Cardano, strong increase in the number of addresses

The number of addresses and user wallets on Cardano have been seeing a great increase over the last year. This article will discuss the reason behind this growth.

Reasons for the growth of Cardano addresses

Strong growth of wallets in the Cardano ecosystem

Despite a rather bearish outlook of the crypto markets, development hasn’t halted. In fact, many, including co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin, welcome the so-called Crypto Winter, as this means that developers and builders can continue to work without being distracted and pressured by the hype and exaggerated expectations that a bull market brings.

This development can be seen in the Github activity of the various projects, with Cardano being the most developed crypto project on GitHub in 2021 according to data compiled by CryptoRank and Santiment.

And of course all this development is starting to bear its fruits, with users creating new addresses to interact with Cardano’s novel DeFi landscape and NFT world.

Blooming DeFi on Cardano

It has been several months now that Cardano users have been able to perform yield farming on several DEXs, these include SundaeSwap, Minswap and the most recent one: Wingriders. The peculiarity of this last DEX is that users can continue earning staking rewards on their ADA while providing liquidity, thus earning from different streams of revenue.

There are several other highly anticipated DeFi projects which aim to launch later this year, perhaps following the upcoming Vasil hard fork scheduled for the end of June, which is expected to improve the network and its smart contract capabilities. 

Some of the eagerly awaited projects include:

• Liqwid, an interest rate protocol built for lenders, borrowers and developers
• Ardana, a decentralized stablecoin hub
• Djed, a crypto-backed algorithmic stablecoin
• Genius Yield, an AI-powered Smart Liquidity Management protocol
• Maladex, a DEX that claims to have solved impermanent loss

Cardano NFTs on the rise

Another contributor to the growth of Cardano addresses is the exploding NFT space. The Cryptonomist has indeed started the Cardano NFT Column where projects are invited to share their stories, giving an update from within the Cardano community.

Taking a look at data from opencnft there are over 5000 NFT projects on Cardano with a volume of 58 million ADA (equivalent to $40 million) over the last 30 days across over 10 NFT marketplaces, with the leading one being jpg.store.

Seeing the recent astronomical gas fees on Ethereum due to the BAYC land sale, NFT enthusiasts are beginning to explore alternatives that are cheaper, more scalable and more environmentally friendly, with Cardano being one such alternative.

This was certainly the case of Snoop Dogg and his son, aka Champ Medici, who have collaborated with Cardano NFT project Clay Nation to bring iconic clay animations, land pitches and unlockable music content to Cardano.