The total value locked on Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has recently reached a new milestone above the 600 million $ADA mark, with the amount of the network’s native tokens locked on DeFi applications having tripled since the beginning of the year.
According to data from DeFi tracking and analytics service DeFiLlama, the total value locked on Cardano, represented in U.S. dollars, is close to $180 million, up from around $49 million at the beginning of the year. In terms of ADA, however, it was briefly above 600 million tokens and is now close to that mark after a short drop.
Decentralized exchange Minswap is leading on Cardano in terms of total value locked, with $48 million worth of digital assets on the platform. It’s followed by Indigo, a collateralized debt protocol, with $39.3 million in total value locked.
Most protocols built on top of the Cardano ecosystem with a significant amount of total value locked are either lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, or collateralized debt protocols which also include the Djed Stablecoin.
The TVL on Cardano has been steadily growing so far this year. As CryptoGlobe reported in February, at the time, the value locked on Cardano’s DeFi protocols had doubled from the beginning of the year, to reach the $100 million mark.
As CryptoGlobe reported, data has shown that large ADA token holders, colloquially known as whales and sharks, 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.
These addresses, 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.
Interest from 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.
Featured image via Unsplash.
