Cardano is not a serious competitor, with a max capacity of only 23 TPS! Despite being one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies ever The community should be concerned; ADA keeps falling behind Promising scalability is not good enough for builders launching apps now! 🧵 That is the harsh reality of a competitive free market; ADA cannot sustain itself forever on "vibes" & "promises" alone Without scalability, no serious independent builder will ever consider developing apps on ADA & it will continue to fall behind in usage & revenue: Capacity: Transactions Per Second is an objective measure of capacity that can be equally applied to all chains: ADA's TPS is calculated like so: The block size limit is 90,112 Bytes & a basic 1 to 1 TX is 192 Bytes; so, with a 20-second block time: 90112÷20 = 4505÷192 = 23 TPS! As TPS is a measure of 1-to-1 value transfers for the purpose of equal comparison. However, much of the ADA community claims this is an unfair comparison: Batching: Because ADA can batch many TXs into a single TX by creating multiple outputs, however, many major chains, including BTC & SOL, also have this capability... In BTC's case, Schnorr signatures enable this capability & in SOL's case, it uses a fixed fee per signature regardless of the number of instructions (equivalent to multiple outputs) That is why, contrary to what much of the ADA community claims, this direct comparison is, in fact, totally fair Since, if we were to count batch TXs, we would have to do so consistently across all chains, arbitrarily increasing TPS by a fixed amount across the board. So that still puts ADA way behind on a relative basis, no matter what Speed: Speed is another critical competitive attribute that ADA is lacking, as the latest generation of chains is now within the sub-second range! ADA's 20-second block time cannot possibly compete with this from a UX perspective. Making everything built on ADA feel sluggish in comparison Fee Markets: ADA completely lacks any sort of fee market, as TXs are processed on a first-seen basis, which is also why TXs are so deceptively cheap over ADA That is because in ADA, TX fees are fixed by governance, not a free-market mechanism like in BTC, ETH, & SOL! This means that if there is a large spike in usage, there will be no way to prioritize TXs based on fee. This has the potential to bog down the entire network, as has previously also occurred on SOL when it lacked proper fee market mechanisms This also has the effect of making spam attacks on the chain far cheaper to carry out, as attackers could easily & cheaply block most ADA usage this way. This can be achieved by carrying out a spam attack, which would exploit the delayed response of a governance-based fee mechanism Hydra: Hydra is an L2 & therefore does not count towards ADA's L1 capacity, as it is literally off-chain. Every blockchain can have L2s, giving them theoretically "infinite" capacity; even BTC can do this trick... However, "L2 scaling" always involves major trust & or UX trade-offs, making it a non-solution when it comes to L1 scaling by definition. So, even if playing Doom on Hydra is cool, it has zero relevance to this scalability critique Leios/Input Endorses: Leios is ADA's real scaling solution, as they have been working on this for the past 4 years now Representing a significant leap in performance, both in capacity & speed. The exact numbers are difficult to pin down due to there being several levers. Such as how high will the community allow node requirements to become & whether they will prioritise speed or capacity If node requirements are increased & we take things at face value, Leios might be able to achieve 10K TPS with an average block time of 14 seconds This is all great except that none of this is actually implemented now; that is what is at the core of this critique: Falling Behind: The truth is that the longer this upgrade gets delayed, the more ADA falls behind compared to the competition Building DeFi on ADA today makes no sense, since you will be bottlenecked by the L1's limited capacity if your app saw any serious success That is why people build on SOL, SUI & NEAR, as they have the capacity to support massive usage right now, while still preserving decentralization, unlike BASE, OP & ARB, for instance! (L2s) ADA's decentralization metrics are great, particularly with the implementation of on-chain governance. But none of that matters if you cannot build real products at scale. Since, even if ADA's tech were hypothetically better when it finally releases, that does not matter if the project has fallen so far behind that it cannot overcome the network effects of the competition Competition: The harsh truth is that even if Leios were launched today, it still would not match the performance of the latest generation of blockchains. For example, SOL & SUI are able to achieve 20k+ TPS with sub-second block times now With further significant improvements on the horizon Considering that there is no official date for the release of Leios & it has been continuously promised & pushed back for over 4 years, there are good reasons to be highly skeptical of ADA's competitive edge Talk is cheap, so until ADA actually ships a product that can compete with the current leaders in usage, it will continue to fall behind & I will remain a staunch critic Credits: Credit where credit is due, @Quantumplation offered to help me with this critique for the sake of accuracy, as he is a good person. Even if he does not agree with my conclusions, there is no reason for us to get any of the facts wrong Pi Lanningham is clearly also a very smart & capable crypto CTO, whose work I have leaned on in the past as well. He is an asset to the ADA community & I would recommend more to follow his lead It was also interesting to learn that ADA is aiming for a more gradual rollout of new tech, hopefully cutting down on the waiting time between releases Conclusion: Some will argue against these facts until they go blue in the face. However, that does not change the harsh reality: That 23 TPS, combined with 20-second block times, is completely inadequate to support any sort of on-chain economy or applications today. Putting ADA objectively so far behind the cutting edge that the community should be highly concerned IOHK failed to deliver on the promises it made to the community for years & now seems to have shifted its focus to launching a new chain instead... So now it is up to the grassroots community to make the ADA dream happen instead I hope the community will view this critique as a positive step, helping to push ADA in a more productive direction. Because the ADA community needs to do more to counter "dangerous narratives" that will prevent ADA from scaling. Such as the Hydra "cope" & the lies around ADA's current capacity (batching), while pretending as if that is enough... There may even be another ridiculous community note (the last one was self-contradictory). None of that changes the fact that ADA today is still slow & has no capacity. So, how about instead of shooting the messenger, allow me to help by providing a third perspective Otherwise, ADA will continue to fall behind as long as it does not scale. Because dreams of an ADA future are a fantasy under the current technological regime. We have to evaluate what exists now! Do not believe in the promises of a historically under-delivering project (implementing PoS in 2020 & Smart Contracts in 2022 & governance in 2025). As a matter of principle, in crypto, we must bet on what is implemented now, not on mere promises: "Do not trust, verify!" What exists now is a large community, with good decentralization & governance. The potential exists to turn this into something great. We only need to scale the system, so that ADA can attract meaningful usage & thereby also actually affect real change in the world Whether that means pushing the boundaries of Leios even more or adopting different tech entirely. For that reason, this is a discussion worth having Ultimately, we share the same cypherpunk dream. That is why we should all want ADA to succeed; that is why we should all want all decentralized cryptocurrencies to succeed Because that is how we make ADA & all of crypto great again ❤️