Cardano’s Recent TVL Surge Is Just The Beginning

It’s no secret that Cardano’s TVL has been surging the past couple of months. Charles Hoskinson says that this is just the beginning of Cardano’s rise in the DeFi space, and here’s why. 

Covered:

• Why Cardano’s Recent TVL Surge Is Only The Beginning
• The Vasil Hardfork
• Cardano’s TVL Hits ATH

Why Cardano’s Recent TVL Surge Is Only The Beginning

Total value locked (or TVL) is an important metric for indicating how healthy a protocol is, and is defined by the spot value of all assets that are staked in a protocol. Recently, in the past couple of months, Cardano’s TVL has been surging. Although the rise in TVL of $ADA was somewhat expected (because of the release of SundaeSwap and other DeFi protocols), Charles Hoskinson says this is just the beginning, and we can expect to see even a higher surge in Cardano’s TVL this summer.

What most also don't understand is that many Cardano DApps are waiting for the Vasil hardfork in June to launch to benefit from pipelining. So it seems we ain't seen nothing yet on TVL https://t.co/mMHxwRrF96

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) March 12, 2022

The Vasil Hardfork

Why will the Vasil Hardfork implementation continue to push Cardano’s TVL to the top and what is it?

The Vasil hardfork is planned to launch in June and is named after after Vasil Dabov, a Hungarian mathematician who was a member of the Cardano community and was particularly influential to Hoskinson himself.

According to Charles, the Vasil hardfork “is going to bring in a lot of the Plutus improvements that people like the CDA recommend and what we’ve learned with working with Plutus developers” This will allow major projects like light wallets to move forward, and other dApps too. Therefore, with more dApps and protocols actually being able to function on Cardano, there is no doubt that Cardano’s TVL will continue to rise.

Cardano’s TVL Hits ATH

Defi Llama takes into account all methods of staking in a protocol, including liquidity pools, borrowing, staking by the treasury, and so on. It also shows what projects are contributing to TVL, and the dominance of the most influential project (in terms of TVL). Per data from DeFi Llama, Cardano is currently near an all time high of just over $264 million.

There are two interesting aspects to note about Cardano’s TVL. The first being that SundaeSwap’s dominance has decreased about 40 % in a month, but has increased its TVL by over 20 % this past month. That essentially means that SundaeSwap is still growing despite hitting major milestones and still contributing to TVL, but other projects are beginning to contribute even more to TVL, resulting in a continuation of Cardano’s TVL surge.

It’s easy to think of the crypto space as a whole with this comparison. At its inception, Bitcoin dominance was extremely high (actually 100 % for a while), but as the space grew as a whole, Bitcoin dominance continued to drop, which overall was healthy for crypto. With that being said, the fall of SundaeSwap’s dominance only means that other Cardano dApps and protocols are starting to contribute more to TVL.

Secondly, and speaking to Charles point in the above tweet, most projects in the Cardano ecosystem aren’t even contributing to TVL yet. This can be directly measured by examining how many projects are contributing to TVL, and how many projects are planned or currently being worked on in the Cardano Ecosystem. Currently, there are only six projects in the Cardano ecosystem contributing to TVL. When looking at other chains that are ranked highest on DeFi Llama, there are tens, and even hundreds of projects/protocols contributing to their TVL’s.