The devil’s lawyer

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I am a researcher by nature. I am not a computer developer, I do not have the education to analyze computer codes, but I do have the logic, to be able to understand the ecosystem as a whole.

Decentralization is, for me, essential today as a lifestyle, having learned this in the crypto industry. By this I mean that I am decentralized, I do not respond to any interest. I can afford criticism.

I am making this introduction because of what I am going to say, which is my opinion, and I will do it objectively, as always.

Do not accuse me of FUD or similar, because it is not the idea, but I pretend that we all think, even more so my readers.

Today Cardano has a very good performance for the number of transactions it handles, and that have increased considerably after the HF Mary, in March, by the NFTs.

From time to time we see when there are airdrops, how the network becomes congested and slows down, not to mention Yoroi with its servers, (but that issue is not a problem with the blockchain, but with Emurgo).

In that sense, the blockchain has a kind of mempool (similar to Bitcoin) where it leaves unprocessed transactions on the waiting list. Each Bitcoin block is 10 minutes on average and Cardano is only 20 seconds, so the mempool is smaller out of necessity. When this type of congestion occurs (so far airdrops) many transactions are rejected and must be processed again, this does not imply loss of funds, but time for the user.

Imagine the network traffic that will come when all the number of platforms that are being developed are operated. Today only those of NFT are active, since they do not need smart contracts.
I leave this link with the ecosystem of the most important developments (and they are not all!):
Https://jleagle.github.io/cardano-ecosystem/#synthetic-assets

Let’s not even talk about the “absorption” that it will make on the Ethereum ecosystem, with respect to the ERC20 tokens, from the ERC20-Converter.

That said, you should know that the vast majority of developments are waiting for the PAB, Plutus Application Backend, (some like Sundaeswap have said they will do without the PAB), which is a platform to lighten the burden on the developer, providing this built-in functionality to the smart contract developers. The service intermediates between the Plutus applications, the node, the wallet and the users. The PAB also helps applications track status and other information in the chain for use by SCs.

I leave you an article about PAB: The Architecture Powering Cardano and its Future Applications | AdaPulse

There is no release date for the PAB, although there are already two pre-releases: Releases · input-output-hk/plutus · GitHub .
IOHK said they would launch with the HF Alonzo and it didn’t happen. All good, we know that they are going slowly, steadily and surely, I prefer it that way.

Then the ERC20-Converter theme, the same, no date and they said it would be for the HF.

Finally, HYDRA, necessary and (sufficient) for climbing in 2nd layer and off-chain. It will be available no earlier than 6 months.

When they launch the PAB and the ERC20-Converter, the growth in network traffic would be enormous, because a large number of developments will come, both their own, native to Cardano, and those of Ethereum.

Now, I’ll be the devil’s lawyer:

Is Cardano Prepared to Support Your Operation Growth? No.
Today Cardano operates at 20–30% of its block capacity, see: https://pool.pm (see 1H / 24H LOAD)

If the traffic grew, say, 5 times (not much considering the potential that is coming), the network would saturate.

Why aren’t the PAB and ERC20-Converter ready yet? If these two tools were already available, but without Hydra, the blockchain would be slow, congested, and impact higher network fee costs, something that we criticize for Ethereum .

Time will tell us.

Perhaps a strategy could be, in my opinion, to launch the PAB and not the ERC20-Converter, so that growth is controlled. That is, stay with the same for now, and the adoption of Solidity Tokens (Ethereum), would be pending until the launch of Hydra.

My intention is constructive criticism, to help us think to evolve. Cardano has great potential, great design, and a team of excellence that builds it, leading its way today, necessary for its first steps, and until the Voltaire era of governance gives democratic decisions to the community.

I’m just a freedom maximalist, and decentralization is my navigational compass.

1 Like

Hello @arielfavio

I can see by the time and effort you put into this article that you care about Cardano and are just opening discussion on points that you believe need attention.

However, I can see from your assumptions that you may be missing some puzzle pieces in this narrative. I’ll try to add parts that I’m aware of that you may consider in making these points.

There are a few points that you raised and many of them revolve around scalability. For example you said:

Cardano current network performance is capped by IOG / IOHK because they determined they will not need more then 8 TPS for current operations of network. Cardano is still in early stages and there are only a few million users, so they didn’t want to produce empty blocks. They can decide any time to change protocol parameters and boost the network to ten times the speed if they wanted to. Here is the link to IOHK article where they discuss this along other design choices :Introduction to the design of the Data Diffusion and Networking for Cardano Shelley* - IOHK Research

Cardano base layer TPS on the last performance test I remember seeing was 257 TPS, compared to Ethereums 20 TPS or Bitcoins 4.6 TPS. Cardano with out any further improvements and just with protocol adjustment from IOHK can easily handle 100% of any or all ERC20 token conversion traffic. Theoretically, Cardano can run both Ethereum and Bitcoin on it’s network if we are just looking at TPS limits.

Development of PAB is being done by Adrestia team and they seem to be doing very well. You can get weekly updates on their progress as well as progress on Daedalus team and Network team here: https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/

There is a very clear roadmap for Cardano, as well as openly declared process of testing and release. They are now in GOGUEN era and are still adding and testing. Charles mentioned that there will be about 3 HFC evets per year to bring all this into mainnet. There is no point of adding PAB to mainnet if they are just going to guess on what issues are to be solved.

HYDRA is a scaling solution that will be coming in BASHO era that comes after current GOGUEN era. At the moment, beside for nodes that are minting CNFTs, no one really needs HYDRA. HYDRA theoretical TPS puts Cardano at over 1,000,000 TPS compared to 8 TPS we are barley using now. As I mention before there are only a few million users (active wallets), so unless we get 200 million new users for some reason there is no scalability issues.

Yes, when you have bunch of CNFT projects all launching 10,000 CNFTs in the same time frame there will be congestion. Last 10,000 CNFT project I bought was sold out under 2 minutes. That means that 10,000 mint transactions + 10,000 buy transitions + 10,000 send transactions all happened in those 2 minutes. And if you look at CNFT release calendars you will see that many projects release at the same time. After sending ADA I got those CNFTs in about 4 minutes. I do run Daedalus so I’m not as affected by network congestion as Yoroi users.
This is exactly the issue that HYDRA addresses. After HYDRA is deployed nodes issuing CNFTS can ‘grow’ a head and run up to 1000 transactions per second with out affecting the network. This way 10,000 CNFTs minting + buying +sending will be (theoretically) done in under 1 minute with no network congestion. However, they need to finish up with GOGUEN part of the road map before they start on mass scaling.

All this is with out even considering that Cardano (and so far only Cardano) may be of capable parallel processing where the network can run multiple chains at the same time. Charles was talking about that back in 2017 (when no one would listen). This makes Cardano the only network that may have TPS multiplier that is only limited by hardware. As Charles put it: TPS will be n*base.

One thing to remember is that Cardano is in a middle of being fully built. In the road map we are now dead center with BYRON and SHELLY behind us and BASHO and VOLTAIRE ahead of us. So, it’s easy to see that there are still elements missing. However, they are on the way and arriving as planned. At this rate they will be done development before we get enough people to join Cardano and make use all of the improvements.

A little bit of time is all that is needed and all will be there.

Hope this info addresses some of your points. :smiley: :v:

4 Likes

Thanks for your contribution. Cardano has this limit: the protocol has maximum parameters per block, it admits up to 65,536 bytes per block, or 64 Kb (1024 bytes = Kb), that is to say that no more tx can be validated than this total weight in each one. Each tx cannot weigh more than 16,384 (16 Kb). The header of each block has a maximum of 1,100 bytes (1.07 Kb).
My previous: Speed in the Shelley era

All these parameters such as Max Block Size, Max Header Size and Max Transaction Size are updatable. These numbers are just chosen for use at this stage of the operation of the network. They calculated what they thought would be needed and tried to predict the most efficient blocks for transaction size and volume. At any time IOHK / IOG deems necessary they can just change it on the next HFC event. They made about 9 changes to parameters just during 2020. So if these specific numbers ever become an issues they can be easily adjusted to new efficient ones that the network demands.

There is a proposal issued by IOHK staff to provide a base stats of all these parameters, so by the time governance becomes decentralized the community will be well informed about this issues. It is also a good place to see a list of all parameters that are updateable and ones that can’t be changed. Here is a link: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/blob/master/CIP-0009/CIP-0009.md

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Yes, u r right.