The total value locked on Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has recently hit a new all-time high of 336.8 million $ADA tokens, worth over $110 million at the time of writing. The total value locked on Cardano surged this year.
The largest decentralized finance protocol on the Cardano network is currently Minswap, which has a total value locked of over $40 million, representing over 36% of the total. The protocol is followed by WingRiders, Indigo, and the Djed stablecoin, which went live at the end of January.
According to data from DefiLlama, the total value locked on the Cardano network started 2023 at around $49 million, and has since surged to now be close to the $110 million mark. The rise can be partly attributed to Cardano’s price appreciation, as the cryptocurrency moved from around $0.25 at the beginning of the year to roughly $0.32 at the time of writing.
Notably, Cardano’s total value locked when measured in $ADA has also risen significantly, going from 198.6 million $ADA to 334.8 million at the time of writing.
Cardano is a smart contract hub with high throughput, making it a desirable option for developers seeking a scalable and secure platform. The protocol faces competition from rivals that include Solana ($SOL) and Avalanche ($AVAX), which themselves compete with the leading smart contract network Ethereum ($ETH).
In terms of total value locked Cardano lags significantly behind BNB Chain (BNB), which has a TVL worth $4.74 billion. Ethereum is the protocol to compete with, but first, Cardano needs to outpace other Ethereum killers and double down on its efforts to grow its DeFi economy across the board.
As CryptoGlobe reported, data shows that 80% of Cardano investors are in the red, 4% are at-the-money, or breaking even on their investments, and 16% are in-the-money, or sitting on unrealized gains.
Cardano’s supporters point out that the project has a strong development team and a solid roadmap for the future, which could make it a strong contender in the cryptocurrency space over the long term.
The cryptocurrency community expects Cardano to experience an upward movement during the month of March, at a time in which the cryptocurrency’s adoption keeps on growing.
According to over 1000 users on CoinMarketCap’s cryptocurrency price estimates, on average, respondents predicted that ADA would end the month of March trading at $0.3971 per token, up from around $0.3377 the cryptocurrency is currently trading for, or over 17% more.
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