Cardano produced around 3.3 million ADA in transaction fees while distributing 493.7 million ADA in staking rewards across 73 five-day epochs through September 1, 2026. Fees accounted for just 0.668% of the rewards paid out, making the reward pool roughly 149.6 times larger than transaction-fee revenue.

The imbalance has become more pronounced as activity on the network has declined. Average daily transactions dropped 72.46%, from 90,294 in 2022 to 24,869 between January and August 2026. That decline has placed greater attention on how Cardano will sustain staking rewards as it moves toward its next scaling upgrade.

Data covering Cardano’s transactions since its first block and divided into 73 five-day epochs from September 1, 2025, to September 1, 2026, shows the same dynamic. During Epoch 654, Cardano processed 108,500 transactions and generated 33,855 ADA in fees over five days, compared with 9.998 million ADA distributed as staking rewards.

Under Cardano’s monetary policy, transaction fees are combined with 0.3% of the remaining ADA reserve to form a virtual reward pool each epoch. The treasury receives 20% of that pool, while the remainder is available for staking rewards based on stake-pool performance.

Cardano’s reserve is programmed to decline over time. Its documentation describes an estimated half-life of four to five years, without specifying a fixed date for complete depletion. As emissions decrease, the amount allocated to staking rewards can also fall, mechanically reducing the gap between fees and rewards even without additional transaction growth.

The network’s minimum-fee formula consists of a fixed component and a charge linked to transaction size. Although governance can alter these parameters, a sustained improvement in fee coverage ultimately requires more economic activity and fee-producing transactions.

Cardano’s August public testnet update reported a sixfold performance improvement for Leios while using synthetic traffic. The result demonstrates that the network can increase its processing capacity, but it does not indicate that mainnet activity will generate enough fees to close a gap of nearly 150 times. Linear Leios is designed to achieve throughput beyond the simplified 43.1 TPS scenario, potentially allowing Cardano to process much larger transaction volumes.

The difference between available capacity and actual demand is also evident on other networks. Solana’s Transaction v1 upgrade tripled data capacity on a blockchain that already produces substantially higher fee volumes. This illustrates that greater throughput alone does not guarantee additional network revenue; applications and users must generate sufficient demand to utilize the capacity.

For Cardano, the longer-term challenge is generating enough paid activity to meaningfully narrow the 149.6-fold difference between transaction fees and staking rewards. Until that happens, staking payouts will remain heavily dependent on reserve emissions instead of organically generated network income, a distinction that is relevant when assessing ADA through its underlying protocol economics rather than its nominal staking APY.