What new Cardano [ADA] data tells us about whale activity

Cardano has been an integral part of the blockchain technology space since its launch in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson. It’s one of the most promising protocols that continues to reach new milestones. Although the project lacked use cases in the first four years, 2022 saw Cardano reach new milestones.

This comes at the back of completing of the Alonzo Hard Fork upgrade in September 2021.

Bring it on

Crypto intelligence firm IntoTheBlock reported that the number of large transactions on the Cardano blockchain hiked by more than 50x this year. The volume of on-chain transactions >$100k, i.e. large transaction volume (LTV) increased from 1.35 billion ADA per day to 69 billion ADA (worth $81.4 billion) on 28 March.

Source: IntoTheBlock

In a 29 March tweet, the firm said that such a high volume indicated “increasing institutional demand.”

In fact, the total value locked in Cardano’s DeFi protocols stood at $300.56 million as per DefiLlama. While only seven DApps appear on DefiLlama currently, co-founder Charles Hoskinson said many more were expected following due to a hard fork expected later this year.

Two protocols (MiniSwap and MuesliSwap) stood out in the last days towards the end of March.

Santiment picked up on similar network activity. The behavioral analytics platform recorded a 1.7% increase in the number of whales on the Cardano network.

Source: Santiment

Roughly new 42 addresses hold 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 ADA created following this uptick. Such whales holding between $1.2 million and $12 million in ADA, the sudden spike in buying pressure could translate into millions of dollars.

Any problems?

Well, with every milestone, there are some setbacks that the protocol did suffer in the past and even now. Firstly, only 34% of addresses are ‘in the money’ while 55% are ‘out of the money’.

Source: ITB

In fact, Cardano’s native token, ADA suffered a fresh 1.5% correction in 24 hours. At press time, it was trading below the $1.2 mark as per CoinMarketCap.

Despite the growth of Cardano this year, the network’s TVL still pales in comparison to that of its layer-1 competitors in DeFi such as Ethereum and Solana.