The total value of assets locked in the Cardano decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has reached an all-time high of 417.7 million ADA.
At the start of 2023, Cardano’s TVL was around $50M. In less than 6 months, it has tripled to break the $150M mark but is still well below its $300M all-time high.
Decentralized exchange (DEX) Minswap has become the dominant DeFi protocol on Cardano, accounting for $55.7 million of total TVL.
Second place went to the non-custodial protocol of synthetic assets Indigo, with $29.67 million locked in its smart contracts. Over the past week, the TVL of these two platforms has grown by 10.55% and 8.35%, respectively.
Another exchange, WingRiders, comes in third with $15.61 million, while Cardano’s super-backed algorithmic stablecoin Djed has a TVL of $13.75 million. Lending platform Liquid closes the top five with $11.97 million.
Protocols such as Aada and FluidTokens have also grown significantly in the last seven days.
Over 1,000 smart contracts have been deployed on the Cardano network since the beginning of the year.
According to Lookerstudio, over 1,000 Plutus V1 smart contracts have been deployed on the Cardano blockchain since the beginning of 2023. However, the level of developer activity is still far behind Ethereum, where more than 100,000 smart contracts are launched every week.
Analysts suggest that the recent Ethereum network congestion and high gas tariffs may push more users towards cheaper alternatives like Cardano. After the memcoin craze, the price of gas hit a 10-month high as more traders looked to profit from the sale of the hype tokens.
What happens to the price of ADA
Despite the growth of network activity and TVL, the native blockchain token ADA is going through hard times. Over the past 30 days, the price of the asset has dipped by about 10% and is $0.364 at the time of writing.