My personal rabbit hole journey with crypto is pushing me hard into Cosmos / Cardano.

Introduced to Bitcoin like most. Invested primarily as a "risk bucket" investment hoping it would go up in value. It hasn't disappointed, but it does nothing more for me than that.

Learned about Ethereum and how it allows developers to build and launch dApps, and quickly jumped on this train. Purchased and held primarily hoping it would go up in value. It hasn't disappointed, but I didn't do much with it otherwise.

Bought a computer with a 3090 GPU right before the major price increases so I could play with deepfakes. Quickly got bored with that, and learned about using it to mine ETH. Got it running along with 2 other desktops with lesser GPUs, but generating about 200MH/s. Paid for the computers and generated more ETH to hold onto over the course of a year. Continues to mine now while awaiting the move to PoS. This has not disappointed.

Started learning more about DeFi, and was very interested. Like so many others, I was quickly pushed away from doing much with it because of the gas fees on Ethereum. Transferring, depositing, swapping, etc. just costs too much. This left me disappointed. I lost interest and didn't pay attention for awhile.

Learned about PoW vs. PoS and how to earn rewards with staking. As noted, I was using Ledger Live, and they had some coins available for staking directly in the Ledger Live software. This made it easy for me, and it was a good sign for me that these were built into Ledger Live. I did a little bit of research and wound up buying Cosmos (ATOM) and Polkadot (DOT) basically to hold and stake. I also bought Cardano (ADA) even though it wasn't built into Ledger Live just because I liked the project and again wanted to hold and stake. So I have been holding/staking these, and only slightly paying attention.

At first I wasn't able to stake my DOT because the min. was too high. I bought some more so that I could stake, and then they raised the min. As such, I've basically been holding it, without any staking, and it has basically trade sideways. Eh, whatever, still holding it just based on the initial research I did and hoping for the best.

ADA and ATOM have been doing well over that year, and I'm able to see those rewards coming in, claim them, compound them, etc. Very nice.

I learned about Polygon when Ethermine made it available for Payouts because of the Ethereum gas fees. I was slow to react, unfortunately, but I wound up switching my Payouts to Polygon, and learned about how to use it with Aave, etc. Cool, now I can do DeFi with cheap fees!

Ha, well, not much time after that Polygon fees goes crazy from the farm game or whatever, and then the network was jammed, fees are more expensive, and we seem to have the same exact problem that we have on Ethereum. This lasts for a couple of weeks and seems to be fixed. Seems to be a problem with the way the game was published, okay fine. Back to normal.

Well, now we're running into high gas fees again and have some sort of problem with bridges after this EIP-1559 upgrade. Ethermine payouts are jammed up again. This leaves me disappointed with the platform.

Enter Cosmos. I have been staking ATOM all this time, and because of that, I unknowingly qualified for quite a few airdrops of the projects that are launching on Cosmos. This was intriguing, of course, and I started diving more into Cosmos while learning how to claim all these airdrops.

The value of ATOM has doubled in that year because of all this action happening on the platform, I've earned more of it through staking, and now I'm being given free money through Airdrops of some pretty darn interesting looking projects.

To claim all these airdrops I had to get into the Keplr wallet and Osmosis defi. I'm now staking 11 different coins on the Cosmos network, and I have myself positioned for quite a few more airdrops coming up.

All of these transactions swapping, transferring, etc. were nearly instant and extremely cheap. The experience with Keplr and Osmosis has been very smooth. This experience has been the best by far when comparing to Ethereum and Polygon. This keeps me excited. This keeps me engaged. This gets me buying more ATOM so that I can swap for more coins and position myself for more airdrops in the future by staking and providing liquidation on these platforms.

Now Cardano seems to be heading in that direction with SundaeSwap coming up, and I have myself positioned for this airdrop as well. We all know fees are much cheaper here than Ethereum, and it seems we may see a lot of the same thing here that I'm seeing on Cosmos.

Both Cosmos and Cardano will allow for porting Solidity dApps from Ethereum over to their networks.

I find myself really wondering...why the heck are we all holding on to ETH? Trying to actually use it leaves me disppointed, and the thing that has kept me happy with it (mining) is going to become obsolete.

These other projects are much farther along, have already solved the problems that Ethereum is trying to solve now (very slowly), and are handing out free money via airdrops on a regular basis, which allows for even more staking, LP's, etc, and are allowing Ethereum dApps to run on their blockchains.

I haven't sold ETH. I'm not trying to FUD. I'm just honestly asking myself why am I still high on Ethereum? Am I still high on Ethereum? Okay, we'll get to PoS but that won't solve the gas fees problem. So then we'll get to sharding, but that's still showing ~2023 at best.

Meahwhile, I'm sure having fun with Cosmos, and as a developer thinking up solutions to build on blockchains, Cosmos and the SDK it provides sure makes it hard not to choose to build on it instead of the others right now.

What a crazy environment altogether! :)