Smart contract network Cardano ($ADA) has been seeing its on-chain transaction volume rise steadily so far this year, to the point ADA’s weekly on-chain transaction volume has surged over 1,700% since late January.

According to popular on-chain analytics firm Santiment, despite Cardano’s “suppressed market value compared to its April local top,” utility is playing an important role in the rise of its on-chain transaction volume growth, and is being paired with “adequate ADA social dominance.”

Notably, last month Cardano whale wallets with a balance of 100,000 or more ADA have reached a 16-month high of 25,294, even as the cryptocurrency’s price dropped 35% from this year’s high to then trade at $0.28.

As CryptoGlobe reported, Cardano has recently come in third place in terms of development activity, behind the “blockchain of blockchains” Polkadot ($DOT) and its public pre-production environment Kusama ($KSM), according to Santiment.

The term “development activity” refers to the amount of work completed by a cryptocurrency project’s developers on the project’s public GitHub repositories within the past 30 days.

In a post Ali shared on the microblogging platform X (formerly known as Twitter), he observed that the price of Cardano’s native token ADA traded between $0.10 and $0.028 for 665 days between 2018 and 2020, before seeing a 2,985% price surge after taking off from the long accumulation phase.

Drawing parallels from that time, Martinez noted that ADA now “seems trapped in the $0.46 to $0.24 range” for 329 days now. He noted that if history and price action can be indicators, it’s possible ADA will break out around February 2024.

Santiment has also noted that the native token of the XRP Ledger, $XRP, has been seeing a significant growth in its on-chain volume, to the point it recently reached its highest level since February as the protocol’s ecosystem development activity rises.

According to Santiment data, XRP has seen substantial increases in key metrics at the start of the month. Specifically, the on-chain transaction volume reached 4.8 billion XRP, while the circulating supply hit 2.03 billion XRP. The development activities for XRP, which ranks as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, have also seen a significant boost.

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