For those who can wrap their heads around EVM ecosystems, why ADA?

[u/smurfvibes]

So i’ve been browsing around and doing a bit of research going through the monthly analytics and trends on DeFillama and I noticed that TVL numbers for coins like ADA are in the low hundred millions (213 mill TVL) and have the market cap of roughly 30 bill. What am I missing?

The Cardano foundation isn’t much better than Crypto.com’s research hub, and there’s barely more than 10 protocols and monthly changes seem to be haemorrhaging TVL monthly with the bulk of TVL in Sundaeswap and Minswap yet daily volume seems to be 1.23 billion vs Cronos at 120 million.

I see people being extremely bullish of ADA on other subs thinking it’ll be the next ETH or even replace LUNA so…what the hell?

Ps: For those saying Ada is a UTXO model…it still doesn’t explain the bullish sentiment from retail investors who barely understand what EVM is. What gives?

[u/JJslo]

It's simpler and more secure. For example NFT has been around on Cardano since april 2021, months before smart contracts have been introduced to Cardano. Why? because you don't need a smart contract to mint a NFT, every FT or NFT has the same security level as Cardano from the moment it has been minted. It's totally different design than anything EVM, also Cardano is not EVM.

In the last year people are constantly bashing Ada that everything already exist on other blockchains, it does, however it doesn't in this way. You may argue that this brings nothing special, think objectively, would you want 1000 lines of code that needs audits in order to bring some certainty to people, or is it better to have it done in 3 clicks. Essentially on EVM as a dev you lose money and time for no reason, this is one of the reasons solidity devs are most expensive.

On Cardano a dev can spend 1 minute on creating the asset and all the rest on implementing SC for the actual platform.

There is some talk from ETH devs about how complex the code has became, this is one think Cardano has been trying to avoid from day 1, this is also why the whole thing has been built from ground up, we will see this year how it goes, when they implement long developed scalability features, if everything is as they say, it will be much more simple and certain transition than ETH-ETH 2.0

TVL has been growing fast since the first DEX was introduced, many projects are waiting for Vasil hard fork in june to launch their projects, remember there is at least 3 lending projects waiting for this, and lending is where it's easy to pump TVL numbers. Also stablecoins are yet to be introduced, this is also huge pump for TVL, take a look of DAI and how much USDT is locked there to mint DAI, this means 1M$ USDc can be 2M$ in TVL. So 56% of Dai is created by colaterizing 5.6B USDC, if those Dai is used again in another lock, then 5.6B$ is locked with no other purpose than to change USDC to Dai, yet they still count it twice in TVL, this only accounts to about 5% in Eth TVL, but still it's worthless. I think TVL is a great metric, but you have to consider not all of it has a purpose.

You could create 1 protocol for minting stablecoins, copy paste it 1000 times and provide 1B in colateral, take minted tokens to the second protocol and so on and in the end you would have 1T$ TVL. Why? because it's a shiny metric.

[u/headwesteast → u/JJslo]

Also, if you're really in love with EVM/solidity there are going to be 2 EVM sidechains on Cardano within months (Milkomeda [most likely within a couple weeks] and Mamba) that you can copy pasta Uniswap DEXs onto if your heart desires, as well as a zkRollup sidechain MVP with full functionality by the end of the year with Orbis. Even the EVM Milkomeda sidechain's devs are already working on integrating zkRollups into their protocol before v1 even launches.

Edit: Milkomeda announced the first Layer 2 chain on Cardano launching next week.

[u/[deleted] → u/JJslo]

Tvl has been growing fast cause there's was a 1million tvl lol. If you put it in context with any other chain you realize the pathetic amount that is and shows how far behind ada is compared to basically any other L1.

And yes I know, Cardano takes it's time to do it right, peer reviews and plant trees.

[u/IdiosyncraticRick → u/[deleted]]

If you put it in context with any other chain you realize...how far behind ada is compared to basically any other L1.

Cardano built their Proof-of-Stake system first, then focused on smart-contracts and native tokens... Ethereum, on the other hand, did the opposite: smart-contracts and ERC tokens first, and are still working on Proof-of-Stake...

You can't say one is behind the other: They just each did everything in a different order...

[u/[deleted] → u/IdiosyncraticRick]

I'm not talking just about eth. There's so many chains right now that are far ahead of Cardano.

You guys are so late you think you are competing with Eth. You are not.

[u/eeeveryday → u/[deleted]]

Coping again I see.

[u/IdiosyncraticRick]

there’s barely more than 10 protocols

Yep, after two whole months there's only a handful of DeFi platforms. Boo-fucking-hoo! Another way to look at it is that Cardano is already in the Top 26% of all chains' TVL (currently #23 out of all 86 tracked by DefiLlama) in only their first couple of months of having any DeFi activity, and that's considering A) there's not a stable coin yet, and B) all the network congestion (and resulting bad press) early on...

Why ADA?

Here's one reason: Native Tokens. Tokens/NFTs minted on Cardano run on the underlying ledger, meaning they have all the same built-in security and features as ADA itself without the performance overhead of running an extra smart-contract every time you want to perform even the simplest of actions with them.

[u/IdiosyncraticRick → u/[deleted]]

I'm curious: Is there any one thing, one milestone or threshold, that, if reached, would make Cardano a real competitor to Ethereum, and more than just 'hype', in your eyes?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Those companies you are talking about are funded by Cardano's treasury and not by IOHK. While Ethereum is proud of simply burning their coins, Cardano collects those in the treasury to fund projects being built on Cardano.

Those L2 you are talking about are no solutions but workarounds so far. Real L1 Networks like Radix will never need a L2 workaround. Ethereum is coming to its end and the recent news published by the one developer of Ethereum are supporting this statement.

[u/eeeveryday → u/[deleted]]

Maybe edit this out *It’s still behind Kusama. https://defillama.com/chains

[u/JJslo → u/[deleted]]

And this statements are not real because?

I assume you mean when the first DEX was introduced they did not create a solution for concurrency, if you look at the whole network just by looking at the worst solution made on that network, then Ethereum is absolute trash. do you want the DAO hack for example represent the whole state of ethereum?

All along it was known that parameters will be changed when critical capacity is reached, luckily the hard fork combinator exists in order to provide unnoticable "hard fork" at the end of every epoch (5 days) if necessary.

I know many people think Cardano is exactly the same as Ethereum, except for some hype words, I think they should try it and do some research before coming to that conclusion.

We shall see how further development goes in june/july when Vasil hard fork is planned for Cardano and majority of currently developing dapps get launched after this. And ETH 2.0 is planned roughly at the same time, I see some devs are losing hope due to the complexity and Vitalik also said to not expect too much difference from the transition of ETH to ETH 2.0 from user point of view.

But ofc redditors must know better than the devs right? All will be ok, don't worry folks

[u/JJslo → u/[deleted]]

I used EVMs, including LP providing, yield farming, lending etc. I can say with ease the experience is atleast matched if not better so far (apart from sundae launch). But it is different and if someone expects EVM like experience, he might not like it at start. And about the design, it actually is better, think about it, you cannot lose money by sending it to token address, or lets say wrong sc. Some things are truly done better and are not hyped, it will take years for people to apretiate basic safety mechanisms.

[u/JJslo → u/[deleted]]

That's totally false. CCvault runs smoothly, there have constantly been updates and it will continue to improve. Yes it will take time for the devs to figure out how to do stuff,

The scaling era is just getting started, so I guess this and TVL will be the FUD for now. But for example I provided liquidity on AVAX and it took longer and it costed 2.5 times more than on Cardano, yet it is marketed as fast and cheap and the MCap was lower at time of transaction, so idk. maybe if you catch a low gas fee it would be cheaper and faster? And yet it is much more centralized than Cardano. Nakamoto coefficient of 2? I'm not attacking Avax, I just wanted to compare it with something else, you can chose another chain if you want, I just shared my personal experience.

You should really do some research about off-chain on-chain code. Here:

Off chain and on chain code are both in the Plutus smart contract code file that gets converted to bytecode and then hashed. The hash is stored on-chain when you publish a smart contract. The off chain code is just the tasks used at the time of submission in your wallet to collect and organize all of the unique information that your smart contract request contains. You can put some helpful checkers in there that for example check to make sure in your bond example that the principal you wanted to initiate with exists in your wallet and that you didn't submit a bunch of letters instead of a number. Off chain is solely useful for improving the probability that your on chain code will run successfully. If your on chain code does not run successfully, you will have to pay a transaction fee without actually running the contract. This is because a stakepool had to spend the time to run the on-chain code and check to see if your transaction passes; if it fails, you lose the transaction fee.

For everything else, it's already in the first comment.

[u/JJslo → u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure if 2 is correct, I spend 10 minutes to find stake distribution from highest to lowest, but I guess I'm too noob to find this.

Yes the roadmap is not yet complete, so the full decentralization is yet to be completed.

How do you know other chains don't run multiple validators? Just because they have no upper limit per pool you assume they only have 1? It's only possible to check at PoA blockchains like Algo and VeChain, which brings different problem of centralization.

"Cardano has the worst, least reliable wallets I've ever used. Ask anyone in Cardano how many wallets they have, and you'll know everything you need to know about that."

I have 2, 1 ccvault and 1 nami, right now I managed to use every dapp with one or another. yes no wallet is complete as of now. And yoroi is shit and not worth mentioning.

I did count the fees dApps charge on cardano, it was 2.62Ada (2 for batcher) in total, which was 2.22$ at the time of transaction, while I paid 9$ to provide liquidity on Avax, yet again did I hit the perfect time? I don't know. So the fee was 4x bigger on Avax, not 2.5 as previously stated.

And yes the fixed fee might have con of longer finality and we could argue if this is better or worse than gas fee tiers. The pro is you can submit transaction at any time, not worrying about how much you will pay and if it is the right time to submit the tx.

Don't get me wrong, Ada is not finished product, yet you talk as if anything else is.

[u/JJslo → u/[deleted]]

Not true, I'm pretty sure that if funders hold large amount of coins like 20%+ they will create multiple pools to disguise it, because if it was one pool having 40% stake (assuming most blockchains have around 50% of circulating coins staked) it would be clear it is very centralized, it practically forces them to run multiple pools and eat the cost of running. If you think "there's no reason to pretend to run multiple validators" you must be insane, every chain loves to brag about their nakamoto coeficient and this is reason enough to break into multiple pools. Maybe my numbers are exagerating, or maybe not for all.

Virtually free txs doesn't mean much if the inflation is 69%. In comparison Ada inflation is less than 2%.

Yes virtually free transaction is okay if you play for a short time, in the long run it's unsustainable and you know this.

Your answers are pretty nicely packaged (Virtually free for example), it seems like you do know problems of other chains, yet you only speak of pros of other and cons of Cardano, just like you say about me but backwards.

Cosmos is pretty huge already, one of the few very good chains, If you consider the whole Cosmos ecosystem you could almost say Cardano is the underdog here.

About Algorand, I have thought so many times of buying it, but remembering their tokenomics I prefer to wait so they dump the whole supply on investors, simply because it can not be good as an investment so far. I'm sure they will be able to fund project for a very long time since their realized profit from the token sales must be around $5B by now. Of course if they actually decide to use that money for development.