The Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI) may be one of the best frameworks yet for answering a question crypto usually gets badly wrong: How decentralised is a blockchain, really? It doesn't just count validators. EDI looks across multiple layers including: 🔹 Consensus 🔹 Token distribution 🔹 Software development 🔹 Network infrastructure 🔹 Geography And its wider research framework also considers hardware, APIs and governance. Crucially, it tries to identify the real entities behind validators/pools, rather than pretending 50 nodes controlled by one organisation are 50 independent actors. Applying that logic across the largest L1s gives me roughly: 1. 🥇 ADA — 91 2. 🥈 BTC — 90 3. LTC — 88 4. XMR — 84 5. ETH — 83 6. BCH — 82 7. AVAX — 80 8. DOGE — 79 9. ZEC — 76 10. TON — 75 11. SOL — 75 12. SUI — 73 13. HBAR — 72 14. Canton — 71 15. XLM — 70 16. BNB — 68 17. XRP — 67 18. TRX — 66 19. CRO — 64 20. HYPE — 58 ⚠️ Important: EDI currently provides comparable live scores for Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. The others are my EDI-style estimates using the same principles — not official Edinburgh scores. And the individual stories are fascinating. Bitcoin remains extraordinary: exceptional token distribution, huge node/network resilience and arguably the strongest resistance to governance capture. Its weakness is mining-pool concentration and increasingly industrialised hardware. Ethereum has phenomenal software and network decentralisation, but validator count is misleading once stake and validator infrastructure are clustered into real entities. Solana is far more decentralised than its critics claim — but around half of validators currently receive Solana Foundation delegation. Only ~5% of total stake is Foundation delegated, so this isn't Foundation control, but it is an economic dependency worth measuring. XRP is also more nuanced than "Ripple runs everything." Anyone can operate a validator — but practical consensus revolves around a relatively small curated default UNL and very high overlap between trusted validator lists. That deserves a substantial decentralisation discount. Zcash has arguably the best deployed private-money technology of the group, but privacy ≠ decentralisation. Mining concentration remains a weakness. And then there's Cardano. 👉 EDI currently gives Cardano an extraordinary 99.37/100 for consensus decentralisation. 👉 No approved validator list. 👉 No need for Foundation permission to become an SPO. 👉 No industrial ASIC arms race. 👉 Non-custodial stake delegation. 👉 Thousands of pools. 👉 Explicit on-chain governance distributed between ADA holders/DReps, SPOs and the Constitutional Committee. Cardano doesn't win every decentralisation dimension. Bitcoin actually beats it on EDI's tokenomics measure. But across the EDI dimensions currently measured: ADA: 91.3 BTC: 89.5 LTC: 87.6 ETH: 83.4 So I think we need to retire the lazy assumption that: Bitcoin = decentralised Everything else = varying degrees of centralisation Bitcoin may still be the world's hardest and most battle-tested monetary network. But if the question is: “Which major blockchain is the most comprehensively decentralised?” There is now a very serious research-driven case for the answer being: Cardano. $ADA