The media has the power to shape public opinion and influence the way that people think about issues, events, and people. This can be a positive force when the media is used to inform and educate the public, but it can also be a negative force when the media is used to manipulate or deceive people. The media has the ability to present information in a way that influences how people perceive and understand it. The media can also use techniques such as selective reporting, sensationalism, and bias to influence the way that people think about certain topics. Furthermore, the media can be used to manipulate public opinion by presenting false or misleading information as fact. CoinDesk published an article with predictions for 2023 in which it described Cardano as a Zombie chain and compared it to the EOS project. That doesn't seem very objective at first glance. Let's explore this more. TLDR Cardano and Bitcoin process approximately the same number of transactions. CoinDesk probably miscalculated the transaction volume. For several years in a row, Cardano has been the project on which the team has been working most actively. CoinDesk editors give the impression that they don't even have a basic overview of individual projects, don't see any technological differences, and can't even measure network activity well. The quality of CoinDesk's articles may be affected by the composition of DCG's portfolio. What does the Zombie chain look like? Zombie chain is a derogatory term for blockchain networks that nobody uses. There are a large number of blockchains in the blockchain industry, so it is obvious that only some can attract a larger number of users. The successful ones grow the network effect and have a chance of mass adoption. Most blockchains will die out due to disinterest in use. Let's take a look at what CoinDesk wrote about Cardano. Let's take a look at some network statistics first. Cardano processes approximately 250,000 transactions every 24 hours. This figure is valid for the whole of the year. It is clear that more transactions take place on the networks in a bull market than in a bear market. Bitcoin transfers approximately the same number of transactions every 24 hours. The difference is that in the case of Cardano, there might be multiple user requests per transaction, often dozens. In other words, TPS is not a completely accurate telling figure for Cardano in terms of the number of users who have used it. There may be only 10 transactions in a Cardano block, but 50 recipient addresses. This means that in this case the number of transactions must be multiplied by approximately 5. For comparison, the first layer of Ethereum transfers about 1 million transactions per day, roughly 4 times more than Cardano and Bitcoin. That's not an order-of-magnitude difference. CoinDesk wrote that Cardano only transfers $1M value in 24 hours. Is that realistic? CoinDesk doesn't indicate if it is counting the value of tokens transferred or just ADA coins transferred. A simple calculation concludes that if CoindDesk is correct, each transaction would on average only contain a value equivalent to approximately 16 ADA (4 USD). That's highly unlikely. I dare say that the average transaction can carry a value in the hundreds or thousands of ADA, maybe more. In the context of the CoinDesk article, it was not appropriate to include the data from where the authors took the information about the number of transactions on Cardano. However, it seems they used the wrong source of information. If they were to use the information available on the Messari web, they would find that the transaction volume of Cardano is ~2B USD, which is a similar volume to Ethereum. In the case of Bitcoin, 3B USD. All 3 blockchains are basically very similar. Is Cardano really a Zombie chain like CoinDesk claims? What on-chain data doesn't say CoinDesk wrote that there is almost no development of the ecosystem on Cardano. Perhaps if the author of the article had looked at GitHub, he would have found that for several years in a row, Cardano has been the project on which the team has been working most actively. We dare say that individual projects cannot be compared with each other. Cardano has chosen a different path than Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, or Terra Luna. Cardano is not competing to be first to market, but to stay on the market for decades to come. It's important to the team that people don't lose money in DeFi, that the PoS consensus is 100% reliable, and that Cardano is as decentralized as possible. The team, along with the community, is clinging to the core principles of the industry. Cardano has smart contracts from the end of 2021. Plus, the Plutus platform is a completely different thing than the EVM ecosystem. When a new programming platform is created, it also takes years for people to adopt it. Tooling and documentation are still being worked on. Nevertheless, the first dApps have been created. Is it really that hard to find apps and try them out? CoinDesk hasn't done quality research when it comes to the Cardano ecosystem. Otherwise, they would have to take notice of emerging projects. They would also find projects that are Web3-related. Maybe if CoinDesk had some IT experts, they might notice that Cardano has native assets, which is technologically quite different from the usual approach of using a smart contract to create tokens. Is CoinDesk really so sure that no one will take advantage of this? We really don't know what is happening with the EOS project now, but we agree that a huge amount of money has been raised for it and the result is not as good as expected. However, is it fair to compare EOS with Cardano? Is there really not something more behind Cardano? Did the editors attend the Cardano Summit? Did they look at the academic papers? Did they compare the quality of staking on Cardano with the PoS that Ethereum has deployed? Do they have any idea what native liquid staking is? In our opinion, the authors of the article have no idea what is really going on in the individual ecosystems and how individual projects differ. We understand that they look at on-chain data and draw some conclusions from that. However, this is a very misleading and uninformative figure if we are talking about a prediction for 2023 and beyond. If the CoinDesk editors had opened their eyes, they would have known that Cardano will have 2 new stablecoins in Q1 2023. They might have thought that this would increase activity on the network and that it could kick DeFi up a lot. Coming to that conclusion is as easy as learning to add two numbers. Statistics on the number of transactions don't tell you much about what the transactions were used for. Most Bitcoin transactions are related to buying and selling BTC. The Lightning Network is starting to take hold so very few people would use a Bitcoin on-chain transaction to pay in a store. Cardano was mentioned negatively in the article in the context of Web3. If the editors had taken a good look at what the transactions contain, they would have found that there are a lot of NFTs and tokens. Aren't these transactions more important in the context of Web3 than those associated with centralized exchanges? Have the editors looked at how many tokens and NFTs were created on Cardano? Cardano has a strong community that is with the project not because of the hype, but because of the technology that is being built. Statistics are important and the numbers should grow, but to condemn the project and not see its potential is a mistake. CoinDesk made the erroneous conclusion that Cardano would end up like EOS. That may or may not happen. We believe that Cardano is doing significantly better than EOS and that the network will be used much more than it is today. If a project has a strong community, it's hard for it to just disappear from the world. What can affect the quality of an article? Coindesk is owned by Digital Currency Group (DCG). DCG was founded in 2015 by Barry Silbert, who is also the CEO of Coindesk. Digital Currency Group is a significant player in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. It is a venture capital firm that has made investments in a wide range of companies in the space, including Coinbase, Ripple, and Chainalysis. DCG also runs a number of incubator programs for startups in the industry, and it has played a key role in the development and growth of the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem. DCG is headquartered in New York City and has offices in London, San Francisco, and other locations around the world. It is considered one of the most influential and well-respected companies in the industry. The quality of CoinDesk's articles may be affected by the composition of DCG's portfolio. It is logical to promote those projects in which you have invested and try to damage those projects that compete with you. The media always pretends to be independent and objective, but it might not always be the case. CoinDesk has shown many times in the past that it does not like to write positively about Cardano. It is necessary to accept this and know why it is so. Cardano does not appear very often in various analyses or statistics. It happens that analysts release a report on the activity of, say, the top 20 blockchains and leave Cardano out. Yet if they had put it in the report, it would have ended up at the top. This is incredible amateurism, and it is good to wonder why this happens so often. How is it possible that projects on which much less is happening than on Cardano get into the reports, whether we measure the number of transactions, transaction volume, the number of tokens issued, etc? Why is a project from the top 10 being ignored? Usually, the reason is money and the interests of an economically powerful group. VC funds have invested in many projects, but often not in Cardano. If I open an analysis and don't find Cardano in it, that's a red flag for me. I'm trying to find out who issued the analysis and who might have paid for it. Conclusion The blockchain industry needs better and more objective journalism. Some politicians own the media and use it to their advantage. There are influential groups in the blockchain ecosystem, such as the DCG, which owns the media and can influence its content. It is good to know about this and not to believe everything that is written. The same applies to reports or analyses. On-chain data is publicly available. It is easy to trace information about transactions. If the analysts don't do it, you can easily do it yourself. You'll definitely be more successful than CoinDesk's editorial staff.
