarch to replace Barry Silbert won’t benefit CoinDesk.

I spoke to numerous journalists and editors, within and without the cryptocurrency industry, about Hoskinson’s dream of buying CoinDesk. There was a collective revulsion and a broad agreement that he doesn’t know anything about journalism.

But Hoskinson needs us all to know that he can afford it if he “really wanted to.”

Cool, Charles. Very cool. Just promise you won’t.

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Cardano (ADA) activated in favor of its Vasil hard fork, an upgrade designed to give its network more functionality. Developers promise that Vasil will improve smart contracts, increase throughput capacity, and reduce fees.

Cardano’s largest infrastructure company, Input Output, named the latest upgrade “Vasil” in honor of Vasil St. Babov, a Cardano ambassador who died in 2021. Babov is known for planting more than 10,000 gingko trees during his lifetime.

Vasil activates Version 2 of Cardano’s native smart contract programming language known as “Plutus.” The development team promises that it will be backwards compatible with Version 1. Plutus Version 2 is expected to go live on September 27, one epoch after the activation of the Vasil hard fork.

Cardano retired the Vasil DevNet, which it had used to test upgrades in the Vasil hard fork. For future development, it will use distinct test environments: Preview and PreProduction.

Vasil also changes the way that contracts handle inputs and unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). Previously, contracts could only access data on the Cardano blockchain by spending and recreating UTXOs. Now, reference scripts can avoid creating new transactions, which can reduce congestion at the blockchain’s base layer.

Vasil activates Cardano Improvement Proposal 40 which changes transaction validation for scripts. Previously, if a script failed Phase 2 validation, it could lose all the funds in the collateral’s UTXO. Now if the script fails validation, it will only use the funds put up as collateral and send any remaining funds sent back to a specified change address.

Read more: How close is Cardano to displacing Ethereum as altcoin king?

Cardano promises to slightly improve decentralization of block production by removing a parameter that benefited data center-based block production. It also worked on making block verification faster without compromising security by dropping one of the two required Verifiable Random Functions (VRF).

Who was ready for Cardano’s Vasil hard fork?

Major exchanges like Binance announced support for Cardano’s Vasil hard fork. Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger also announced support. Some Cardano-based dApps like Revuto updated to support the upgrade.

Cardano says 80% of Staking Pool Operator nodes, 90% of exchanges, and the top ten dApps by Total Value Locked (TVL) were prepared for Vasil. Input Output recommended that investors who keep their ADA tokens on an exchange double-check to make sure the exchange was ready for the hard fork.

IOHK’s Vice President for community and ecosystem, Tim Harrison, referred to watching the hard fork happen as “a glorious combination of edge of seat suspense and watching paint dry.”

Martify Labs announced the development package Mesh soon after the Vasil hard fork. According to Martify Labs’ website, Mesh is a Cardano-based software development kit for developing dApps.

Podcast host Rick McCracken ran a test attack on Cardano soon after the Vasil hard fork went live — his attack failed.

Upcoming Cardano improvements include “diffusion pipelining,” a method for improving Cardano’s speed and scalability by propagating blocks before they are fully validated. Diffusion pipelining will still require validating headers. This upgrade will not require a hard fork.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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Between January 2021 and January 2022, ether (ETH) outshone Bitcoin (BTC), gaining 394% compared to the leader’s 47%. This consolidated its position as the second most dominant coin on the market.

However, despite the fact that the price of ETH is soaring to new highs and its market cap is increasing exponentially, its fight for market dominance is hampered by competitors and new entrants to the space.

And ETH has many competitors that are looking to snatch the currency’s market dominance, including Cardano blockchain’s ADA token.

Cardano exists only to one-up Ethereum

The Ethereum blockchain was built as a smart-contract all-rounder on which decentralized applications – or dApps – could be built. The code was written with Solidity and is open-source, meaning anyone can write applications to work on the blockchain.

The many coins created to run this way include Uniswap, which went on to create DeFi (decentralized finance), Chainlink, and AAVE. Among the most popular Ethereum dApps today are NFT exchanges such as LooksRare and OpenSea, along with MetaMask, the wallet people use to store their Ethereum-based tokens and connect with NFT exchanges.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson — along with Gavin Wood, Anthony Di Lorio, Joseph Lubin, and Vitalik Buterin — was one of the original Ethereum developers. Hoskinson split from the Ethereum team in June 2014 after allegedly disagreeing with Vitalik and others about creating a non-profit organization for Ethereum. Hoskinson wanted to create a company while Vitalik and the others went on the create the Ethereum Foundation.

Hoskinson’s original aims for Cardano appeared to be rather vague, not covering much beyond the desire to create a technically better blockchain than Ethereum. And in some ways he succeeded. 

Written in Haskell, Cardano is also a smart-contract all-rounder on which dApps can be built. However, it differs from Ethereum in that it’s mainly a proof-of-stake (PoS) network, as opposed to a proof-of-work (PoW) network.

The difference here, of course, is that a PoW blockchain validates transactions using the miners who create the tokens, while on a PoS network transactions are validated by stakers.

As has been widely reported, PoW blockchains consume a lot of energy compared to PoS networks. However, Ethereum is nearing the final stages of its upgrade to PoS, known as “The Merge.”

And, desperate not to be left behind, Cardano is undergoing its own “Vasil” update, designed to make it more efficient, increase the blockchain’s throughput, and make it easier to create smart contracts and decentralized apps.

Gas fees haven’t turned off ETH fans

Cardano’s biggest beef with Ethereum has traditionally been the latter’s extremely high transaction costs. These ‘gas fees’ are typical of PoW blockchains and have regularly been used as a stick to beat Ethereum. ADA fees, on the other hand, have historically remained at an average of around 0.18 ADA, which in dollar terms would be around nine cents.

However, higher transaction costs and exorbitant gas fees didn’t make users leave the Ethereum blockchain for other blockchains. Even if they did, the numbers are insignificant.

The Ethereum blockchain is currently the most popular blockchain for NFTs, followed by Solana, while the Cardano blockchain isn’t even listed in the top 17. With regards to DeFi, as of June this year, Ethereum dominated the DeFi market owning up to 63% of market share, with Cardano trailing in 27th place with just 0.17%.

Cardano isn’t as transparent as Ethereum

Despite Cardano being in the pole position as Ethereum’s main competitor, and despite the fact that its technology has been more efficient so far, Cardano still has to make a gargantuan leap to outrun Ethereum.

As of today, Cardano makes only 1.64% of the whole crypto market — admittedly an improvement from its 0.74% in December of 2020 — with around 71,000 active addresses. ETH, on the other hand, boasts 200,000,000 addresses.

In October 2021, daily transactions for Cardano hit above the 100,000 daily mark, however, this is also dwarfed by Ethereum transactions which exceeded the one million daily mark.

Another problem facing Cardano as it seeks to overhaul the world’s leading alt coin is the fact that it’s notoriously opaque when it comes to revealing who holds its tokens.

Traders may not necessarily appreciate or care about the fact that Cardano uses superior technology to Ethereum since most people piling into crypto are doing so for speculative intent, however, secrecy around its holdings may represent a big red flag.

On the other hand, ETH holders are comparatively forthcoming. For example, we know, thanks to transactions linked to his main wallet, that Vitalik sold a large amount of his stack in May last year when the coin was at $3,811. And we also know that he kept most of it and currently owns at least 290,000 tokens.

Read more: Here’s what you need to know about Ethereum 2.0’s Merge

Joseph Lubin claimed that he and his company ConsenSys does not own more than half a percent of all ETH tokens. In a recent clip that emerged on Twitter, Vitalik also admitted that the Ethereum Foundation sold its ether tokens at the peak of the bull market. Hoskinson, by contrast, has not been so forthcoming with his or his company’s holdings. In a report by Finbold it was reported that 94% of the ADA supply is stored in just 10% of wallets. This is a mind-blowing number that could, understandably, make some traders fearful of being rug-pulled.

Is fixed supply the ace up Cardano’s sleeve?

Finally, if Cardano is to make an attempt on the altcoin summit, the issue of fixed supply may be in its favor. In contrast to Ethereum, which has no fixed supply, Cardano’s supply is capped at 45 billion tokens with a current supply of around 33 billion. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s current supply stands at around 121 million tokens, having grown by more than 50% since November 2016.

This begs the question of whether or not Ethereum can keep its price if it continues to increase its supply, particularly when The Merge happens and control of the network is practically handed to the vaildators.

One would need 32 ETH to become a validator and collectively the validators would have, theoretically, the power to modify or change the supply of ETH. So, it’s yet to be seen how the new validators will use the supply to play the market. One would assume that it would be in their own interest to restrict the supply.

Statistics don’t lie and they say that most cryptocurrencies don’t make it. Cardano has, so far, not only survived, but it has thrived and grown, albeit not enough to pose a serious threat to Ethereum. And of course Cardano also has its own competitors, chiefly Solana, which is backed by Sam Bankman-Fried. All of this means that Cardano could offer a good trading opportunity, but all the cards are stacked in favor of Ethereum.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

The main author of this article holds more than $1,000 USD in Ether.

Edit 16:00 UTC, Aug 2: The piece has been edited to read that 94% of ADA’s supply is stored in just 10% of wallets not 10 wallets.

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