Cardano‘s native token ADA has been creating wonders on its price chart lately, despite the slump that the larger market is experiencing. The cryptocurrency has gained around 32.5% in valuation over the past week, compared to the leading Bitcoin’s mere 2% gain.
Interestingly, ADA’s price gain has been accompanied by a surge in its transaction volumes as well, which crossed that of Ethereum on 17 January. According to data by Messari, Cardano momentarily became the number two blockchain in terms of 24-hours transaction volume after it processed around $7.02 billion, compared to Ethereum’s $5.41 billion.
This led to Cardano founder Hoskinson commenting on Twitter, he said it was just the beginning of Cardano’s success over the remaining year.
Just getting started Lark, it’s just January https://t.co/ToJ923QOAk
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 17, 2022
What’s more, the surge in transaction volume did not necessarily mean a high gas fee for the network as is the case for Ethereum. The surge in on-chain activity has not had a negative impact on Cardano’s network fee, which has dropped from $0.45 to $0.38 on average. In comparison, Ethereum has an average gas fee of around $26 per transaction.
While Cardano had surpassed Ethereum, the brief overtake in volume could be seen as an indication of the network’s growing adoption following a period of severe criticism. Several other milestones were also crossed by the network recently, which could be supporting its price growth further.
For instance, the network has completed 20 million ADA-USD transactions in over 1,500 days of operations without any downtime, according to a report by Nasdaq. The report added that wallets holding the token had also crossed the one million mark recently. Active addresses on the network have gone up drastically from 35,440 in February last year to currently 221,675, according to Glassnode.
The sudden surge in on-chain activity could be attributed to the host of announcements made by the network recently. This includes the launch of many much-awaited dApps- Pavia, Cardano’s metaverse, and NFT gaming project, whose recent launch has generated much buzz within the community.
Moreover, Cardano’s development arm IOHK also unveiled the protocol’s scaling plans for 2022 in preparation for a further surge in traffic. It was revealed earlier this week that Cardano had entered the Basho stage in its roadmap, which will focus on improving scaling and interoperability. Well, changes can be expected in the block size, along with Plutus script and node enhancements, among others.
All these developments have been further exuberated by the planned launch of the Cardano-based SundaeSwap DEX later this week. The exchange has been in the pipeline for long and its release will mark the release of Cardano’s first native DEX.
