Cardano's had a rough 2022 until now, up 34%
in the last month, 26% in the last week.
If you're a Cardano holder, you're
likely thinking it's about time.
But this doesn't mean that we're without questions like
why did this pump all of a sudden happen?
How long will this last?
And what does Cardano have in
store for the rest of 2022?
Well, it appears Cardano is
following a logical sequence.
If we Zoom out a bit to their three month chart,
we can see that a price spike happened in mid January.
That might feel a little bit random,
but the cause is dApp activity.
In the case of January, that
was the launch of SundaeSwap.
Cardano saw a quick run up in price before tumbling quite
a bit lower along with the rest of the market.
As unexciting as the price action was afterwards, that spike
in price was still very significant because it showed to
the world that Cardano can support a DEX.
Of course, not without a few
bugs, but a DEX nevertheless.
The good thing about negative price action
is it doesn't mean developers stop building.
Sure, they probably aren't as stoked about
building on a blockchain that's decreasing in
price, but that's just crypto.
When you're up, you're really up.
When you're down, you're really down.
But they're still building.
So we have that January spike and proof of concept,
followed by this kind of pit of despair, and now
we're seeing significant gains again from that pit.
So what exactly is the cost?
Well, it turns out Cardano saw a huge spike in TVL.
That's Total Value Locked, basically
money deposited within the ecosystem.
A higher TVL means it's actually being used.
Now the questions are how high is
the TVL compared to other projects?
And why the sudden spike? First, the numbers.
Thanks to DeFiLlama, we can take a look at all the
top blockchains and see the total value locked on each chain so
we can get a better analysis of what's going on.
Checking out Cardano's TVL chart for the last
month, we can see an explosion of growth.
This is a wonderful sign, but
it doesn't tell the entire story.
To better understand this, we need
to compare different chains to Cardano.
Ethereum is by far the largest in TVL, followed
by Terra and then the Binance Smart chain.
In order to find Cardano, we have to scroll
down quite a bit, down to 27th place.
Here we can see Cardano has over $300 million in TBL,
much, much higher than it was even a month ago.
And now you might be asking if Cardano
is a top ten crypto, why is it
TVL so much lower than many other chains?
And the simple answer would be that TVL
is only one piece of the puzzle
to determining value, you have general technology, marketing
partnerships, future upgrades and a million other criteria
all factored into the price of a crypto.
Now don't get me wrong, TVL is very important,
but Cardano is being given a bit of extra
benefit due to the other factors around its price
thanks to their partnerships and roadmap.
Now, if Cardano was still in 27th place a
year from now, that would be cause for concern.
So TVL is definitely a metric to keep an eye on.
Either way, this value locked is trending upwards,
so it means something changed in the network.
What is it?
Well, first in January we saw that initial bump
in TVL, thanks to the SundaeSwap launch.
Then a new DEX on Cardano called Minswap launched.
You might remember Minswap if you've been following Cardano
for a while because they were in the news
last August due to their testnet debacle.
What happened was they launched the testnet for their
dApp and surprise surprise, the prototype needed work, but
this caused kind of a media flurry at the
time and it turned out to be quite overblown.
I actually asked the founder in a video
about it, which I'll link in the description.
Either way, Minswap eventually fixed the issues and
had a successful full launch in 2022,
gobbling up more and more TVL for
itself and for the Cardano ecosystem.
But then they ran into another issue, a major one.
Just recently Minswap went into maintenance mode for
50 hours because there was a bug in
their smart contract that would have left Minswap
vulnerable to exploitation by a hacker.
All the ADA in their stakepool smart contracts could
have been drained and stolen - $200 million worth.
This would have been devastating
both for Minswap and Cardano.
So how in the world did this happen?
Well, Minswap, of course, wrote the
code and checked it over.
They then had the code audited as a standard practice.
Then they made the audits public and a
helpful entity absolutely saved the day by finding
the bug and then reporting it to Minswap
instead of just stealing the money.
Minswap has since fixed the
issue and no users were harmed.
Now, I read through some technical docs and
the bug basically would have allowed someone to
duplicate pool tokens and steal money.
The auditors somehow missed this and this really highlights
how new and insane this entire space is.
There's always brand new protocols popping up with exciting yields
and features, and it might just be best to wait
for others to be the guinea pig for you. Just in case.
You just never know.
As we're seeing here, even an audit can miss something.
And either way, that issue is now fixed and
Minswap actually holds more than 60% of the entire
TVL on Cardano, really flying past all other DEXes.
So TVL and the functionality of Cardano
are growing, helping to push up prices.
But that isn't the only reason we're
going to cover the other Cardano catalysts.
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Now let's do some rapid fire Cardano catalysts
that are helping to push up prices.
Grayscale just launched a new fund for smart contract
platforms, and it's revealed that Cardano is the largest
holding in the fund, making up more than 25%
of the entire fund, a sign that smart money
is really buying in on Cardano.
On top of this, Coinbase launched Cardano staking last
month, improving both the accessibility and giving even more
incentive for holders to hold long term.
In the week after Coinbase announced staking,
Cardano's price surged 10%, of course, due
to a combination of different exciting catalysts.
Now the rates for Coinbase are around 3.75% APY
with a lock up period.
If you want to stake your Cardano for 5% APY
and zero lockup period, check out the info in the
description for my stakepool, or you can visit stakewithmax.com.
Now, we have a couple more rapid fire
events before the biggest news of all,
there are several launches coming soon.
Cardax is launching the first
stablecoin on Cardano, Djed.
This launch is now scheduled for May.
ErgoDEX is launching their testnet on Cardano on
4th of April and Cardano is scheduled to get its
next hard fork upgrade, Vasil, in June.
Throughout the history of Cardano, hard forks
have been paired with very significant gains
in price, which we can see highlighted.
Thanks to Cardians on Twitter, the Vasil
upgrade will have a focus on scalability.
Now, if you're a geek, I'll have
the technical document linked in the description.
And if you don't really like Greek letters in
your math, all you really need to know is
that this upgrade will use a technique called
that will help Cardano bump up transaction speeds
while the network is building in popularity.
Now, to the last and arguably
most exciting update to Cardano.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more on this.
It's Milkomeda's official launch.
If you don't know what that means, don't worry.
I don't blame you.
What this means is Milkomeda has
officially made Cardano
Okay, basically what they've done is made it possible
for Ethereum dApps or programs to be ported over
to Cardano in a secure and easy way.
This is massive for a few reasons.
First, it opens up Cardano to a potential flood
of new dApps to mess around with, but also
because one of the bigger complaints developers have about
Cardano is it has a tricky programming language Plutus.
This means developers familiar with Ethereum which most
are in the world of blockchain can build
in Ethereum's code and deploy it on Cardano.
As time goes on we'll see more
and more launches happen this way.
Overall, it's a very exciting time for Cardano who
decided to wake up from its winter nap.
However, this isn't all without saying that you
shouldn't always keep an eye on the projects
you're invested in and actually use them.
Things can change extremely quickly in crypto.
One of the most important aspects to me is
usability, if I use a blockchain and it's easy
and cheap I know others will likely think the
same and it will grow over time.
So keep an eye out for new Cardano dApps, test them
out, check in on TVL every once in a while and
see how Cardano compares to competitors now that their DEXes and
other dApps are finally getting up and running.
I can't say it enough, this is
such an exciting time for crypto.
There's so much changing and so many opportunities
opportunities to just learn and invest and that's
going to do it for today.
Next I highly recommend checking out this video
on screen that covers a fascinating deep dive
I did, I would like to thank you so much
for watching and I hope you have a profitable day!