Cardano: What high dev. activity tells us about the network

Journalist

Posted: December 27, 2023

• Cardano has seen the highest developer activity in the last month.
• Its NFT sector has witnessed a rise in sales volume in the last 30 days.

Cardano [ADA] has emerged as the leader, boasting the highest developer activity in December, according to data from Santiment.

🧑‍💻 Here are #crypto‘s top coins by development activity. Notable #github commits, past 30 days:

1 @cardano $ADA
2 @polkadot $DOT
3 @kusamanetwork $KSM
4 @avax $AVAX
5 @dfinity $ICP
6 @hedera $HBAR
7 @cosmos $ATOM
8 @optimismFNP $OP
9 @ethstatus $SNT
10 @chainlink $LINK pic.twitter.com/ilpWhbksj4

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) December 26, 2023

Development activity is an important metric as it offers insights into a crypto project’s commitment to creating a working product and the likelihood of shipping new features.

A high development activity often reduces the possibility of the project being an exit scam.

This metric tracks the number of unique development activity contributors, the count of all events for a project, and the number of unique GitHub activity contributors.

According to Santiment, Cardano saw a development activity of 540 in the past month. Polkadot [DOT] and Kusama [KSM] trailed behind it, both recording a development activity of 358.

User activity plummets on Cardano

An assessment of Cardano’s on-chain activity revealed a decline in network demand since 9th December.  According to data from Artemis, the daily count of unique addresses that have completed at least one transaction on Cardano has since dropped by 46%. 

Due to the fall in the number of unique wallets transacting on Cardano daily, there has been a decrease in the count of daily transactions completed on the network.

As of 24th December, 75,020 transactions were registered on-chain, having dropped by almost 35% from the 113,030 transactions recorded on 9th December.

Source: Artemis

Further, while other leading Layer 1 blockchain networks have seen their decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) surge in the past few weeks, Cardano has experienced a decline. 

Since 9th December, Cardano’s TVL has dwindled by 3%. At press time, the network’s  TVL was $405 million, according to data from DefiLlama.

However, it is noteworthy that on a year-to-date basis, Cardno’s TVL has skyrocketed by almost 750%. As of 1 January, the network’s TVL was $48 million.

Source: DefiLlama

The recent dip in Cardano’s TVL may be due to the decline in the volume of trades executed through decentralized exchanges (DEXes) housed within the chain in the past few weeks.

Data from Artemis showed a 28% drop in Cardano’s DEX volume since 9th December.

Read Cardano’s [ADA] Price Prediction 2023-24

Interestingly, the month so far has been marked by a surge in sales volume for the network’s non-fungible token (NFT) vertical.

AMBCrypto found that in the last 26 days, NFT sales on Cardano totaled $7.04 million, marking a 50% uptick from the $4.71 million recorded sales volume in November. 

Source: CryptoSlam