Cardano's metaverse progress report: Late to the party, but...

Cardano, one of the most promising ecosystems, has witnessed an unprecedented rise since its inception. Just recently, on 29 March, the volume of ADA’s on-chain transactions greater than $100k increased by 50x in 2022 alone.

This depicted the surge in institutional demand.

Wait, there’s more

Cardano’s first Metaverse project reported over 22,000 landowners on the platform. Pavia, Cardano’s first Metaverse project, in a 1 April tweet, highlighted this development on the social media platform.

There are now over 22,000 unique wallet holders of https://t.co/lNyCpRhWGo Land NFTs which is amazing to see but remember you won’t need to own Land to visit, you may however want some $PAVIA to spend: https://t.co/DfRMkqtEO7 price tracking inbound. #Cardano #Metaverse #Liquidity pic.twitter.com/p9OCTSZyON

— Pavia.io (@Pavia_io) April 1, 2022

Not just this, the ecosystem grew exponentially, gaining millions in capitalization and TVL in smart contracts of recently released platforms and DeFi apps. According to data from DefiLlama, the Cardano DeFi ecosystem has attracted nearly $230 million more in funds since the start of March.

At press time, the TVL stood at $247 million. Even though it went down quite a bit from the previous ATH, the graph below did notice an uptrend.

Source: DefiLama

In addition, Cardano-based smart contracts surpassed the 2,000 mark for the first time ever. The number of Plutus Scripts increased by 489 between 28 March and 30 March, when they stood at 1,671 and 2,160.

According to the statistics from Cardano Blockchain Insights, the number of smart contracts was recorded at 2,272 on 1 April.

Source: Blockchain.com

Indeed, the inclusion of smart contract functionality made Cardano capable of scalability and performance faster than ever before.

This was one of the reasons why different celebrities from outside the crypto niche community collaborated with the network. According to an announcement on Twitter, Charles Hoskinson, Snoop Dogg, and others would join Clay Nation on 5 April.

This will be fun 🎥 #Cardano https://t.co/rxgYimMQW7

— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) March 31, 2022

Shower some love

The rise in the bullish narrative around the platform saw an inflow of large investors. Cardano network witnessed an influx of large investors. The increase of whale addresses totaled around 1.7% since 21 March.

The number of whales on the #Cardano network has increased by 1.7%. Roughly 42 addresses holding 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 $ADA were created since Mar. 21.

The uptick may seem insignificant at first glance, but these whales hold between $1.2 million and $12 million in #ADA. pic.twitter.com/ELUsppKhCl

— Ali Martinez (@ali_charts) March 29, 2022

Cardano’s native token, ADA, too surged, sensing this love. ADA traded at $1.18 with a fresh 3% surge in just 24 hours at press time. However, the ‘steady and slow‘ approach did create problems for the flagship ecosystem. In a way, giving opportunities for competitors to surpass. For instance, consider this tweet,