Large holders on the Cardano ($ADA) network, colloquially known as whales and shakrs, have been actively accumulating tokens, to the point that they added over $116 million worth of the smart contract’s native token since May 21.
According to data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Cardano has been seeing continued accumulation from sharks and whales, defined as addresses holdings between 100,000 and 10 million ADA tokens, who have accumulated to the point they’re at the highest level since September 2022.
The accumulation comes at a time in which the price of the cryptocurrency has been on a continuous downtrend, losing over 46.5% of its value over the past year, partly as it was deemed a security in lawsuits filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against leading cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Coinbase.
After the lawsuits were filed, several exchanges delisted Cardano for users in the US, including Revolut, which delisted it along with Polygon ($MATIC) and Solana ($SOL). New York-based digital assets trading platform Bakkt has also delisted Solana, Polygon, and Cardano due to regulatory uncertainty.
In total, the SEC has over a series of actions deemed over 60 digital assets to be securities, including Polygon, Cosmos ($ATOM), Axie Infinity’s $AXS, and $NEXO.
Interest form Cardano whales and sharks seemingly coincides with growing on-chain activity on the network, as Santiment pointed out that transaction volume on the network has been “rising nearly every week for the past 6 months.”
Per the firm, there have been back to back weeks with “over 67 billion in ADA transaction volume,” the highest level since September 2021.
As CryptoGlobe reported, last week digital asset investment funds offering exposure to Cardano, Solana ($SOL), and XRP have seen significant inflows, raking in $640,000, $600,000, and $500,000 from investors last week. In contrast, Ethereum-focused funds saw $1.9 million in outflows, while Avalanche ($AVAX) investment funds saw $400,000 in outflows.
Cardano was recently mentioned as one of the top cryptocurrencies when it comes to its ESG score by CCData’s ESG Benchmark report. The report was topped by Ethereum ($ETH) and was followed by SOL and ADA.
Featured image via Unsplash.
