Cardano has long been called one of the most revolutionary blockchain projects in the crypto ecosystem, being the most peer-reviewed blockchain network. And more recently, it has been showing improving strength in terms of its total-value-locked (TVL) in DeFi thanks to strong growth numbers coming out of the decentralized finance ecosystem on the Cardano blockchain.

Fresh data from decentralized finance data aggregator DefiLlama, shows that the TVL in DeFi on Cardano has hit a new all-time high of 343 million ADA tokens. ADA is Cardano's native crypto token that is used to run the blockchain network. As of writing, this is worth a little over $100 million but that drop in dollar value is mainly due to the major crash in the crypto market we saw over the past 24 hours, especially post the budget announcements pertaining to the crypto industry.

But in terms of ADA tokens that have been locked in DeFi protocols on the Cardano blockchain - we have witnessed significant and strong growth, especially since the beginning of February 2023. It has gone from around 200 million ADA in TVL to touch a high of over 340 million ADA, resulting in a very promising 70% jump in total-value-locked in DeFi within a period of a month. It is currently at about 337 million ADA, not too far off the ATH.

This growth comes in tandem with the proliferation of a series of promising DeFi protocols being built on the Cardano blockchain. For example, Miniswap dominates the overall TVL with a total of $37.8 million locked, representing a 36.06% dominance as of writing.

Cardano is well known for being a smart contract hub with a very good level of throughput when compared to existing alternatives in the crypto market. However, despite its legacy, stellar development team and leadership, technological know-how, and advancements, it still lags behind its competitors by a pretty large margin, including Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX).

According to DefiLlama, Cardano is currently placed at the 23rd position in terms of total-value-locked in DeFi, well below even the likes of Algorand, Optimism, and Polygon.

However, Cardano hitting this milestone is an impressive one, especially in a bear market which showcases the increased interest in this network and the steady onboarding of new projects on the blockchain.

Additional read: How Cardano's Hydra Protocol can revolutionize its ecosystem

As reported earlier, Cardano is heavily focused and invested to make its network highly scalable and improve protocol functionality. It is making concerted efforts to build its Hydra Head sidechain that will greatly improve upon the scalability of the underlying blockchain. Cardano needs to double down to improve its viability amongst developers and other participants in the crypto ecosystem too to improve its TVL further and also increase the number of transactions on the protocol. Cardano is still lagging far behind on both these counts. Cardano has been touted as an 'Ethereum-killer' but it is still not at par with other 'Ethereum-killers' such as  Solana, for example. So Cardano still has a long way to go before it can catch up!

Values as on 10 March 2023.

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