Cardano is finished as an investment, and I sold all of mine. The chain is still running and there is a loyal community. What I mean is that, in my analysis, the economic thesis behind ADA is broken. After nine years of hype, partnerships and upgrades, I still cannot find a real business model, real demand or real revenue that justifies a multibillion-dollar valuation.
Below is every post I have written on Cardano, in full, so you can check my reasoning yourself. I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I hold tens of thousands of Internet Computer Protocol myself, which is where my money went, so weigh my view with that in mind.
My view did not start as a sell call. In my June 2024 review of Cardano I was already arguing that the price was trending toward zero. Almost nobody was building on it, it was slow and expensive to use, and I could not find the engineers behind it. I compared it with ICP, which I measured at roughly 10,000 times the raw computing power of Cardano.
By June 2026 I had gone much further. In my letter to Cardano holders I explained why I moved to ICP. Cardano, in my view, fits neither of the two futures I see for crypto: one where everything runs fully on chain, and one where custody is centralized. I pointed to real-time throughput of less than one transaction per second, with a recent peak of about 11 across the last 100 blocks. I also raised governance. On ICP I can vote directly, while on Cardano I had to delegate.
Then I made the full case in Cardano ADA is Finished, and its core is the gap between valuation and business. At the time, Cardano had a market cap of around $5 billion and a price of around 14 cents, about 95% below its high. Chain fees were roughly $1,000 over 24 hours. Multiply that by 365 and you get about 365,000 a year, thousands of times below the valuation. That is the number I cannot get past.
The narratives that pumped the coin, from the Ethiopia education deal to a 2019 New Balance authentication pilot to Hydra and Leios, never turned into recurring chain revenue that I could find. A pilot is not a business. Announcements and big logos stopped mattering to me because none of them turned into demand on the chain itself.
Holding ADA is also a bet against an entire field. Cardano competes with Ethereum, Solana, BNB, Avalanche, Sui and many others for the same developers and users, and in my analysis it is not winning. ICP is pursuing on-chain cloud infrastructure, where websites, storage and backends run fully on chain. If you want to compare the other large chains, I cover them on separate pages: Ethereum and Solana.
The downside is what persuades me most. The realistic upside for ADA requires a financially engineered pump that is hard to sustain, while the downside is far larger. Even if ADA fell 99% to a $50 million valuation, I would still think it was overvalued. That asymmetry is why I sold.
The Cardano bulls keep answering with maybes: maybe Bitcoin pumps, maybe an alt season comes, maybe Hydra or Leios matter. I put far less weight on maybe and far more on whether a business exists. ICP has one people already understand: they pay for compute, storage, websites and backends on chain.
If you notice your identity is tangled up with a coin, separate the research from the emotion. Ask an AI model to list the obvious criticisms of the project and compare it with alternatives, then see whether you can still justify holding it without the story attached.
Below this opening you will find all three posts in full, newest first. Reading them oldest first shows how my view moved from a price call to a full business argument. For the coin I hold instead, see my ICP hub.
If you are holding ADA and want an honest second opinion on your own position, you can book a personal video review with me at jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Cardano ADA is Finished (June 28, 2026)
- Dear Cardano Holders: Why I Sold and Moved to ICP (June 17, 2026)
- Cardano (ADA) Crypto Review: Why I See the Price Trending to Zero (June 11, 2024)
Cardano ADA is Finished
From my video published June 28, 2026.
Cardano is finished. I hate to tell you this because I know many of you love ADA. You've been a holder for a long time. You identify with it: this is my token, this is my project. I hate to tell you something you don't want to hear, but I also care about you, and I want you to have a successful time investing in crypto. To me, one of the most loving things you can do for people is to tell them something they don't want to hear, something they should really look at and seriously consider rather than instantly dismiss. This is where I see the future in crypto going, and in my view Cardano is completely left out of that for the reasons I'm going to get into in great detail. A lot of coverage is just surface level and doesn't go into the depth of what really needs to be said, so I'm going to cover what really needs to be said about Cardano here.
I've watched Cardano since 2017 when it launched. I've been hyped, and I've bought it at various points. This is why I sold it, and why I'm not in it anymore: because I want to be positioned successfully for the future. So I invite you to have as much of an open mind as you can. Really hear what I'm saying, think about it, and don't be afraid to hear it. A lot of people who identify as Cardano holders are scared to hear anything that might make them change. For me, I'm so glad I was willing to look up all this material for all the coins I sold, because it's given me a much better position and I feel so good today. I am not a financial advisor and this isn't financial advice, and my position will be very clear as we go.
I'm saying Cardano is finished not because the blockchain stopped running, but because in my analysis the economic thesis is broken beyond repair. This is a project that's been around for nine years through all kinds of hype, partnerships, livestreams, governance, and community loyalty. After all of that, I still don't see a business model. I'm not talking about narratives or roadmaps. I'm talking about a real business model with real demand and real revenue, something that's going to actually grow and thrive in the future. I don't see any evidence of that right now. And I see evidence that there are vastly superior business models that could make not just Cardano but every other layer one irrelevant, which we'll get into.
The questions serious investors actually ask
These are the main questions. Some of the people who talk with me have a lot of money. They're very serious people, and it feels practically free to them to talk to me or to join my group, because to them it's so cheap. Their questions are: where's the business system for the coins they hold? Where's the real demand beyond hype, speculation, token prices, and narratives? Where's the revenue for the project? Where are the realistic expectations for growth? Where are the users paying for something they actually need, not just hype and marketing? These are the questions people with serious money are asking. In my experience there's literally no crypto that provides great answers to these outside of ICP, which is what I hold. And Cardano, even among its competitors, is not in a great position, as we're going to go through. If you want to run your own crypto holdings through those same questions — business model, real demand, revenue — and get honest answers, that's exactly the kind of thing I love digging into with people; join Jerry Banfield Family and bring whatever you're holding to a weekly call.
I'm not dismissing that Cardano has activity. There clearly are developers, there's activity, and there's a community. But economically, in my view, Cardano is dead. Most of the community, developers, and activity are still running on momentum, because most people are desperate to close their ears to what I'm saying. Because of confirmation bias, the first thought you have after hearing this is, "Wow, have I been wrong about Cardano the entire time?" A lot of the biggest changes I've made in my life have started with first admitting there's something I don't know, something I should learn, something I've been wrong about. That's been the foundation of some of the best changes I've ever made.
The valuation does not match the business
The absolute key thesis here is that the valuation of Cardano does not match the business. Cardano has a multi-billion dollar market cap, but the actual on-chain business activity is tiny. Here's the current rough picture. The market cap is around 5 billion. The price has plummeted to around 14 cents, down about 95% from its high. The DeFi is around 83 million for something that's nine years old and close to the top 10 in crypto, which to me is horrible. There's about 56 million in stablecoins. But here's the thing: roughly $1,000 in 24-hour chain fees. ICP has something like five times that much with five times less market cap, and it's been around for half the time Cardano has, with probably 5% or less of the marketing. Do you understand how bad that is economically? To me this is an economically unviable business model.
Consider that those fees are mostly gas fees, because the things built on Cardano are paying money to Amazon Web Services or other often centralized hosting to run everything around them. So there are all these costs, but the actual blockchain itself is making almost nothing. If you were to buy a business, the valuation might be something like 10 times the revenue if there was a high profit margin, or in some cases you only pay around the revenue, or a little higher depending on the business. Right now, if you multiply Cardano's 24-hour chain fees by 365, you get about 365,000 a year. That's more than 10,000 times less than what it's valued at. This is what I'm looking at. There are manipulations, and there are people just trying to print money for themselves, but most people with larger amounts to invest care about this. So you made $1,000 in revenue and your valuation is 5.4 billion. To me that's off by a factor of thousands of times. It's an unsustainable business model.
ICP again has five times or more the revenue at five times less the valuation. That means even though ICP is still struggling with its revenue, I did a video showing how it has the best business system in crypto, and you can watch it by comparison. In my analysis it has a 25-times-better opportunity purely on business fundamentals than Cardano. That's the last thing you want to see if you're an ADA holder. The transactions are around 25,000, with under 20,000 active addresses, for a $5.4 billion market cap. Cardano is not being valued like a tiny experimental network. If I were to appraise Cardano, I would appraise it at a few million dollars. Look at the revenue: it's making a few hundred thousand a year in chain fees. So I'd appraise the Cardano blockchain at around $5 million. It's currently valued, in my view, a thousand times higher than it should be. It's being valued like a major crypto asset, but the actual business usage is tiny. The fees are tiny, the revenue is tiny, the stablecoin liquidity is tiny, and the DeFi ecosystem is tiny. That's why I say this is dead economically.
The chain is still running, the community is still active, and a small number of developers are continuing to build. But the economic demand is so out of sync with the valuation that anyone in a rational frame of mind, which a lot of crypto investors are not, will look at this and see a problem. To me, Cardano has blasted into a massive iceberg in the North Atlantic in the winter, and the boat is going down. I'd be looking for a life raft to get off, looking for any rational way to sell all of this before everyone else figures it out. This is stuff AI can tell you in five minutes. It's not super secret. If you talk to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about Cardano and ask it to evaluate it as a business system, this is the kind of answer it can give you. More people are using AI, and more people are going to start thinking, "If I'm holding $1,000 of Cardano, maybe I should check whether this has a valid business system or not." The more people get burned in crypto, the more they're going to do these basic steps: look at the business system, see that it's broken, and decide to sell. That was my approach to Cardano too.
A cult coin with no business system
Most coins in crypto are effectively cult coins, and I would put Cardano in the category of a meme coin. All the talk and all the hype about Cardano has not once materialized into a business system that made sense for more than a quick bull market. What you need to look at is which crypto has such a strong business system that it will be left standing.
Take smart contracts. When Cardano came out, it did not have smart contracts, and for years people said Cardano would be a serious Ethereum competitor. Four years later, Alonzo launched. This was supposed to open the door for all kinds of activity. But where's the explosion? Where's the dominant Cardano app ecosystem? Where's all the liquidity, the fees, and the apps? It didn't fail for lack of smart contracts; it got smart contracts and still did almost nothing. And it launched right in the bull market to get people to buy in and be hyped. In the five years since, nothing truly useful has emerged. That's why I think this is the worst time I've ever seen to be in Cardano by far, because at this point the excuses are gone. You've had all kinds of hype and all kinds of launches, and nothing has materialized. Now the narratives are around having bigger institutions buy into ADA.
Do you really think the people investing huge amounts of money are just going to buy in based on hype and speculation and "maybe something someday will happen"? Or do you think they're going to ask the same kind of questions I ask? Do you think they're going to ask what the business model is, and why the revenue is in the toilet while the valuation is tens of thousands of times higher than it would merit? To assume big money pours into Cardano, you'd have to assume those people would not ask the most basic investing questions. Sometimes they get sucked into momentum and forget to ask. But once they ask those questions, they're out.
The narratives that pumped Cardano and delivered nothing
Here are things Cardano was hyped on that merited price pumps, although in my opinion they didn't merit it. These were the reasons Cardano maxis and community members got really excited. I remember the Africa narrative. I held Cardano back then. There was this Ethiopia education and identity deal, one of the biggest narratives. Big story, although the story is nothing compared to what Internet Computer Protocol does, like powering the internet for Pakistan, the fifth largest country on the planet. The Cardano story looks tiny compared to that. But it was a story that got people buying Cardano and turning their identity into "Cardano's my coin." That's what you need to separate from.
ICP is not my coin. ICP is the best investment I've found. If I found a better one, and I found true reasons ICP was bad that matched all the other research I've done, I would dump it. It's not my coin. It's a coin. Even though I make videos about it every day, it's not an identity. It's not tied to who I am. You need to separate these coins from an identity of who you are. It's striking how these top coins essentially pay people to promote them, and then you've got people with followers who bought in and are shilling them to keep the price up. If you notice your own identity has gotten tangled up with a coin and you want a clear-eyed second perspective, I'm always glad to think it through with you — join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we'll separate the research from the emotion.
Let's look at the Ethiopia deal. The narrative was millions of students, thousands of schools, hundreds of thousands of teachers, identity records, education, real-world government blockchain adoption. Supporters pointed to it as proof Cardano was not just another speculative crypto, which in my view it absolutely is. But years later, what did that turn into? In my assessment, almost nothing. Was there transaction demand? No. Recurring revenue? No. An identity layer? No. Because the technology itself can't do this, and that's why you need to look at the tech itself. Not all tech in crypto is bad; ICP has real tech that can do this kind of thing. Cardano, in my view, does not. The more ICP gets known, the more these other chains give up. Even if some useful technology came out of the Ethiopia work, there was no reason at any point for people to need Cardano. This is the pattern with Cardano over and over: big story, big expectations, little to no economic impact.
Here's another example: New Balance. In 2019 there was a New Balance shoe authentication story, the idea that Cardano could authenticate real products and fight counterfeits. It sounds great on paper. Somebody probably got paid a lot to do this deal behind the scenes. It was a known brand, the kind of tangible partnership crypto investors love, the kind of thing people would see one video about and immediately buy, and then carry the identity of being a Cardano holder. But where's the business today? Does New Balance ever mention Cardano anywhere now? I literally never heard of this partnership until I researched it. It was used to pump the coin at one point, but seven years later it's totally non-existent. Did product authentication become a killer app? No. And that's because of the technology. It was a fairly ridiculous use case in the first place, and the technology itself can't support doing all this on-chain. That's why ICP is so good: you could run something like this fully on ICP, but you can't with Cardano. So it's expensive to build, and the chain isn't capturing the value. Did it create meaningful chain value? No.
This is the difference between a pilot, a headline, a partnership, and a real business. The pilot gets the headlines and gets people FOMOing in. The business keeps things going over time. As Tommy put it, the first rule of crypto is that the team is everything, and in my view the team behind Cardano is extremely limited, and the technology even more limited than the team.
Another example: Dish and Chainlink. In 2021, Cardano announced partnerships with Dish Network and Chainlink. Again, a huge narrative around telecom, identity, enterprise, oracle support, developers, and smart contracts. As far as I can see, Cardano and Chainlink are still doing plenty together. But years later, where's the measurable result? Where's the telecom-scale demand? This comes back to the technology behind ADA being extremely limited and able to barely do anything besides send transactions and run basic smart contracts. You can't put phone photos on the blockchain. You can't host websites on Cardano. That's why these partnerships are meaningless to me: there's no enterprise-scale usage when the blockchain itself can hardly do anything, so you don't need it. There's no massive developer explosion and no revenue. These are partnerships that got people to buy into Cardano, to identify as a holder, and then to watch old content hyping Cardano with no substance over and over again.
Why announcements no longer matter
This is why I say Cardano is finished. Announcements don't matter anymore. Partnerships don't matter anymore. You've cried wolf enough times. You've never delivered anything that added a meaningful business model or partnership outside of temporary financial engineering and influencers shilling coins they were either paid to shill or bought and got sucked into themselves. Press releases don't count anymore. Fortune 500 logos don't matter anymore. None of it matters, because none of it is ever delivered, and based on the technology itself there's no reason to expect that will ever change. In fact, in my view things are getting worse.
Remember the Lightning Network? Nothing seems to turn into anything. To me it's all smoke and mirrors, all hype. Let's talk about Hydra. Hydra has been one of Cardano's major scaling narratives. Here's the thing: if your blockchain were actually a technical breakthrough like ICP, you wouldn't need scaling narratives, because the blockchain itself wouldn't be the bottleneck. For years, Cardano supporters have talked about Hydra as if scaling would unlock the future. Then Hydra entered an adoption phase. But where's the demand Hydra is solving? Scaling matters when users are overwhelming the network, when apps are exploding, when fees and demand are already there. Cardano doesn't have a problem of too much demand. After all these years, there's still hardly any economic demand. Hydra does nothing to address the core issue, which is that the Cardano blockchain is, in simple terms, basically a copy of Ethereum that innovates very little on it. Compared to ICP especially, ICP makes Ethereum look like dial-up internet and itself like fiber optic. That's a major innovation. When you have to build a solution outside the blockchain just to scale the blockchain, that's how you know you're in trouble: the blockchain itself can't scale. Even Ethereum, with all its community and money, has been unable to scale and has gone nowhere in five years. So Hydra solving a traffic problem for a chain that doesn't have a traffic problem is, to me, ridiculous.
Here's the newest example of more of the same. Leios is the latest. Another "major upgrade," little reaction. It's positioned as a major scaling step, but the daily transactions are going nowhere and active addresses are near monthly lows. Again, the technology does not provide real value to people outside of crypto, unlike ICP, which does, because I can host my website on it. That's real value. Cardano's biggest upgrades in years barely move user activity. Nobody's building on it for this upgrade. The problem isn't the upgrade; the blockchain is so limited you can't even meaningfully upgrade it. The problem is demand. Cardano is preparing for a future wave of users that, in my view, is never coming. That's why I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the economics behind Cardano are unviable.
Governance is not a business model
Governance is not a business model either. Who cares to govern something that fundamentally has no value? In my view the governance narrative is ridiculous. ICP's governance is vastly superior to Cardano's. With ADA, the governance experience was poor, and I never participated in it when I was a holder because it was annoying and unclear how to even do so. With ICP, as soon as I got on the network nervous system, it was easy. I immediately started voting, and it's all hosted fully on-chain. To me, any governance narrative behind Cardano is ridiculous, because there's no point in governing something that's truly useless economically and drastically overvalued. The decentralized decision-making is also very theoretical, because you have to use third-party tools to even interact with the blockchain to vote, unlike on ICP, which has the most active DAO in all of crypto, blowing Cardano away. Yes, a treasury can matter, but you typically have to go through Charles and his people to do any of this. Governance is not a business model. Voting does not create customers. A constitution does not generate revenue. A treasury does not create product-market fit.
Governance over a thriving economy is valuable. Governance over a weak economy is just politics, and to me it's useless. So while Cardano supporters talk about their governance, what exactly is being governed? A drastically overvalued blockchain that, in my view, has done nothing but make empty promises for years. Yes, technically things have been done, but they've led nowhere, to no mass adoption. In my assessment, all the promises at this point have been proven fake. I don't see a future for Cardano DeFi or stablecoins. I don't see a major app with a realistic future on Cardano. ICP, by contrast, already has cloud infrastructure locked down in a gigantic lane, and that's a customer platform that I believe will be the leading DeFi and stablecoin system and a massive app economy. So a treasury and a token community deciding what to fund next doesn't matter at this point. To me it's hopeless. The ship is already critically damaged. You'd better grab a life raft, and this is not financial advice, before your funds drown and go to zero.
Staking hides the weakness
Staking certainly hides the weakness, because ADA staking is one of the few reasons people stay emotionally attached. You stake and you earn a relatively tiny amount of rewards. I remember when I was staking Cardano, the rewards were poor, and you had to use some third-party wallet you had to download, and the whole process was bad. That's actually how I noticed ICP was different. I tried staking on Cardano and it was a bad experience, and then I wondered why ICP felt like some future technology I was using, while everything else felt like a shabby copy of one another. So people feel productive staking and earning rewards. You feel like you're participating in the network. But where does Cardano produce real demand from real people who aren't even involved in crypto? Where is a real person pulling a real transaction off the Cardano blockchain who has no involvement in crypto at all? In my view there isn't, because you have to pay a transaction fee just to do that. Staking hides the weakness because you feel like something is happening, since you're personally invested in it.
I am not interested in personally investing in anything in crypto that doesn't have huge potential in the future based on the reality of what I can see now. Certainly, if the network has real demand, staking can support security. But when the main reason people take rewards is hope for a future pump, that's not an investing thesis. It's a waiting room. I think a lot of ADA holders are in a waiting room, waiting to get back to even, waiting for another bull run, waiting for another alt season. That means every pump is just an exit opportunity. Despite all these clear points that AI could easily regurgitate, the best I hear from the Cardano holders I talk to is that they're waiting to sell at not a loss. At this point that's their best case: enough of a pump that they can sell where they bought or slightly higher. Which means you can't have much of a pump with ADA, because almost everyone holding is underwater. Almost everyone bought higher, believed the old narratives, got tired, and gave up. They're just desperate to sell at a small profit so they can exit and say, "Well, I wasn't wrong. I held Cardano for five years and sold at a 10% profit." No, you weren't wrong; you were just inefficient. That's what you were. Whereas if you had moved that into something with a real business model, in most scenarios you'd have been efficient, and again, that's not financial advice and anything could happen. If you're stuck in that waiting room yourself and want to talk through your own thinking rather than sit in it alone, that's a conversation I'm happy to have — join Jerry Banfield Family and bring it to one of our weekly calls.
Asymmetric downside risk
So why would a new long-term investor rush into Cardano at this point? In my view there's no reason for anyone outside of ADA to buy into this, except being purely clueless and not doing the least amount of research. Ask AI to list the obvious criticisms and problems with Cardano. Ask it to give you a decent review of Cardano and compare it to see if anything better is out there. We didn't have AI in the 2021 bull market. Think about that. You couldn't just ask AI to rip a crypto apart for you. Now you can, and these models are ready to do it if you're willing to hear it. It's easier than ever to see why these altcoins are, in my opinion, not what they're sold as. This is a very ugly setup for Cardano, where even most of the existing community feel defeated and hope for nothing more than to exit at a tiny profit so they can say they weren't wrong. The harder but more honest move is to say, "I was wrong about that. All they did was promise things that never materialized. I'm going to cut my losses and get out now." To me that's the logical, rational thing to do, and that's not financial advice.
Right now, ADA is in a very asymmetric downside position. There's almost no realistic pump outside of something financially engineered, which can absolutely happen when the right pockets are lined, but how sustainable would that be? Almost not at all. Meanwhile the downside could be minus 99% from here. And even if Cardano went down 99% to a $50 million valuation, I'd still think it was overvalued. I think it should go down 99.9% to be accurately valued. That's asymmetric downside: a very realistic chance of losing 99.9%, and almost no chance of even a 2x or 3x at this point. That's a really poor position to be in.
Competing in the worst possible lane
What adds even more fuel to this is that Cardano is competing in the worst possible lane. Even if you still believe Cardano is a smart contract layer one, in that space, if you're holding Cardano, you are betting against Ethereum, Solana, BNB, Avalanche, Sui, Aptos, Near, Polkadot, Cosmos, Algorand, Hedera, Ton, and many others. If you're holding ADA, you're saying you think ADA is going to beat all of those. The most illogical response is to hold all of them because you don't know which will win and you call that diversifying. Maybe you should reconsider the entire investment lane and the possibility that none of these have sustainable business models. It's like going to a racetrack where every horse but one is lame. It doesn't matter if you bet on all the others, because the one is going to win. In my view crypto is basically rigged at this point: ICP is so far ahead technologically that none of these other cryptos have a chance. So if you're invested in Cardano, you're essentially saying Cardano is somehow going to be viable in the future.
If you're holding ADA, you're saying you don't believe in a future where tech in crypto matters, and yet you somehow think ADA will outperform all these chains that have every advantage in the world over it. To me that's ridiculous. All these chains are fighting for the same basic developers who don't realize something better is out there. They're fighting for the same basic users, the same liquidity, the same stablecoins, the same apps and meme coins, the same tiny pool of people just guessing at what happens next. What ICP is doing is going for developers, users, liquidity, and narratives that nobody else is even going for. Meanwhile Cardano is fighting over that same tiny pool of users who all think the same way, and Cardano is clearly not winning. It's not the biggest smart contract chain, not the fastest-growing retail casino, not the dominant DeFi chain, not a stablecoin hub, not the developer default, not where the action is. So Cardano is stuck in a crowded lane and losing in it.
As I've more than hinted, in my view ICP is putting everything in a devastating position for the whole crypto industry. That's why I believe it's so suppressed and silenced, why exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, in my opinion, made every effort to harm it by setting the price insanely high when it launched. But none of that has stopped it. To me, ICP is the most dominant technology in crypto. If ICP didn't exist, I might be somewhat more bullish about Cardano. But ICP is set to be the grim reaper for all of crypto, cleaning up these other blockchains until they go away. While Cardano is trying to be a better blockchain, ICP is building the future of on-chain cloud infrastructure. No other crypto is doing that. Other cryptos like Sui are essentially pretending to do it because they can see the future is going toward on-chain cloud infrastructure. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, knows the future is going toward on-chain cloud infrastructure, and in my view he's playing hide and seek with ICP, putting out all these AI coins and not even including it. Because if the future is on-chain cloud infrastructure and there's one coin that can do that, what happens to the rest of the coins? They get slaughtered.
ICP has a business model, and even right now the numbers are 25 times better than Cardano. To me that means buying ICP is at least 25 times better of a hold at the same price and market cap. Over the long term, I think it's going to be 100 to 1,000 times. I believe the difference in return on investment over, say, the next decade of holding Cardano versus ICP will probably be 100 to 1,000 times better on ICP. So every dollar in ADA could potentially be 100 to 1,000 dollars in ICP in the future, and it's not going to take a lot of people to figure that out. If I can figure it out, I'm not some brilliant genius, although I'd like to think I am. It took me a while too. ICP had been out for two years before I figured this out.
I'd been in crypto since 2014. On ICP, people can actually pay for storage, bandwidth, websites, backends, and frontends, like my website fully hosted on ICP. It's a Bitcoin layer two and an Ethereum layer two, and Solana is being built in so you can run Solana applications directly on ICP without bridges. That's a business model most people understand. "Oh, you've made on-chain cloud infrastructure?" It sounds fancy, but it's hosting. In my view ICP has the number one business model in all of crypto, because it's software infrastructure: compute, storage, cloud. Cloud is a trillion-dollar market, and cybercrime is a ten-trillion-dollar problem. ICP has the best business model in crypto, and that means anything besides that is in extreme danger of being annihilated by vastly superior competition. If you want help actually understanding what a real on-chain business model looks like — or you want to build something on this kind of infrastructure yourself — that's one of my favorite things to walk through with people; join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll dig into it together.
Why ICP is the nail in the coffin
Even if ICP didn't exist, I'd still be very bearish on Cardano. But ICP existing is the nail in the coffin. To me it's planting Cardano in the graveyard. This is the end. At least if ICP didn't exist, Cardano could keep making empty promises and all the other blockchains would be making empty promises too, and it would all just be noise. But now there's one real business model in crypto: paying for hosting, compute, and storage on-chain, solving real problems. Compare the pitches. Cardano's pitch was a secure, research-driven blockchain for dApps and financial systems. ICP's pitch is that you can run software, websites, data, AI, and all those applications fully on-chain, which no other blockchain can do. Cardano's is a crowded, worn-out crypto narrative. ICP's is a massive existing business category with huge demand. Cardano needs people to care about ADA specifically, but ICP only cares that you use and build the technology for what the tech can do.
In my view ICP is in such a vastly superior position that anyone researching both will see one as a huge opportunity and the other as a huge liability. ICP is the opportunity; Cardano is the liability. You can't even build anything on Cardano without centralized front ends and other centralized infrastructure, whereas on ICP you can build it fully on-chain. So this is, in my opinion, hopeless for ADA at this point.
The bullish case is all maybes
The bullish ADA case is almost all maybes and hope that can't last. The Cardano bulls say maybe Bitcoin pumps and Cardano comes up with it. Maybe there'll be an alt season again, which I actually pray there isn't, because more people would just get ripped off buying useless coins. Maybe old coins rotate, which is optimistic. Maybe ADA gets another narrative, which to me is just more hype before it goes lower. Maybe the governance works somehow, governing something with no business behind it. Maybe Hydra or Leios matters, which I think is unlikely, because these are things being bolted on to a blockchain that is so limited technically that even putting a phone photo on Cardano is unfeasible. In my view it's absolutely unrealistic to think Cardano could get mass adoption, and anyone saying so at this point doesn't understand the truth of the tech and the blockchain. And maybe people somehow forget all the things I've described that have happened over the years.
Here's the thing: after nine years, maybe "maybe" isn't good enough anymore. Cardano is a $5 billion market cap. That's not some micro-cap coin that could pump 100x. To justify it you'd need proof of serious users, revenue, liquidity, business demand, and a network that's truly alive. I don't see proof of any of that. So the logical conclusion for me is that Cardano is finished. The chain certainly hasn't stopped. But I don't believe anyone is building, or is going to build, anything meaningful on Cardano, especially when you look at what you could do on ICP instead.
I know crypto assets can pump for foolish reasons all the time, but I don't believe in investing for foolish reasons. I believe in hard, logical, deep research, and in investing in something that's probably undervalued a hundred times, that can grow massively, where I don't have to constantly change positions or feel anxious. I've gone over everything that's failed on Cardano, and in my analysis every single narrative has failed and every single data point looks incredibly weak. Add ICP to the top of that, and to me this is a scenario where a 99% collapse is more probable than a 10x. That's a huge asymmetry.
I hope I've helped at least one person see this coming. It's like standing on a train track and being able to see the train coming, with no reason not to just walk off and move. But when your identity is locked in as "I'm a Cardano holder, this is my coin," maybe you'd want to consider changing your identity instead of getting run over by a minus 99%. Because almost everyone holding ADA is going to sell at some point. The question is just how low you go first. It's like the Cardano limbo: how low do you go, baby?
So thank you very much for watching. I hope I've shown you, beyond any reasonable doubt, how Cardano is finished, using simple logic, simple reasoning, simple research, and cutting through all the bullshit and all the hype. If you want to go deeper on how I research these projects and compare them, you can go through my Crypto Reviews playlist, where I break down coins one by one the same way.
Jump in and direct message me the coin you'd like me to look at. I can only review so many on the live streams, and I generally stick to the most popular ones because they have the most views, the most traffic, and the most need to help people pull their heads out of their ass about the coin.
Dear Cardano Holders: Why I Sold and Moved to ICP
From my video published June 17, 2026.
Dear Cardano holders, this is a message for you, written by a former Cardano holder myself. I'm sharing it because I think this is really important information to talk about today, and because I care about your success as a crypto investor. I've been in crypto for 11 years now, I've done tons of research, and what I'm about to share with you is something people in the past have told me was genuinely helpful. One note up front: I'm not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice. This is my own experience and my own opinion. For the record, I hold tens of thousands of Internet Computer Protocol myself, so you can see exactly where I stand.
If you're holding Cardano, I'm fully aware of all the hype around it, and I'll cover some of that. But afterward, I want to get into the bigger picture. I know there's a lot of excitement right now around the Hydra Layer 2 solution, with people thinking it's incredibly bullish. There's talk of an airdrop, talk of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem, talk of institutional and regulatory support, and talk of governance. I get it. I see the hype. But have you looked at the criticisms, and then thought about the bigger picture in crypto, instead of just treating Cardano like a cult coin? I like Charles Hoskinson, and I identify with him. But let's set the personality aside and look at the technology. Let's look at where things are actually going.
The technology is the core problem
The most obvious issue I see with Cardano is the technology itself. In my experience, Cardano's technology is extremely limited when you compare it to Internet Computer Protocol. Cardano was originally launched on the promise that it would be the Ethereum competitor, a faster, cheaper, better, more technically rigorous version of Ethereum. Today, I'd ask: in what respects is it actually better than Ethereum? Maybe incrementally, technically. But Ethereum still has far more adoption. Cardano has had very slow development and very slow adoption. You'll hear the narratives about wallets prioritizing security over speed and so on. But does it have the best technology in crypto right now? In my view, the answer is unequivocally no, not even close.
Internet Computer Protocol, as far as I can see, has the absolute best technology in crypto. Right now it does tens of thousands of times as much computation per second as Cardano does. This isn't some incremental improvement. To me this is light years ahead, a decade ahead of Cardano's technology, and it's not something I believe Cardano is going to be able to catch up with.
Two possible futures, and Cardano fits neither
Because of that gap, I see the future of crypto moving in one of two basic directions. The first direction is toward Internet Computer Protocol, where you do everything fully on chain. ICP is, in my view, the first crypto that truly fulfills the original goal of crypto, which is to remove the intermediary across the entire tech stack: the website, the backend, all the complicated data. ICP is the only blockchain I've seen that is technologically and drastically advanced ahead of Ethereum. Cardano, by contrast, is barely ahead of Ethereum incrementally, and it's hoping a Layer 2 is going to save it, hoping institutional adoption and ETFs are going to bring people into the coin.
That hope is fine if you believe the future is heading toward centralized custody of crypto. By centralized custody, I mean the reality we already see with Bitcoin, where most of the Bitcoin appears to be held entirely by centralized entities like crypto exchanges. You can look in the Bitcoin rich list and verify this yourself. In most transactions, people aren't even actually touching the blockchain. They're going completely through a third party. When you buy crypto on an exchange, the Bitcoin is just sitting there. It's not moving on the blockchain. The exchange therefore has total control over the entire experience, which means they can create fake crypto and do all kinds of things to manipulate the price. In my experience, that's the reality of interacting with everything except ICP.
So here's the squeeze. If the future moves toward that dominant, fully-on-chain technology, ICP makes Cardano irrelevant in terms of technology. And if the future moves toward centralization, which the ETFs are pushing, a future where you don't even touch the blockchain yourself and somebody holds all of it for you, I still don't see the purpose of Cardano. Bitcoin and Ethereum already hold the top positions. Other chains already have more adoption. I don't see why things are going to suddenly change for Cardano from where they are now.
The real-time numbers
Look at the actual real-time transactions per second. Right now, according to Chainspect, Cardano is operating at less than one transaction per second. The maximum in the last 100 blocks has been around 11 transactions a second. The block times are 20 seconds. That's awful. I don't see why that would be worth holding in either a centralized or a decentralized future. Neither of those scenarios holds any excitement for me.
This is the problem when you look at the hype and you just watch videos saying the price is going to go up. Almost nobody stops to ask whether this technology is really useful for humanity. I don't see that Cardano's technology is useful in either one of the two futures I described, and to me that is the biggest issue. Cardano faces huge competition in either scenario.
In the first scenario, ICP makes everything else irrelevant. It is, in my opinion, literally the best way to scale Bitcoin and Ethereum right now, with both running on ICP, and you're seeing a lot of Bitcoin DeFi building happening there. That's just not practical on Cardano. Have you actually used the Cardano blockchain? Have you tried to take it off an exchange and actually swap tokens? In my experience it's not a better experience than using MetaMask. Now have you done that on Internet Computer Protocol, on my website? For me it is far better. Your transactions, like posting a message on OpenChat, are fully on chain. You can send pictures fully on chain. You simply can't do that on Cardano.
Governance, market cap, and opportunity cost
With Cardano you hear a lot about governance. But Internet Computer Protocol has the most active DAO governance I've seen, all fully on chain. Whatever Cardano is doing on governance feels irrelevant by comparison, where you have to delegate your voting power. I just don't see the momentum being there.
If this were a tiny little project with a big community and a cult following, that would be one thing. But that's not the reality. The reality today is that Cardano sits in the top 10 cryptos with a roughly $24 billion market cap, while Internet Computer Protocol has almost 90% less market cap by comparison. So I'm looking at opportunity cost. I sold my Cardano because of this research. I don't see why I'd hold Cardano instead of Internet Computer Protocol, when with ICP I can easily participate in governance, it's all fully on chain, it's all transparent, and I've got tutorials showing exactly how. If you search Jerry Banfield ICP NNS, I'll walk you through it. It's easy. You don't have to delegate, and it operates just as fast as the web you're used to.
Compare that with Cardano, where I was not easily able to even participate in governance. I staked my Cardano, and I believe I was delegating to somebody else. That's not something the masses can easily participate in yet. From everything I've seen out of Cardano, and I've been following it since it first launched, it has been a massive disappointment, and I don't see a good future for it.
Right now there's a lot of confirmation bias holding it up. People have already bought Cardano, they don't want to be wrong about it, and so they intentionally try not to see any information suggesting there might be better places to be. You hear people hyping it with no honest look at the actual technology. The more the crypto bubbles burst and the more regulation comes in, the more the tech and what the tech can actually do is going to matter. So I have serious concerns for the future of Cardano. At this point, to me, it's just limping along, and I seriously doubt things go well from here.
I hope I can warn a few people about the trouble signs I see before it's too late, as I'm trying to do across so many different cryptos. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, you can explore my Crypto Reviews playlist. I'm Jerry Banfield, a full-time YouTuber, and my website is fully on the blockchain. Thank you for reading, and I'd genuinely love to know whether this perspective was helpful to you.
Cardano (ADA) Crypto Review: Why I See the Price Trending to Zero
From my video published June 11, 2024.
Cardano is a crypto where I see the price trending towards zero. I think there's a lot better crypto investments, especially Internet Computer Protocol, for example. And I'm going to tell you why. After I held Cardano last year, I was hyped up on Cardano. I got into it for a little while and I sold everything, for the reasons I'm giving you here. First, if I've got my money in Cardano, I can't have it anywhere else. And I see almost no scenario where Cardano is the best crypto investment. So let's look at a couple of big picture things first, and then we'll dive into Cardano in the details.
The big picture: an Ethereum killer that never killed Ethereum
Big picture, Cardano is currently the 10th ranked cryptocurrency. When it first came out, which I was in crypto when that happened, it was this Ethereum killer hype. It's going to be a future top two crypto and all this stuff. Well, that has not played out. And those are just the facts based on the market cap and the users. If you want an Ethereum killer, or if you want a copy of Ethereum that works basically the same way, then BNB and Solana have already locked that down.
There's two basic reasons people build on a cryptocurrency. One, they want to go get users. And BNB and Solana have all the users. Ethereum and Bitcoin have all the users. Cardano is irrelevant right now in terms of users. So somebody who is going to build some kind of application is not going to build on Cardano because they think there's a huge community. And that takes us to the second point: the technology.
Does Cardano have game-changing technology? Not to me
Does Cardano have technology that's truly game changing? Is it a true Ethereum killer? Absolutely not — once you discover Internet Computer Protocol. Internet Computer Protocol has game-changing technology. It is the only third generation blockchain that can actually do full stack web development from your website. Your entire app, your dapp, your pictures, your NFTs, your videos, all of it directly on chain. All of it. You can put a gigabyte on chain for just $5.
If you look at the layer one comparison, you can get an idea of the raw computation power of the blockchain itself, which is extremely important. Because if you're investing in a cryptocurrency, you're basically investing in the protocol itself and the people working on that. And I'm going to show you in a minute who's actually working on Cardano. If you look at ICP, it has, on average, a million instructions executed per second — 10,000 times the raw computing power of Cardano. Now, which of those sounds like a better investment to me?
Market cap and price action that don't impress me
If you look at the market cap, Cardano is 15 billion right now, which I think is drastically overvalued. Internet Computer is less than a third of that. I've got a spreadsheet right here, and I'm going to show this in every video all the time. Today we're doing Cardano, and I am extremely confident that Cardano, priced today, under almost no circumstances over almost any significant period of time will outperform ICP. And I would imagine there will be many other altcoins that outperform Cardano as well. This is the same point I keep coming back to about how crypto market caps are mostly a distraction from what a coin can actually do.
Let's look at a price chart over the last year. You go from 27 cents to 43 cents. That's pretty poor price action. As much FUD as there's been about ICP, the ICP price has pumped significantly more than that in the last year, as have many others. So the price chart on Cardano, it's came and went. It had a bull market in 2021 up to $2.50, and it already had its first one. If you compare the price of Cardano versus Bitcoin, then it was probably higher or about the same. And I seriously doubt Cardano in this bull market goes as high as it even did in the last one, because there's so many more coins. There's Internet Computer now. There's so much else happening in crypto. Other chains have the users. Cardano does not have the impressive technology.
Now some people say, well, Cardano has a max supply. Who cares if something I don't want to use has a maximum supply? The fact is, I've used Cardano before. It's slow. It doesn't impress me with the speed at all. The transaction fees are significantly high, so that even if it did scale up a lot, it would be expensive to use. Now some people will say, well, Cardano's so decentralized. I don't care if something that doesn't have the users or exciting technology is decentralized. Almost nobody's going to use Cardano for whatever theoretical decentralization it has. If you're sitting on a coin like this and want to think through your own decision out loud with someone who's actually done the research, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk it through on a weekly call.
The transaction data tells the story
Let's look at some data to back up what I'm saying. Look at the transactions on Cardano. In the last 24 hours, you literally have, in an hour, in an hour, in an hour, less than a thousand transactions. So for comparison, you need to look at the most technologically superior chain in the game, which is Internet Computer. Internet Computer is doing five times as many transactions a second as Cardano is doing in an hour. And these transactions are computationally intensive. Internet Computer is running websites. Like, jerrybanfield.com is hosted on Internet Computer. The OpenChat community that I have instead of Discord or Telegram — this is on chain. This is generating transactions, all without gas fees that users are paying.
Now Cardano — why would anybody build on this? There's hardly any users and the tech is not impressive at all. But it continues to get worse.
Who is actually building Cardano?
Let's look at Cardano. If we go to the official Cardano website at cardano.org and we look at who is working on this — ultimately, if you are investing in a cryptocurrency, the bottom line is you're investing in the engineers that are building the technology that theoretically people will want to use and build on in the future, which will drive marketing and user adoption. So how many engineers are working on Cardano, and who are they? This is a question you should ask about every single cryptocurrency, not just Cardano.
To first give you a nice comparison, let's look at DFINITY. I have $50,000-plus worth of Internet Computer Protocol today. I had zero dollars in crypto a year and a half ago. I've been totally transparent with you every step of the way as to how I've built from zero to 50,000, and it's primarily been done by DCAing into Bitcoin, buying a bunch of other altcoins, realizing they were crap, putting them all into Internet Computer, and then it went up 4x, and I turned $50 a day into $50,000 in a year and a half. I've done that, and it's because I thoroughly research stuff. DFINITY is the one who launched Internet Computer Protocol — major contributors to the Internet Computer blockchain, the largest research and development team in blockchain. If you go look at their website, look at all the engineers that are working on this. You can see why the technology is vastly superior to everything else in the game. Keep that in mind: 270-plus team members, tons of engineers and technical staff.
When I'm holding ICP, I'm betting — I mean, I'm investing, however you do your crypto — I'm investing in these engineers, these cryptographers from IBM, Google, Facebook. I'm betting that these engineers are making technology that is more advanced than anybody else. I can see proof of that when I use the wallet, the Network Nervous System, when I see the governance. This is the kind of honest, in-the-weeds research I share with everyone inside the Jerry Banfield Family, and it's exactly why I ended up calling Internet Computer the one altcoin I love after researching thousands of them.
Now, let's look at Cardano. Who exactly is building Cardano? We know Charles Hoskinson. In theory, he's doing some stuff on Cardano. But who's building this? If you look at the Cardano Foundation, who's building this? Where are the pictures? Where are the engineers? There's no transparency. I've talked to some blockchain developers personally, and one in particular — I actually met him in person — he said he works for a blockchain in this kind of capacity, and he immediately sells all the payment he gets. Because he's not impressed with it, and he doesn't think it has any real value. And this is somebody actually working for the thing that everybody investing in is putting their faith in, and he's getting paid and he dumps the coin immediately. This is why people don't put their pictures on something like this — because they don't want you to know who they are. If they wanted you to know who they are, and they were proud of what they were working on, their pictures and their profiles would be linked to it.
But look at this, the official Cardano website, the Cardano Foundation. Nobody's listed here. Not even Charles Hoskinson. And there's a for-profit arm of Cardano — nobody's listed on there. Input Output — nobody's listed on there. Intersect — nobody's listed on there. The nonprofit — not one single person is even listed on there. Now, you do have Cardano ambassadors, and they don't have their faces on here either. But an ambassador, that's a marketing person. I want to see the real engineers that are doing the hard work to make real technology that people are going to use. If you go to the Cardano Foundation, which they've linked to on the official website, they give you nothing. This is a bad sign. To me, there's no way I want to invest in something where they hide that.
This is the research I did, which is why I went all in on ICP. DFINITY is trustworthy to me because you can see this huge team, and not only that, you can watch videos with many of these team members. If you follow the DFINITY YouTube channel — Dominic's got a whole bunch of videos, Jan, and I've watched videos from many of these other people and engineers explaining the stuff they're making on ICP. Who else is doing that? What do you see on Cardano?
Why I sold all my Cardano
This is why I sold all my Cardano last year, because my calculation is that Cardano is going to trend towards zero. When the people holding Cardano right now — crypto's mostly echo chambers, so people holding Cardano are likely to watch other people who talk about how great Cardano is. And I made a video talking about how great Cardano is, and I got a bunch of views on it, but I had no information of substance in that video, which is why I stopped making videos like that and started making videos like this. I got disgusted with myself as a creator. Most people in crypto are just trying to say anything to get you to give them money and applause and attention. My goal is to help you see it. My goal is to say what needs to be said. And what needs to be said is, I think Cardano is an investment that will lose you money. And I think Internet Computer, by comparison, is one of the best possible investments I see. I've got my money there, I'm absolutely transparent with you, and I'll keep you updated on my spreadsheet. If you want the longer version of this story, I wrote it up for the people still holding the bag in my letter to Cardano holders on why I sold and moved to ICP.
Here's where my money is. Cardano: here's the spot on the spreadsheet for it. Internet Computer: I've got, you know, 3,000 locked indefinitely, I have a thousand liquid, and I have another wallet with another 500 or so in it. Cardano is 42 cents today. Internet Computer is about $10.90 today. And I'm going to put this on the spreadsheet, and we will see exactly over time how accurate I am. So far, in the first couple of days, if you'd had ICP instead of Bitcoin and NEAR, you'd have a hundred percent — but even just a couple of days in, you have 97 instead. So I'll keep you updated.
Why I actually care whether you get this right
I'm one of the few people who actually cares about your successful financial future, because I'm tired of having neighbors that have made bad investments and then they're desperate and they don't have any money, so they can't keep up their house. So then I have a crappy neighborhood. That hasn't happened as much in my neighborhood, but that's how I think worldwide. There are a lot of bots and a lot of people in crypto trying to rip you off, and I'd rather just tell you what I actually believe. If you enjoyed this kind of honest review, you can watch more of my videos on money and crypto here.