Which Cryptocurrency Could Be a Millionaire-Maker? Cardano vs. TRON

TRON (TRX -0.16%) and Cardano (ADA -0.88%) sit on opposite sides of a practical divide. TRON aims to be a low-cost stablecoin platform for processing everyday payments. On the other hand, Cardano aims to be a carefully engineered smart contract platform with novel design choices and an intentionally slow-moving governance model.

Could either of these coins make investors into millionaires, or at least a fair bit richer?

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TRON’s approach is generally working

TRON’s core value proposition is to move dollar-pegged stablecoin tokens cheaply and quickly, collecting fees along the way. Today, it hosts roughly $79 billion of stablecoins, with Tether (USDT 0.01%), the market’s biggest stablecoin issuer, accounting for about 98% of that base; for what it’s worth, it’s also the chain with the most parked value of USDT in the crypto sector, if only by a hair.

TRON currently has about 2.6 million daily active wallet addresses, and a total decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) of nearly $6.4 billion, which, while hardly anything in comparison to Ethereum, the market’s leader by TVL, is consistent with a chain optimized for payments first. On Sept. 16 alone, it generated chain revenue of $1.5 million from its activity, up from $386,418 three years earlier. So this is a blockchain with real users and a growing volume of real economic activity, suggesting that it has at least a decent fit between its offerings and what people are looking for.

The catch is that TRON’s market cap is already $32.4 billion.

For it to make anyone into a millionaire, it would need to rise in value by at least 1,000%, and it would require a major investment of $100,000 even with those extremely high returns. The odds of that happening are low, as the chain would need to attract a vast amount of stablecoin capital and retain it over time. And that process would likely be stymied over the medium term by the recent emergence of a handful of new stablecoin-oriented blockchains.

Could this coin still be a good investment for general wealth building? Perhaps yes, but this is also where it’s important to notice one of the network’s idiosyncratic risks.

By some accounts, TRON is the blockchain where more than half of all cryptocurrency-related criminal activity occurs. Recent efforts on the chain to seize assets associated with criminal groups, terrorists, and entities facing international economic sanctions have ramped up, but the reputational damage such activity causes is bound to persist. If there’s one coin that’s likely to suddenly crash as a result of law enforcement or regulators bringing down the hammer on illegal money laundering or other unsavory deeds, in my judgment, it’s most certainly TRON — and that makes it a much riskier investment than its stablecoin-centered design would suggest.

Even so, in theory, if stablecoins remain the crypto…