The Cardano ($ADA) network has now processed over 30 million transactions in a milestone that comes shortly after the number of smart contracts on the network went over 1,000 for the first time.

According to Cardano blockchain insights shared on Google’s Data Studio, the Cardano network has now processed over 30.4 million transactions as the number of daily active addresses on the network varies between 150,000 and 200,000.

Notably, in the first eight days of this month, the Cardano blockchain has seen its number of transactions grow by nearly 900,000.

The price of ADA exploded last year with the rollout of the widely anticipated Alonzo hard fork, which brought in smart contracts into the network, allowing it to compete with other blockchains such as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL).

The Alonzo hard fork is part of the network’s “Goguen” era, named after Joseph Goguen, an American professor of computer science from the University of California and the University of Oxford. The Goguen era comes after the Shelley phase, in which Cardano became a decentralized blockchain and community members became validators.

With the rollout of smart contracts came a decentralized finance (DeFi) sector that has now grown to have nearly $100 million in total value locked, with most of the funds being locked on decentralized exchange SundaeSwap (SUNDAE).

The 30 million transaction milestone comes shortly after Cardano developer Input Output has proposed increasing the network’s block size by 11% from 72 KB to 80 KB after network load surged above 90%.

the cryptocurrency’s network load started surging between January 14 and 15, weeks after the launch of the network’s first usable DeFi application MuesliSwap, which went live after conducting an under-the-radar offering and got to over $1 million in total value locked in two days.

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