Cardano at a crucial juncture: What it means for ADA

• Developers continued to focus on the Marlowe smart contracts tool.
• Cardano’s development activity ebbed over the past week.

Cardano [ADA], one of the largest proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, experienced a strong rebound in DeFi activity in 2023 after emerging from the depths of the 2022 bear market.

Since the start of the year, Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) tripled in value to $210 million at press time. As per DeFiLlama, Cardano was one of the best performing chains in the last 30 days, logging a growth rate of 12.55%.

Source: DeFiLlama

Cardano’s DeFi achievements provided sufficient boost to native token ADA, which rose by 3.61% over the past week and exchanged hands at $0.3776 at the time of writing, data from CoinMarketCap showed.

A big factor spurring Cardano’s mainstream adoption was the work put in by its pool of developers.

Summary of the development report

Cardano published the latest edition of its weekly development report on 2 June, highlighting key technological enhancements over the past week.

The most notable among them was the launch of Marlowe, a new smart contract creation tool set on the mainnet. Apart from this, the team worked on the deployment of Marlowe Playground along with the GetContract query & automated end-to-end test scenarios.

Marlowe Playground is a tool to simulate and verify smart contracts in a testing environment.

What’s going down on #Cardano? Check out this week’s development update on #EssentialCardano and stay abreast of all the latest developments in core technology, wallets and services, smart contracts, scaling, governance, and more.https://t.co/SkQcG07JnU

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) June 2, 2023

The core technology team worked on the upcoming node v.8.1.0, which will introduce improvements like more Conway era support, epoch boundary optimizations, and new network packages. Additionally, the ledger team made progress in the Conway ledger era.

On the scaling front, the Hydra team held their monthly review meeting and improved benchmarks and  version reporting. The Mithril team, on the other hand, finished upgrading the Cardano node in the Mithril networks to version 8.0.0.

Hydra and Mithril are part of Cardano’s ambitious Basho roadmap, focused on improving the scalability and interoperability of the network.

Meanwhile, things progressed on the Volatire era as discussions took place on the minimal viable governance (MVG) framework for participatory governance. A change to Cardano’s on-chain governance system is proposed in CIP 1694, which has Voltaire’s birth year as its name.

How much are 1,10,100 ADAs worth today?

ADA has these concerns

Surprisingly, Cardano’s development activity ebbed over the past week, sparking concerns over the timelines of the aforementioned upgrades. Investors in the cryptocurrency field are often drawn to networks that have a healthy development ecosystem.

Moreover, ADA’s weighted sentiment, which spiked presumably because of Marlowe launch, fell back into negative territory. However, with a bullish ADA trajectory, investors could start betting on the token again.

Source: Santiment