Cardano's weekly development update has interesting insights for traders

• Cardano’s weekly development report highlighted efforts made by developers over the last week.
• On-chain performance remained decent, and price action turned bullish. 

Cardano’s [ADA] development activity took a back seat for the majority of last week as it went sideways. However, the graph managed to register a spike on 16 March, after which it once again declined. 

Well, it’s important to notice that Cardano recently posted its weekly development report. Therein, it was found that developers were working on a few projects that could help the ecosystem in scalability and security. No wonder why the development activity noted a brief spike on 16 March.

What’s going down on #Cardano?

Check out this week’s development update on #EssentialCardano and stay abreast of all the latest developments in core technology, wallets and services, smart contracts, and scaling and governance. https://t.co/nH0oRj86dC

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) March 17, 2023

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Read Cardano’s Price Prediction 2023-24

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Cardano developers occupied

As per the report, Lace desktop development was still ongoing, the team enhanced the error handling of CIP-30 DApps activities and also corrected issues with signing CIP-30 transactions with hardware wallets.

The Plutus team continued to work on the Marconi MVP and established a separate repository for it while also reviewing and implementing Marconi notifications.

Cardano’s Hydra team addressed issues with committing complex UTXOs into a Hydra head and prepared the Hydra node to support the mainnet.

However, the Marlowe team made significant improvements to the golden tests for the Marlowe validator to make them more comprehensive.

In addition to that, the Mithril team completed the final milestones required to make the Mithril beta version available on the mainnet.

With the first adaptation of the stake pool store, the team issued a new 2310.0 distribution that enables the era switch mechanism while also beginning to implement the conversion of the aggregator stores to a relational design.

Key metrics show a spike

The report highlighted that the total number of native tokens in the Cardano network was about to reach 8 million soon. It also mentioned that the total number of transactions reached 63 million, while the number of projects building on Cardano touched 1,213. 

ADA’s funding rate remained relatively up last week, suggesting higher demand from the derivatives market. ADA also managed to remain one of the preferred choices for whales as it made it to the list of the top 10 most purchased tokens among the 500 biggest BCS whales.

Meanwhile, Santiment’s chart also reflected whales’ interest in ADA as the whale transaction count remained consistently high. 

On the other hand, ADA’s daily active addresses registered an increase last week, which suggested higher usage of the network. However, its velocity declined, indicating less token movement between addresses.

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ADA’s decent on-chain performance was also reflected in its price action, which significantly supported the bulls.

According to CoinMarketCap, ADA’s price increased by more than 11% in the last seven days. At press time, it was trading at $0.3529 with a market capitalization of over $12.2 billion.