Cardano ($ADA) on-Chain Activity Surges as New Addresses Jump 167%

Activity on the Cardano ($ADA) network has exploded recently with the number of new daily addresses being created on the cryptocurrency’s network jumping 167% to 112,500 addresses seemingly out of the blue.

According to on-chain analyst Ali Martinez, who first pointed to the surge in on-chain activity referencing IntoTheBlock’s  Net Network growth metrics, a “sustained increase in this metric generally precedes a spike in price volatility for ADA.”

decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which according to DeFiLlama data now have close to $130 million locked in them. SundaeSwap has been leading the pack, with close to 98% of the total value locked.

SundaeSwap is “a native, scalable decentralized exchange and automated liquidity provision protocol,” that is backed by cFund, an early-stage venture firm anchored by IOHK, Alameda Research, a quantitative crypto trading firm founded by FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and Double Peak Group, a family office focused on digital asset investments.

The first usable decentralized finance (DeFi) application on Cardano was launched in January and is called MuesliSwap. It currently has a total value locked of over $2.5 million. Data shows that in January large ADA token holders more than doubled their holdings in the cryptocurrency, taking advantage of a price drop of more than 30%. Data suggests Cardano addresses holdings between 10,000 and 1 million ADA have increased their holdings by 113%, accumulating $53.6 million.

Cardano developer Input Output has proposed increasing the network’s block size by 11% from 72 KB to 80 KB after network load surged above 90% with the launch of SundaeSwap.

According to CryptoCompare’s latest Asset Report, the number of Cardano hodlers has grown 10.9% in January to hit 309,000, while the number of cruisers rose 5.85% to hit 3.19 million. The number of addresses holding ADA hit a new high last month of 4.53 million.