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 Money 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.