Cardano is currently the most expensive smart contract blockchain (and other reasons I’m bearish)

Cardano currently has the most expensive fees of any smart contract blockchain. While this is probably temporary due to low ETH activity, ETH currently has cheaper fees than Cardano despite having 10x the daily active wallets, 400x the DEX volume, and 31x the average TPS of Cardano.

Minimum transaction fee on Cardano is $0.06 (0.17ada). On Eth $0.03 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x73bf5f439d98b48552f726e0895d550eb298e4dc766608c5e32a3cc977929614

Minimum DEX swap fee on Cardano is $0.45 (1.17ada). On Eth $0.32 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x8fda8034129413e448b0004bab26aa699015949e8abbf24303b557c4bbc64bc6

Cardano averaged 0.4tps in the latest epoch (504). Cardano community often excuses low TPS with “transactions within transactions”, but EVERY chain supports this. For example this TX has 61 recipients but only counts as 1 transaction on Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x8d296e3cc8cac4651579bb8d54f5452502abe81a72853fc53f67a78a57680d17 (Also this would cost 61 ADA on Cardano because you need to attach 1ada for each recipient when sending CNTs)

Cardano security budget is currently paid with 99.5% inflation and 0.5% user generated transaction fees (see Cardanoscan epoch 503 for proof). Even if blocks were 100% full Cardano wouldn’t be economically sustainable.

For some reason Cardano has a higher % of closed source apps than any other ecosystem, which goes against the ethos of blockchain and decentralization.

The largest “DEX” on Cardano (Minswap) is centralized, partially closed source, and can be frozen at any time (already happened once).

The largest lending app on Cardano (Liqwid) is centralized, closed source and can be frozen at any time (already happened once).

The largest stablecoin on Cardano (iUSD) is centralized (oracle) and has been depegged for almost a year.

Plutus V2 and Aiken upgrades were supposed to be a big TPS boost, but weren’t enough of a TPS boost to avoid major congestion during the launch of the Butane token, Kiseki meme token, and Axo token during Axo prelaunch (these are the ones i personally experienced, there are probably more).

Cardano’s upcoming L2 Hydra scaling solution has a limit of 20 members per instance (due to transaction limits when opening a channel), and all members must REMAIN ONLINE for it to work. In addition Hydra can’t be used for DEXs or anything involving liquidity pools.

Governance is soon coming to Cardano but less than 2k people participated in the community vote leading up to governance. And previous governance experiments (changing staking parameters, Catalyst fundraising) have shown that IOG (the company that develops Cardano) sometimes just ignores the results of community votes.