Blockchain analysts from Santiment are observing significant whale movements on ADA’s network. According to this, large investors invested massive amounts of money in Cardano in January and thus brought about growth of up to 70 percent.
However, Cardano’s strategy seems to be paying off. According to DefiLlama, the blockchain is now one of the top movers in the DeFi sector. Over the past month, Total Value Locked ( TVL ) has increased by around 82 percent. This puts ADA in tenth place in the monthly trend.
Cardano’s success is even clearer in the weekly trend. There, the ecosystem even takes third place with growth of 29 percent. The data aggregator lists 18 different protocols as part of the Cardano ecosystem. Among them, the DEX Minswap is currently particularly popular.
In DeFi, Cardano has only performed mediocre overall despite a consistently high market capitalization rating. ADA is in 24th place after TVL and even lags far behind smaller projects such as EOS, Celo or Canto. In 2022 there were already discussions about how easy it is to manipulate the TVL value .
Cardano’s TVL is currently around $104 million. For comparison: market leader Ethereum reaches a value of around 29 billion US dollars. Bitcoin’s DeFi sector, dominated by the Lightning Network , includes an amount of around $139 million.
Cardano wants to push further growth in the DeFi sector with Djed. The algorithmic stablecoin aims to serve the ecosystem of various dApps. After being in a test phase since spring 2022, the project has finally been live on the mainnet since January 31, 2023 .
In addition, USDA is a centralized stablecoin that is issued by Emurgo. It is intended to be used on the Anzens DeFi platform, among other things. The Cardano developers from IOG and Emurgo have high hopes for this.