Did a game BREAK the Polygon blockchain? Will Sundae Swap break Cardano?

A Play-to-Earn NFT game on the Polygon blockchain recently made the gas fees explode by a factor of 16 causing an immense congestion on the blockchain. Can these scalabillity issues forshadow what will happen when Cardano's Sundae Swap goes live?

Polygon or Matic, as its also called, is a layer 2 solution originally created to solve issues of gas fees and scalabillity on the Ethereum blockchain claiming it can handle up to 65000 transactions per second. 

Sunflower Farmers, as the NFT-Game is called, is among the most popular games on the Polygon blockchain. The farming simulator encourages the players to earn tokens by completing tasks but saw a sharp spike in transactions, reaching as much as 1.1 million transactions in one single day.

This of course led to massive congestions and spike in gas fees on the entire blockchain, and Sunflower Farmers is shut down ever since. The likely explanation to this spike in transactions is most likely due to massive amounts of bots attempting to farm for tokens. 

While the shut down of Sunflower Farms has temporarily set things back to normal on Polygon, its cast some doubt to the claim of the blockchain being able to handle 65000 transactions per seconds. Some claim while those numbers are certainly feasible they would only work in a controlled enviroment but due to the variation in the types of transactions performed become restricted in practice due to block size limits.

Despite these bots congesting the network was certainly not normal on chain behavior, Polygon has nevertheless other layer 2 solution alternatives such as Polygon Hermez and Mir to adress these scalabillity issues.

Looking at Cardano they are certainly surging with optimism lately, even suprassing Solanas market cap.

Part of is people anticipating the launch of the Sundae Swap platform a decentralized exchange and trading protocol on the Cardano blockchain. However, a great deal of ADA holders are equally worried the launch of Sundae Swap is too soon and will cause massive congestion on the blockchain, directing lots of negative attention to the scaleing issues Cardano faces.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson seems completely unphased by the criticism, perhaps viewing whatever the outcome of the realease of the platform as a step forward for the Cardano network.

Regardless, there seems to be a lot of news for the Cardano blockchain this year, as going by the list #BuildingOnCardano 175 projects are being built on the blockchain to be released this year. Some people critizise Hoskinson, saying he should have waited with the launch until the Cardano layer 2 scaling solution Hydra is in place before launching the dex, something that is intended to make Cardano be able to handle up to an estimated million transactions per second according to simulations. But then again, that is still theoretical.

My own guess regarding this is that while there might be some congestion issues, I don't think it will be as bad as people suggest, considering Cardano has been clocked in at 257 transactions per second. And while that seems quite pathetic in comparison to the numbers mentioned in this article, one needs to keep in mind that Ethereum handles about as few as 30 transactions per second.