Hype coins, trends, or memes are not going to win the next bull run. The winners will be networks and their altcoins that solve real problems at scale. So, the question isn’t “Which community shouts the loudest?” It’s which network is actually closest to product-market fit. Today I cover three such altcoins that fit this bill. These are Cardano ($ADA), Ripple ($XRP), and Hedera ($HBAR).
These altcoins are not based on hype. Instead, they’re based on actual adoption, partnerships, tech, and network activity. What I found surprised even me. By the end, you’ll know exactly which chain has the strongest foundation going forward. And I promise, the answer is not obvious.
Cardano ($ADA)
The first of today’s altcoins is Cardano ($ADA). Let me first start with some strong points for Cardano. After that, I will also cover some weaker points.
So, Cardano’s design has some interesting core design elements. It emphasizes peer-reviewed research and academic rigor. The latter is great and offers thorough final products. However, it also means that it takes a long time for products to launch. Furthermore, Cardano eyes sustainability. You can find this back in its low energy proof-of-stake consensus protocol “Ouroboros”. This sets it apart from various other networks.
🚨Big news for #Cardano! Introducing Ouroboros Phalanx — our latest upgrade that makes network attacks way harder and more expensive while enabling up to 30% faster transactions.
More secure. More efficient. More Cardano.
Technical & non-technical blogs below 👇:— Input | Output (@InputOutputHK) October 31, 2025
Many Cardano users actively stake their $ADA. According to Pooltool, $ADA holders stake almost 57% of all circulating $ADA. There are 1.34 million addresses that stake $ADA. These are impressive numbers. This puts Cardano in the top 20 for staking ratio.
Cardano Epoch 592 ends today 🔥
All $ADA delegators will receive their regular staking rewards, just like last epoch.
57.4% of the circulating supply is staked. If you’re not staking yet, just pick a pool and delegate.
Soon we’ll hit Epoch 600. No outages. Ever. 🫡 pic.twitter.com/NXBlUvEelF
— Cexplorer.io 🅰️ (@cexplorer_io) November 5, 2025
The Leios upgrade went from its research stage to the engineering stage. This means that the devs are now working on and testing this upgrade. Among others, it should improve the transaction speed. It has a theoretical TPS (transaction per second) of 10k. I talked about Leios in yesterday’s video to find out if Cardano is dead, due to its low TVL numbers. Here’s the video link.
So, talking about Cardano’s TVL, that’s not looking too good. On DeFiLlama, Cardano ranks 25th. Its current TVL is $248.5 million. Charles Hoskinson acknowledged this. As a result, he and his team are working on solutions to solve this issue. So, there’s a justified critique of Cardano’s TVL and low DeFi usage. In essence, the fundamentals of the Cardano network are still strong. It also has an extensive ecosystem, but weak DeFi usage.
Hedera ($HBAR)
Next in my list of altcoins is Hedera ($HBAR). As you may know by now, Hedera is not a blockchain but a hashgraph. The main difference between these two is that a blockchain uses a linear chain of blocks. A hashgraph, uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to link transactions in a non-linear fashion. This offers faster transaction speeds and higher throughput. The throughput measures the TPS a chain can handle. Furthermore, a hashgraph can process transactions in parallel. This is in contrast to a standard blockchain, which processes them one block at a time.
So, with that out of the way, what else does Hedera have to offer? The founders are Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon. Dr. Baird invented the hashgraph technology. However, where you really want to look is Hedera’s Governing Council. This is a diverse group of prominent organizations, so not a single entity or person. In this council you can find firms like IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Google, or LG. So, not exactly the smallest firms around. The council members make major decisions like software updates and pricing policies. You could say Hedera is the enterprise crypto project. And you’d be right.
Hedera recently saw the launch of the third crypto ETF ever, after the $BTC and $ETH ETFs. In late October, Canary Fund launched the $HBAR ETF. It saw massive inflows, of 172 million $HBAR. That’s around $34 million. And it gets better. There are another 12 ETFs filed that reference $HBAR.
Today marks history as HBAR becomes the third ever crypto ETF to launch after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
To make this clear, out of the 19M+ cryptocurrency’s that @CoinMarketCap tracks, it was the @CanaryFunds HBAR ETF that passed – citing @Hedera’s institutional-grade network 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Rc5U6eX35M
— Hedera Foundation (@HederaFndn) October 28, 2025
Here’s another surprising stat for you. After Ethereum, Hedera has the second-largest core developer pool across all L1s. Who would have thought that? And earlier this week, Hedera integrated with Chainlink. That’s by far the biggest oracle provider in the business. So, Hedera is looking strong here!
By integrating with @chainlink, Hedera enables developers to build secure cross-chain DeFi & tokenized RWA applications with trusted data & seamless interoperability.
Explore how we are shaping a connected, transparent on-chain economy together.https://t.co/fz3i3skax5
— Hedera (@hedera) November 4, 2025
Ripple ($XRP)
Next on today’s list of altcoins is Ripple’s $XRP. Ripple is big and manages to have a steady news presence. Now, Ripple’s network claims integration with worldwide banks and payment-providers. It wants to enable faster cross-border settlement. There are plenty of claims that many partner banks adopt Ripple’s messaging tech. That also includes their settlement tech.
However, this does not include $XRP-based liquidity. It’s difficult to verify these claims. And there’s also commercial confidentiality. This means that many banks’ usage details, like volume or financial arrangements, are not fully disclosed publicly.
Currently, there seem to be at least 12 banks that actively use $XRPs infrastructure. This includes giants like American Express or Standard Chartered. So, adoption seems to be happening, however, hard proof is different.
The Ripple Army are great supporters. However, they also sometimes tend to go overboard a bit. Here’s an example, apparently, Ripple has issued bank IDs to over 500 banks. That doesn’t necessarily mean that these 500 banks also use Ripple or $XRP.
💡 REMEMBER THAT RIPPLE HAS ASSIGNED BANK IDs TO OVER 500 BANKS! 🏦
AND PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THAT #XRP WON‘T BE USED 🤭 pic.twitter.com/vwbXweJTn7
— 𝓐𝓶𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓮 (@_Crypto_Barbie) July 26, 2025
Recently, we also saw that various projects ended up picking other chains over Ripple. That was after extensive testing of the Ripple infrastructure. For example,
- •SWIFT went for Linea.
- •Western Union recently picked Solana over Ripple. That’s in favor of high throughput and low fees, offered by Solana.
- •MoneyGram and Ripple partnered between 2018 and 2021. After that, MoneyGram went for the Stellar Network.
10+ years and billions of $XRP sold to fund itself, Ripple’s biggest deals (MoneyGram, Western Union) collapsed, leaving only a handful of small regional banks, while SWIFT is now piloting with $LINEA w/ 30 Tier-1 banks.
This is the first time SWIFT has used a public blockchain… pic.twitter.com/zO0jAuE4Fm
— ElonTrades (@ElonTrades) October 5, 2025
These indicate lost opportunities for Ripple and $XRP.
The Verdict
So, here we are, with the verdict. For me, there’s a clear winner. Hedera beats both Cardano and Ripple/$XRP at many levels. It already has a successful ETF. Hedera also has some recent good integrations and partnerships going on.
It’s crazy how an $HBAR ETF got passed before an $XRP ETF did
Really tells you how connected Hedera is
— Jesus Martinez (@JesusMartinezEZ) November 5, 2025
In contrast, both Cardano and Ripple have some issues to deal with. Cardano with its low TVL and lack of DeFi usage. Whilst Ripple recently saw two big potential network users choose different networks altogether. SWIFT picked Linea over Ripple, and Western Union went for Solana. Hence, this round clearly goes to Hedera ($HBAR).