Cardano will not help bring democratized broadband internet to millions of Africans

Blockchain-based platform 3air will leave Cardano to build its internet-connected platform on Ethereum scaling solution SKALE.

The announcement of the move to a Layer 2 multi-chain network on Ethereum is a blow to Cardano’s scalability as the market debates its congestion issues.

Haskell developer shortage

3air’s mission is to bring broadband internet and digital services to millions of underserved Africans.

According to the announcement, 3air will continue to build a blockchain-based platform solution on SKALE’s mainnet.

After reviewing multiple EVM-compatible networks for potential partnerships and evaluating the technology, 3air decided to further build on SKALE, a multi-chain network focused on scaling Ethereum. Sandi Bitenc, CEO of 3air said:

“We looked at top layer 1 like Solana, Algorand, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Velas, Tezos and also other layer 2 like Polygon, Arbitrum,…”

According to Bitenc, the decision to leave Cardano was made after considering a few factors:

“While we have full confidence in what Cardano is showing, we’re having a hard time finding the talent that can develop 3air’s platform on Haskell. We’ve been actively recruiting experienced Haskell developers to build on top of Cardano for months, but there’s a real lack of truly talented people in the market. We found two part-time developers for beginners. We also contacted the development agency mentioned by Cardano and they were great, but they were too busy and couldn’t meet our schedule.”

Cardano is built using the useful Haskell programming language. This language is not one of the most popular programming languages ​​and is not widely accepted by developers.

However, Haskell is both the basis for Cardano’s smart contract programming language Plutus and the domain-specific language of Cardano’s financial smart contracts – Marlowe.

Scalability issues

Bitenc notes that Cardano’s scalability issues are among the factors.

“We tried to build on their platform and we think that the EUTXO model will not be suitable to build smart contract based dApps (decentralized applications) until a good extension is found.

We also hope for more direct support from Cardano for our shared vision of African connectivity.”

According to the CEO, the initial reason for choosing Cardano was its strong presence in Africa and government-level contracts for a digital identity that 3air wanted to use for its customers.

Bitenc explains that building on SKALE means 3air developers can start working immediately and post-transition development will be accelerated.

3air plans to develop the platform and launch smart contracts and end-user solutions on SKALE in the coming months.

“The main reason we chose SKALE is that they offer gas-free transactions to end users and we really get our own chain that no other project can clog. We also think their innovative approach to scaling and solving common problems like pre-run and instant block processing is one of the best in the current blockchain space.”

Meanwhile, Cardano’s Basho development phase continues to be perfected through incremental adjustments and tweaks, hoping to thoroughly eliminate network congestion issues.

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