As Cardano Foundation pointed out on Tuesday (February 1), the Cardano platform’s Total Value Locked (TVL) — i.e. the total amount of funds locked in Cardano’s DeFi protocols — increased by over 9,000% last month as the highly anticipated DEX SundaeSwap went live on the mainnet.
Cardano Foundation is “an independent Swiss-based non-profit that oversees and supervises the advancement of Cardano.” It is the legal custodian of the Cardano brand and it collaborates with IOG and EMURGO to “ensure that Cardano is being developed and promoted as a secure, transparent, and accountable solution for positive global change.” Cardano Foundation “sets the direction for decentralized economic empowerment, working with regulators in different jurisdictions to shape blockchain legislation and commercial standards, and empowering the Cardano community to leverage the Cardano protocol to solve real-life problems.”
According to Binance Academy, Total Value Locked (TVL) for a DeFi protocol is the aggregate amount of funds locked into that protocol. For instance, “the TVL locked in Ethereum projects is typically measured in ETH or USD.”
In this article, by Cardano’s TVL, what we mean is the total amount of funds (in USD) locked into all of Cardano’s various DeFi protocols that are running on the Cardano mainnet.
As you can see from the chart below by DeFi Llama, in January 2022, Cardano’s TVL increased from $822,261 at the beginning of January to $74,890,000, which means a jump of around 9,007%.
The huge spike in Cardano’s TVL that you see January 20 (when the TVL was $3,227,583) is due to the launch of Cardano-powered DEX SundaeSwap on the mainnet on that day.
SundaeSwap was not the first Cardano DEX to launch on the mainnet. That honor belongs to MuesliSwap, which launched on the mainnet on 26 November 2021.
However, despite not being first, SundaeSwap is by far the most popular DEX on the Cardano platform, and currently (as of 11:30 a.m. UTC on February 2) its dominance is around 94.47%.
Yesterday, Cardano Foundation sent out a series of tweets to tell the Cardano community about its January 2022 roundup of Cardano on-chain stats.
In particular, it pointed out that January’s “significant increase in Total Value Locked was a result of #DeFi protocols being added to the Cardano blockchain.”
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