Cardano has been on the rise recently to the surprise of many in the space. Not only has the value of the digital asset gone up but the total value locked (TVL) on the network has also been surging. This comes off the back of a disappointing downtrend that saw ADA fall to $0.5. Nevertheless, the increase has been noticed by many and has led to speculations about why the network has been recording this uptick recently.
Why Is Cardano Up?
The launch of the Vasil hard fork has been drawing closer and with it has come more optimism for the network. More decentralized finance (DeFi) users are moving to the network, which has caused a significant uptick in activity. This coupled with the number of projects that are currently building on Cardano has been a recipe for success as there are currently about 1,000 projects being built on the network and more than 2,780 smart contracts have been deployed.
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The rate at which projects are being developed on the network has shocked even founder Charles Hoskinson who expressed surprise at a new project that launched on the network known as Genius X. The DeFi project had seen more than $105 million locked in its ISPO which is being used to help accelerate projects on the blockchain.
ADA trading at $0.51 | Source: ADAUSD on TradingView.com
The Cardano founder had tweeted that the network is getting too big and he may be right. Cardano has seen new wallets being added to the network at an accelerated rate, with new wallets per day averaging 2,000 and more than 100,000 wallets added alone in the last month.
All of this in the first half of the year has propelled more faith in the network. This is evidenced by the volume of transactions on the network which continues to average over 110,000 transactions per day.
ADA On The Charts
The Vasil hard fork mentioned above has been a big push for more projects to onboard on the Cardano network. It was announced that the hard fork may be coming sooner than expected by a developer on the Mutant Apes project which is domiciled on the Cardano blockchain. They revealed that the public testnet launch will happen on June 2nd and mainnet launch will happen on the 29th of June.
Cardano Vasil hard fork will be available on public Testnet on June 2nd (Mainnet planned for June 29th) and here is my take of its benefits from an @epoch_art perspective ?
— glneto (@glneto_) May 23, 2022
Their announcement had been followed by a rally in the price and TVL on the network. On Monday, ADA had grown more than 5% in value and so had the TVL. TVL had grown from $130 million on May 22nd to $137.69 million on May 23rd. The value of the digital asset had then grown to $0.55 before losing its footing once more.
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Cardano is not yet a top contender in the DeFi space compared to other networks. However, the popularity of the network has been a great boost for developers to bring their projects to the blockchain.
Featured image from The Cryptoknowmist, chart from TradingView.com
