Cardano’s total value locked or TVL recorded a new all-time high (ATH) of 601,9 million ADA deposited in its DeFi protocols.
The growth of Cardano's DeFi ecosystem has accelerated in 2023. Since Cardano developers enabled smart contracts on the scientific blockchain, through the Alonzo update that was launched in September 2021, the development of this blockchain has taken a rather interesting direction.
Cardano now ranks as the 13th largest decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem with $178,7 million in TVL.
But that's not all, the network has just marked a new all-time high, or ATH, recording 601,92 million ADA, the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain, locked in the smart contacts of its decentralized protocols.
According to data from the DeFi Llama platform, Cardano's DeFi ecosystem is made up of 24 decentralized protocols, the most important of which, in terms of TVL, is Minswap, which blocks more than 160 million ADA in its smart contracts.
Cardano's TVL has tripled this year
As seen on the DeFi Llama chart, the number of ADA deposited into Cardano smart contracts has accelerated this year.
By early January, Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem had just over 200 million ADA deposited, representing a 300% year-to-date growth in just seven months.
Source: DeFi Llama
Cardano's unprecedented growth this year is driven primarily by the constant development and innovation of its ecosystem.
Since Cardano opened the doors to smart contracts and decentralized applications, developers have released a large number of updates and improvements to optimize the network, allowing creators to access new tools to create more innovative products and services and offering users a wider range of digital solutions.
New developments on Plutus, Hydra, Mithril and more
The technical development report Cardano this week saw developers report several major advancements and improvements in building the scientific blockchain, such as the implementation of Posthog and Trezor wallet support. Lace, decentralized governance support in Plutus, bug fixes in the ecosystem of tools and programming languages Marlowe and the implementation of new features in Hydra to enable reading protocol parameters via the API.
- Cardano also completed the beta launch of the Mithril protocol, which is about to be launched on the Cardano mainnet to improve the speed, security and decentralization of the network.
Cardano developers are also continuing to work on improving the overall capabilities of the blockchain, such as performance, scalability, reliability, and transparency.
5 years without interruptions
The Cardano blockchain was launched in 2017 and has not seen any interruptions so far. As of July 31, this blockchain had accumulated 2.130 days of uninterrupted operation on the web, despite the catastrophic events of 2022 and the uncertainty surrounding the crypto industry.
One of the reasons behind Cardano’s impeccable stability and performance is its scientific approach, which is the first blockchain to be built based on research and peer review.
