Data from blockchain analytics platform Santiment shows whales are eagerly stocking up on ADA, Cardano’s native cryptocurrency. The numbers of ADA added to existing wallets which hold between 100,000 and 10 million ADA, have soared to heights last seen in September 2022.
Santiment wrote: “As Cardano sits just above $0.29, whales and sharks holding between 100K-10M $ADA have accumulated back to their highest level since September, 2022. Additionally, on-chain transaction volume has been rising nearly every week for the past 6 months.”
Despite the legal woes caused by the SEC’s blanket assumption that dozens of cryptocurrencies, including ADA, are securities, daily trading volumes have steadily risen to over 67 billion ADA. The whales and sharks in question have amassed $116.1 million more in ADA since May 21 of 2023.
The renewed interest has, however, attracted bad actors, it seems. According to some in the Cardano community, a potential rug pull of 60,000 ADA has occurred, it seems the associated Twitter account from blockchainmages has since been deleted.
Popular community member Cardano Whale, who regularly buys hundreds of thousands of ADA worth of DeFi (decentralized finance) tokens to jump-start emerging projects on Cardano, was among the victims, it appears.
The ADA whale said on Twitter: “I have to own this one. Been too naive again.” Prompting a timely reminder of the pitfalls that still exist in crypto. Of course, 60k ADA seems negligible compared to the over 600 million ADA that makes up the Cardano DeFi space, according to data from DefiLama.
Cardano Developments Gain Momentum
Nevertheless, the increased interest during this bear market also comes from some interesting developments in the Cardano ecosystem. Currently, in the second last stage of development, called Basho, the network now focuses on scalability and predictability before the previous phase, Voltaire targets governance.
The main projects right now are Hydra which, as a layer 2 solution, increases scalability and resource utilization; Mithril, on the other hand, improves the speed and throughput of nodes on the network. Additionally, side chains will free up the main chain while optimizations will change block structure, leading to fewer resources being tied up on-chain.
Further, in late July, Cardano achieved the milestone of zero downtime in over 2,130 days, highlighting the network’s track record of reliability. At the time of writing, ADA traded for $0.29, a slight plus of 1% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
