Trading volumes for Cardano’s ADA token have exploded of late with daily figures averaging around $720 million in February while exceeding an average of $1.4 billion in March.

This rise was spurred by a social media post by U.S. President Donald Trump, who mentioned ADA as one of the tokens that would be included in the nation’s strategic crypto reserve.

Although Cardano is enjoying its moment of mainstream attention, the layer-1 blockchain has been quietly emerging as a crypto juggernaut since it went live in late 2017.

Adoption metrics

The ADA token has a market cap of $25.6 billion but what’s more notable is what’s under the hood; data from Google shows that the Cardano blockchain has more than 5 million unique wallets and 1.3 million delegators, with thousands of new wallets being created per day.

The blockchain also has $329 million in total value locked (TVL), although Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard believes that metric is overemphasized by crypto communities.

Instead, he points to “non-value transactions” associated with people conducting real-world – albeit non-financial – activities on blockchain rails: Minting a decentralized ID, tracking metadata, recording documents, that sort of thing. Cardano’s a hotbed of such activity, he said.

“I’m fighting to ensure that 50% of the activity is a non-value transaction,” Gregaard told CoinDesk.

One example of this is Cardano’s partnership with Veritree, which saw the Cardano community donate over 1 million ADA tokens to plant 1 million mangrove trees in Kenya, with each donation verified and tracked on the blockchain.

Last week, the Cardano Foundation also announced a deal with SERPRO — Brazil’s largest state-owned IT company – to accelerate blockchain adoption in South America. SERPRO processes 33 billion transactions annually for 90% of Brazil’s federal administration. Additionally, 8,000 employees will also receive blockchain training.

Cardano’s perspective differs from the likes of Solana and the slew of layer-2 networks like Base that pride themselves on total value locked (TVL) and hype-driven movements like memecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

TVL on Solana grew from $2.2 billion to more than $10 billion in 2024, Cardano meanwhile zipped from a modest $445 million to $537 million in the same period.

DeFi on Cardano

Whilst Cardano Foundation’s CEO said his focus is on real-world use cases, the blockchain still boasts a bustling DeFi ecosystem under the surface.

Minswap is Cardano’s native decentralized exchange (DEX). Its cumulative trading volume hit $3.4 billion this month with December alone notching a near-record $271 million, DefiLlama data shows.

There are also a number of lending protocols including Liqwid, Lenfi and Optim Finance, with TVL across Cardano’s lending sector exceeding $116 million.

But the key part of Gregaard’s mission, he insists, is not to exceed that 50% level for financialized transactions. He sees it as staying in line with the Cardano Foundation’s non-profit ethos, even if it limits potential exponential growth of hype-fueled movements like memecoins.

Cardano Foundation vs Hoskinson vs Emurgo

Fulfilling that ethos has its own challenges, mostly because the blockchain is run by three main entities: the Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson’s IOG and Emurgo. The latter two are commercial businesses, which can cause friction between them and the foundation.

“The intent of having a non-profit was that you can optimize decision-making based on 10 years, it’s different than if you optimize decision-making tomorrow,” Gregaard added.

Some of the friction was highlighted by an anonymous Cardano community member in December, who penned an email on a path forward and detailed how the entities running Cardano were at loggerheads.

“CF’s recent burst of activity is part of a larger strategic play—an attempt to undermine Charles, IOG, Intersect, and the broader governance roadmap,” the email read.

“It’s been a long and difficult road, but I do agree with some of the sentiments of the whistleblower,” Hoskinson wrote in response on X.

Gregaard, however, was more diplomatic about any potential rift.

“There’s no monetary exchange going on between us, but we do work very closely together,” he said.

“We sometimes go to [a conference] and we share a booth. So we come together and we sponsor booths together, that’s the closest you will get to any affiliates, which is very different compared to both the Ethereum foundation or Tezos foundation, where they basically control the Treasury and control the disbursements.”

“On the flip side, we [Cardano Foundation] are the liability umbrella for the community and the blockchain, which means that we are the one who interacts with the SEC and the CSDC and the FMA, and I negotiated MICA with the European Parliament.”

Layer-2 network ZKsync has announced that it will be sunsetting the Ignite Program, which rewarded users for providing liquidity, due to bearish market conditions.

“After careful consideration, the DeFi Steering Committee (DSC) has decided to not renew Ignite for Season 2 and will be sunsetting the program starting March 17th, 2025 by turning off rewards for period 6,” ZKsync posted on X.

It added that the long-term vision is centered around the Elastic Network, which is composed of multiple chains within the ZKsync ecosystem.

“Unfortunately we’re navigating a bearish market right now. In line with many other ecosystems, ZKsync has decided to be more conservative with spend in the short to medium term in response to these evolving conditions,” it added. “To stay sustainable, we’re tightening our focus and spending smarter, rather than fighting headwinds.”

Total value locked (TVL) on ZKsync is down by around 50% since Jan. 30 as the wider crypto market is grappling with a correction that has seen bitcoin and ether lose 13% and 27% of their respective market caps in the past month.

ZKsync’s native token (ZK) has plunged by 35% in the same period.

Solana’s high staking rewards will live to inflate SOL another day.

A contentious effort to reform the blockchain network’s generous inflation regime flopped on Thursday after supporters of SIMD-0228 failed to garner the supermajority they needed to implement the major economic change.

The surprise result delivered a blow to the Solana power brokers who rallied to replace Solana’s static inflation mechanics with a market-based system. Their proposal likely would have cut the network’s 4.7% annual staking rewards down to 1% or less.

In a contest that pitted Solana’s influential leaders and investors – who claim the network’s high staking rewards are bad for SOL’s price – against small-time operators who feared the effects of a big cut to their revenue, the opposition rallied hardest on Thursday, as late-voting validators’ ballots broke heavily in favor of “no.”

That was enough to scuttle the first major attempt at lowering Solana’s uncommonly high staking emissions rate. Among the most valuable programmable blockchains by market cap, Solana issues comparatively large sums of new tokens to its validators, the computer operations that power proof-of-stake blockchains.

Much like election night in the U.S., SIMD-0228’s weeklong political circus featured betting, ranting, data threads, chart-reading wonkery, endless social media debates and more than a bit of heated name-calling. One validator put their votes up for sale. Many others split their tickets.

It crescendoed with a dramatic rush of ballots cast by many of Solana’s 1300 validators. In the end, the opposition won an exceptionally high turnout election that laid bare the divide between big and small validators.

In the end, SIMD-0228 became the network’s first economic reform to fail at the polls.

Little stakers

Solana validators are only called upon to vote when the network is grappling with a major economic change, said Jonny, the operator of the Solana Compass validator.

SIMD-0228 is the third ever such vote to appear in records by StakingFacilities.com (the current proposal went up for consideration with an unrelated SIMD that passed). Its controversies sparked the highest turnout vote in the network’s history.

Over 66% of validators cast votes, according to a dashboard from Flipside Crypto. Together they wielded 75% of the network’s voting power, a remarkable share given voting in this decentralized system is voluntary.

Of participating validators with 500,000 SOL or less, over 60% voted against SIMD-0228, per a Dune dashboard. Larger validators saw the exact opposite: of validators with more than 500,000 SOL, 60% voted in favor.

The lopsided results suggest opponents’ warnings of economic ruin struck a nerve with small-time validators.

Big Stakes

Proponents of SIMD-0228 believe it would have solved Solana’s inflation problem, which they claim drags down SOL’s price. Their thinking goes like this: fewer tokens means fewer sellers, and fewer in the hands of tax collectors, too.

In place of the network’s static 4.7% SOL emissions that validators receive annually, they called for a dynamic system that adjusts to nudge staking trends up or down

Opponents, meanwhile, called the proposal reckless and rushed. Some told CoinDesk they suspected its co-author, the influential investment company Multicoin Capital, had written it to favor its own interests. Others publicly warned SIMD-0228 would disrupt elements of Solana’s DeFi economy, or turn off institutional investors who they claimed were attracted to SOL’s native yield.

Some doomsayers even claimed SIMD-0228 would chip away at Solana’s decentralization by forcing hundreds of validators with small SOL stakes offline, though others dispute the size of the blow.

Solana validators make money based on how much SOL they’ve staked, either from their own coffers or from tokens delegated to them by others. Those with smaller stakes are more acutely exposed to changes in emissions than those with bigger operators.

“Many people feel like SIMD-0228 is not the best proposal to address inflation on Solana,” said SolBlaze, a validator operator.

“SIMD-0228 is a significant economic change, and changes on this scale deserve more time to discuss, analyze data, and iterate with feedback from different sectors of the ecosystem.”

Reformists aren’t going to give up the fight, said Max Resnick, one of the proposal’s co-authors and an economic researcher at Anza Labs.

“We are gonna chat with the no’s and come to a compromise,” he said.