Polkadot Struggles with 0.09 TPS, But What Keeps Its Market Cap in the Billions?

• While Polkadot has a $6.4 billion market cap, it can only handle 0.1 tps, which can only mean investors took the gamble based on future utility.
• Polkadot’s architecture based on cross-chain connection and parachain may cover real network activity in plain tps numbers.
• The low current activity could mean that Polkadot is still in a growth stage, and increased usage in the future could be the cause of increased transactions.

Polkadot, one of the blockchain networks praised for its innovation in connecting different blockchains, has a disappointingly low transaction volume. Currently, the network can only process 0.09 tps at the current time and an average of 0.1 tps over the last month. Ripple owns a $6.4 billion market cap, and doubts about the actual usage of the network are being raised. This odd relationship between the market price and the network activity leads to questions about what drives Polkadot’s value and why it seems so dormant.

Transaction Volume in Connection to Market Capitalization

The tps on Polkadot are relatively low, Unsurprisingly, even Cardano, a network that has been frequently accused of complacency, appears more adopted and faster than Polkadot. The question that arises from these two observations is how Polkadot sustains such a lofty market capitalization despite so little on-chain interaction.

#Polkadot is doing 0.09 tps right now and averaging 0.1 tps over the month, yet its marketcap is $6.4b. Nobody is using this $6.4b chain. Whats going on? Why are you holding this?

Why?

This tps makes even Cardano seem adopted and fast. pic.twitter.com/2gVZ8zpABi

— MartyParty (@martypartymusic) September 22, 2024

One potential reason for it is that, while the size of the market capitalization is a good clue in judging a blockchain’s current adoption, it may not always be the best indication of its future possibilities.This can also be attributed to the fact that speculators and investors have placed high value on the market capitalization of Polkadot.

Its governance mechanisms, as well as scalability solutions, make it one of the main players in the blockchain market even if its current usage statistics do not suggest this. Businessmen may not be viewing things in terms of the present, but are more interested in the future profitability and size of the network.

Reasons for Reduced Adoption

There are several reasons which might explain why Polkadots transaction throughput is low. Firstly, Polkadot has no primary aim of handling a large number of transactions, but rather, it focuses on the development of a heterogeneous multi chain network. Consequently, it succeeded in pointing out that the network usage is likely not accurately reflected by the number of transactions. Also, its structure, such as that of parachains, can perhaps indicate that most of the network’s work is happening on the parachains and not the relay chain itself, thereby distorting the tps results.

Another possibility is that Polkadot is still in a state that has not yet been discovered by its users and developers where the chain has not yet reached its full capacity. This may rise with time as use of the network expands with more projects and decentralized applications (dApps) deployed on the network leading to a rise in the tps.

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