Vladimir Kalnitsky, a well-known developer who worked on the cardano-transaction-lib (CTL), announced recently that he was leaving the project, marking yet another major departure for the Cardano ecosystem. His exit exacerbates worries about the platform's capacity to attract and retain talent in the quickly changing blockchain industry. 

Why leave Cardano?

Despite having gained invaluable experience working with Cardano's PureScript ecosystem, Kalnitsky stated that he no longer has a passion for functional programming, especially Haskell, which has been essential to Cardano's development. This opinion highlights that despite Haskell's elegance, there is a significant barrier to attracting new developers, which is in line with the frustrations voiced by other developers in the community. 

Both novice and seasoned developers appear to be losing interest in Cardano over the long run due to Haskell's complexity and niche market, as well as its limited appeal outside of academic and specialized circles. 

Alternative view

Another blockchain developer, Hinson Wong, expressed similar opinions pointing out that a major obstacle to broader adoption is being created by the tools developed around Haskell and the UTXO model. Compared to Ethereum's EVM, which has a far larger developer community and market size, Cardano is thought to have several times higher development costs, particularly in the DeFi space.

Sidan also discussed the challenges of developing DeFi applications on Cardano, pointing out that because of Cardano's tooling constraints, building a platform akin to Uniswap V1 on Ethereum would take a lot less time. The Cardano ecosystem may be experiencing deeper problems, as indicated by these departures and frustrations. 

With the developer exodus, Cardano is becoming less attractive as a development platform, especially for DeFi projects, despite its lofty objectives and vibrant community. This difficulty is also reflected in the price of ADA, which has underperformed other premium cryptocurrencies on the market. Cardano's future, especially in DeFi, is still unclear because important developers are leaving, and the platform is thought to be expensive and difficult to develop on.