Institutional demand for Cardano (ADA) skyrockets as DeFi TVL surges past $300 million

• The Cardano blockchain is witnessing a strong surge in large transaction volumes (LTV) which has jumped 50x in three months.
• Furthermore, the DeFi TVL on Cardano has surged above $300 making a 39,000 percent increase year-to-date.

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One of the top-performing cryptocurrencies over the last two weeks has been Cardano (ADA). During this period the ADA price has surged by a strong 50 percent moving past $1.20 as of press time.

As per the report from crypto intelligence firm IntoTheBlock, the number of large transactions on the Cardano blockchain has shot up by 50x so far in 2022. Large Transaction Volume (LTV) are aggregated volumes from transactions above $100,000 on the Cardano blockchain.

As per IntoTheBlock, Cardano’s LTV has surged from 1.35 billion ADA per day to 69 billion ADA. This is a staggering 51-fold increase in a period of just three months. Interestingly, this also marks the highest volume levels since mid-2018.

The crypto intelligence firm refers to this as the “increased institutional demand” for Cardano’s ADA cryptocurrency. It also adds that other metrics like volatility and average transaction size remain fairly constant. But the total addresses on Cardano have increased. The year started with 3.4 million addresses, which has now grown to 5 million.

Also, the number of whales on the Cardano network has substantially increased. Popular crypto market analyst Ali Martinez writes:

The number of whales on the #Cardano network has increased by 1.7%. Roughly 42 addresses holding 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 $ADA were created since Mar. 21. The uptick may seem insignificant at first glance, but these whales hold between $1.2 million and $12 million in #ADA.

Cardano’s Defi TVL surpasses $300M

Post the Alonzo hardfork upgrade last year in September 2021, the Cardano blockchain has witnessed a steady in the number of decentralized applications (DApps) on the platform. As per data on DeFiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) has surged past $300 million.

This is a staggering 39,000 percent increase in Cardano’s DeFi TVL since the beginning of 2022. On January 1, 2022, the total value locked (TVL) on the Cardano blockchain was less than $1 million. This has now surged to a staggering $326 million.

The seven major DApp contributors in Cardano’s TVL are MiniSwap, ADAX Pro, MuesliSwap, SundaeSwap, MeowSwap, Meld, and vyFinance. Of them, two protocols – MiniSwap and MeusliSwap – have stood out in the last two days.

Earlier on Monday, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson gave a keynote address at Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai. Here, he spoke about the need for decentralization. Hoskinson said that we are entering a new era with Web 3.0. However, he cites the lack of leadership to make key decisions in the industry. The Cardano founder said:

If we’re truly decentralized, we have to somehow come together and figure this out. We have to write some sort of constitution for these things; we have to decide ‘What is the Bill of Rights for the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology?

Hoskinson further added: “There are two paths before us — one, we keep our integrity and we look to decentralization, find these things, understand these things. Or, two, we ignore it. In which case we’ll have custodians, we’ll have escort keys, highly centralized, highly optimized consensus algorithms that can be reset at any time”.