Cardano’s Ada Token trading volume exploded recently, with daily figures exploding in February, an average of around $720 million, exceeding the average of $1.4 billion in March.
The rise was spurred by social media posts by US President Donald Trump. He said the ADA is one of the tokens included in the country’s strategic cryptographic reserves.
While Cardano enjoys the moments of mainstream attention, the Layer-1 blockchain has quietly emerged as a crypto juggernaut since its release in late 2017.
Recruitment indicators
The ADA token has a market capitalization of $25.6 billion, but what’s more noticeable lies under the hood. Google’s data shows that the Cardano blockchain has over 5 million unique wallets and 1.3 million delegators, creating thousands of new wallets per day.
Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard believes that Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard believes the metrics are being highlighted by the Crypto community, but the blockchain has a total of $329 million locked (TVL).
Instead, he points to “non-value transactions” related to people carrying out real-world activities on blockchain rails. Cardano is a breeding ground for such activities, he said.
“I’m fighting to make sure 50% of my activities are non-value transactions,” Gregaard told Coindesk.
One example of this was a partnership with Cardano, where the Cardano community donated more than 1 million ada tokens to Kenya and planted 1 million mangrove trees in Kenya, each donation being verified and tracked on the blockchain.
Last week, the Cardano Foundation also announced a contract with Serpro, Brazil’s largest state-owned IT company, to accelerate the adoption of blockchain in South America. SERPRO processes 33 billion transactions per year for 90% of the Brazilian federal government. Additionally, 8,000 employees will also receive blockchain training.
Cardano’s perspective differs from many of the Layer 2 networks like Solana and the Base that takes pride in hype-driven movements like Memecoins and Nonfungible Tokens (NFTS).
Solana’s TVL rose from $2.2 billion to over $10 billion in 2024, while Cardano went from a modest $445 million to $537 million to $500 million in the same period.
Cardano’s defi
The CEO of the Cardano Foundation says his focus is on real-world use cases, but blockchain still boasts a bustling defi ecosystem beneath the surface.
Minswap is a native distributed exchange (DEX) of Cardano. Data from Defillama said the cumulative trading volume reached $3.4 billion this month, nearly recorded in December alone.
There are also many lending protocols, including LiqWid, Lenfi and Optim Finance, with Cardano’s overall lending division having over $116 million in TVL.
However, he argues that a key part of Gregaard’s mission is not to exceed the 50% level of financialised transactions. He believes it is in line with the Cardano Foundation’s non-profit spirit, even though it limits the potential exponential growth of hyped movements like Memecoin.
Cardano Foundation vs Hoskinson vs Emulgo
That spirit has its own challenges as the blockchain is run by three major entities, and is run by the Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson’s IOG and Emurgo. The latter two are commercial businesses and can cause friction between them and the foundation.
“Having a nonprofit organization was being able to optimize decisions based on a decade, which is different from optimizing decisions for tomorrow,” added Gregaard.
Part of the friction was highlighted in December by anonymous Cardano community members. He detailed how the entity running Cardano turned out to be in Loggerhead.
“The recent burst of CF’s activities is part of a bigger strategic play: an attempt to undermine Charles, IOG, intersections and the broader governance roadmap,” the email reads.
“It’s been a long and difficult road, but I agree with some of the whistleblower feelings,” Hoskinson wrote in response to X.
But Gregard was more diplomatic about the potential rift.
“There is no currency exchange between us, but we work very closely,” he said.
“We sometimes go to (meetings) and share booths. So we come together and we sponsor the booths together. That’s the closest you can get to any affiliate.
“On the contrary, we (the Cardano Foundation) are the umbrella of community and blockchain responsibility. That is, we are people who interact with the SEC, CSDC and FMA, and I negotiated MICA with the European Parliament.”
