Cardano is one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies ever Thanks to excellent governance & staking design However, ADA should not be considered a serious competitor at a max capacity of 23 TPS... Promising scalability is not good enough for builders launching apps now! 🧵 Capacity: Transactions Per Second is an objective & equal measure of capacity that can be 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. 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, some claim this means ADA true TPS is much higher. However, many major chains, including BTC & SOL, also have this capability... In BTC's case, Schnorr signatures enable this capability & while 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 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 a 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 now 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 much easier to carry out, as attackers could easily & cheaply block most ADA usage by congesting the chain in this way Hydra: Hydra is an L2 & therefore does not count towards ADAs L1 capacity, as it is literally off-chain. Every blockchain can have L2s, giving them theoritically " infinite" capacity; even BTC can do this... However, "L2 scaling" always involves major trust & or UX trade offs, making it a non-solution when it comes to L1 scaling. Even if playing Doom on Hydra is cool, it has zero relevance to this scalibility critique Leios/Input Endorses: Leios is ADA's real scaling solution now, as they have been working on this for the past 4 years 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 for 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 for, 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 succsess 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, along with implementing on-chain governance. But none of that matters if you cannot build real products at scale. Since even if ADA's tech would be hypothetically better when it finally releases, it will not matter if the project has fallen too far behind & cannot overcome the network effects of the competition Competition: The truth is that even if Leios launched today, it still does 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 right now With further significant improvements near on the horizon Considering that there is no official date for the release of Leios & it has been continuesly promised & pushed back for over 4 years, there are good reasons to be skeptical of ADA's competitive edge here Talk is cheap, so until ADA actually ships a product that can compete with the current leaders in usage. I will remain a staunch skeptic Credits: Credit were credit is due, @Quantumplation offered to help me with this critique for the sake of accuracy. Even if he does not agree with my conclusions, there is no reason to get any of the facts wrong Pi Lanningham is clearly a very smart & capable CTO, who's work I have leaned on in the past as well. He is an asset to the ADA community & I would recomend more to follow his lead It was also intresting to learn from him that ADA is aiming for a more gradual roll out of new tech, hopefully cutting down on the waiting time between releases Open Debate: We will have an open ended debate on Monday, I hope you also all come & join me there. I have never blocked anyone on this platform, as it is only through open dialogue that we can advance the public understanding of blockchain tech: https://t.co/8DhQd1KK9a Conclusion: ADA will continue to fall behind as long as it does not scale! Dreams of an ADA future are a fantasy under the current technological regime We have to evaluate what exists now! Not blindly believe in the promises of what is a historically under-delivering project (only 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 in 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 meaningfull usage & therefore also affect real change in the world Whether that means pushing the boundries of Leios even more or adopting different tech entirely. For that reason, this is a discussion worth having As ultimately we share the same cypherpunk dream. That is why we should all want ADA to succseed, that is why we should want all decentralized cryptocurrencies to succeed. Because that is how we make ADA & all of crypto great again ❤️