Buying and selling volumes for Cardano’s ADA token have exploded of late with every day figures averaging round $720 million in February whereas exceeding a median of $1.4 billion in March.

This rise was spurred by a social media submit by U.S. President Donald Trump, who talked about ADA as one of many tokens that will be included within the nation’s strategic crypto reserve.

Though Cardano is having fun with its second of mainstream consideration, the layer-1 blockchain has been quietly rising as a crypto juggernaut because it went dwell in late 2017.

Adoption metrics

The ADA token has a market cap of $25.6 billion however what’s extra notable is what’s beneath the hood; knowledge from Google exhibits that the Cardano blockchain has greater than 5 million distinctive wallets and 1.3 million delegators, with 1000’s of latest wallets being created per day.

The blockchain additionally has $329 million in whole worth locked (TVL), though Cardano Basis CEO Frederik Gregaard believes that metric is overemphasized by crypto communities.

As a substitute, he factors to “non-value transactions” related to folks conducting real-world – albeit non-financial – actions on blockchain rails: Minting a decentralized ID, monitoring metadata, recording paperwork, that kind of factor. Cardano’s a hotbed of such exercise, he stated.

“I am combating to make sure that 50% of the exercise is a non-value transaction,” Gregaard advised CoinDesk.

One instance of that is Cardano’s partnership with Veritree, which noticed the Cardano neighborhood donate over 1 million ADA tokens to plant 1 million mangrove timber in Kenya, with every donation verified and tracked on the blockchain.

Final week, the Cardano Basis additionally introduced a cope with SERPRO — Brazil’s largest state-owned IT firm – to speed up blockchain adoption in South America. SERPRO processes 33 billion transactions yearly for 90% of Brazil’s federal administration. Moreover, 8,000 workers may even obtain blockchain coaching.

Cardano’s perspective differs from the likes of Solana and the slew of layer-2 networks like Base that pleasure themselves on whole worth locked (TVL) and hype-driven actions like memecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

TVL on Solana grew from $2.2 billion to greater than $10 billion in 2024, Cardano in the meantime zipped from a modest $445 million to $537 million in the identical interval.

DeFi on Cardano

While Cardano Basis’s CEO stated his focus is on real-world use circumstances, the blockchain nonetheless boasts a bustling DeFi ecosystem beneath the floor.

Minswap is Cardano’s native decentralized trade (DEX). Its cumulative buying and selling quantity hit $3.4 billion this month with December alone notching a near-record $271 million, DefiLlama knowledge exhibits.

There are additionally a variety of lending protocols together with Liqwid, Lenfi and Optim Finance, with TVL throughout Cardano’s lending sector exceeding $116 million.

However the important thing a part of Gregaard’s mission, he insists, is to not exceed that fifty% degree for financialized transactions. He sees it as staying in step with the Cardano Basis’s non-profit ethos, even when it limits potential exponential development of hype-fueled actions like memecoins.

Cardano Basis vs Hoskinson vs Emurgo

Fulfilling that ethos has its personal challenges, largely as a result of the blockchain is run by three foremost entities: the Cardano Basis, Charles Hoskinson’s IOG and Emurgo. The latter two are industrial companies, which might trigger friction between them and the inspiration.

“The intent of getting a non-profit was you could optimize decision-making primarily based on 10 years, it is completely different than in the event you optimize decision-making tomorrow,” Gregaard added.

A number of the friction was highlighted by an nameless Cardano neighborhood member in December, who penned an e mail on a path ahead and detailed how the entities operating Cardano have been at loggerheads.

“CF’s latest burst of exercise is a component of a bigger strategic play—an try and undermine Charles, IOG, Intersect, and the broader governance roadmap,” the e-mail learn.

“It has been an extended and tough highway, however I do agree with a few of the sentiments of the whistleblower,” Hoskinson wrote in response on X.

Gregaard, nevertheless, was extra diplomatic about any potential rift.

“There isn’t any financial trade happening between us, however we do work very carefully collectively,” he stated.

“We generally go to [a conference] and we share a sales space. So we come collectively and we sponsor cubicles collectively, that is the closest you’re going to get to any associates, which could be very completely different in comparison with each the Ethereum basis or Tezos basis, the place they mainly management the Treasury and management the disbursements.”

“On the flip facet, we [Cardano Foundation] are the legal responsibility umbrella for the neighborhood and the blockchain, which signifies that we’re the one who interacts with the SEC and the CSDC and the FMA, and I negotiated MICA with the European Parliament.”