Researching L1s and can’t quite place Cardano.

Bitcoin is king but it’s interesting to study other L1s and I’ve primarily been diving into the Ethereum and Solana developer ecosystems.

Ethereum, as is well known by now has such an extensive and flourishing developer environment. There’s so much being built and the tooling is pretty mature at this point, making it easy for new developers to enter the space.

Solana is exciting too, but you can tell developers are more hardware focused, attracting a lot of former Apple, Tesla and SpaceX devs. However, it’s easy to forget how tiny the eco system is compared to Ethereum, or even some of the Ethereum L2s. But cool things are being built and deployed and while I’m a lot less familiar with the Solana tooling, it seems to attract projects wanting to build upon the Solana blockchain.

I then tried to do a similar case study on Cardano, but I’m finding it a lot more challenging. It’s very possible that I’m just attacking it wrong. But where there are loads of developer conferences for both Ethereum and Solana where it’s pretty clear how the respective blockchains differ from each other and where their focus is, I’m not really seeing the same in Cardano, apart from the Cardano Summit (which seems primarily to have been virtual?). From the surface it seems people are more focused on developing Cardano than developing on Cardano.

Can someone help me place Cardano in the L1 space?