Cardano (ADA) DeFi TVL Jumped 166% in Q4 2023: Report

A newly released Cardano protocol’s Q4 report detailed some of the milestones that the Proof-of-Stake blockchain registered in the last three months of 2023 featuring among many others, a huge Total Value Locked (TVL) jump.

Cardano TVL: Impact of Established Protocols

Per the report from Messari, Cardano’s TVL had a quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase of 166% and a year-over-year (YoY) jump of 693%. According to a post on X, Messari highlighted that the significant boost in its ecosystem resulted from association with more established protocols like Indigo and Minswap. 

Notably, Indigo, a decentralized tokenization platform is a newer protocol on Cardano compared to Minswap, one of the pioneering Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) in the ecosystem.

With the huge jump in Cardano TVL, the Layer-1 protocol moved from the 34th position that it occupied at the beginning of the year to around the 11th position. There was also serious growth in stablecoin TVL as there was a 37% increase in QoQ and 673% YoY. 

Additionally, Cardano’s native token ADA also experienced a massive price gain of 127.2% QoQ. A figure such as this pushed ADA beyond the broad crypto market’s cumulative increase, which came in at only 53.8%. This Q4 increase eventually summed up the YoY change in ADA’s price to 145.2%. 

In actual figures, Cardano’s price at the start of October 2023 was $0.254, a figure that rose to $0.6019 on January 31, 2023.

The Balanced Cardano Ecosystem

ADA did not arrive at this milestone without facing some obstacles. In November, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) declared that the coin is a security in an enforcement action against Kraken. This was alongside other assets like SOL, ATOM, and NEAR. 

In this lawsuit, ADA saw an almost insignificant price volatility for a short while before recovering. At the moment, ADA’s market price is $0.5775 after surging by 6.61% in the last 24 hours.

Generally, the Cardano ecosystem has had other improvements and upgrades in the last few months, thanks to its vibrant developer ecosystem. The Cardano Hydra team has been working on version 0.15.0. and so far, significant progress has been made. The team is working on smoke tests and website publishing workflows. The Mithril team also engaged in the release of the initial version of the Mithril client NPM package. 

A few weeks ago, Cardano made a strategic investment in Blockfrost API geared towards its push for decentralization.