Cardano projects nearly double in seven months, cross 900

The total number of active projects on the public blockchain platform Cardano has crossed 900, reaching almost double the number since it reached 500 projects in September 2021. The announcement was disclosed by Input Output Global, the creators of Cardano, on Twitter, which has since elaborated the range of existing projects on the Cardano blockchain in an elongated thread.

Cardano is a public blockchain platform that uses proof of stake (PoS), instead of proof of work (PoW) blockchains such as Bitcoin (BTC), to bring more tokens under its blockchain into existence. In a PoS blockchain, users holding tokens can stake or store their tokens in a blockchain wallet, and use this stake to validate new transaction blocks on a blockchain to bring a token into existence.

Cardano operates under its ADA token, which has a maximum supply cap of 45 billion tokens. A total of 33.75 billion ADA are already in circulation, with Cardano operating at a market cap of $31.93 billion as of today, April 20 – according to crypto valuation tracker, CoinMarketCap.

The range of projects covered under the Cardano blockchain are diverse, and include projects such as decentralised finance (DeFi) lending such as Nexo and Liqwid, stablecoins such as Stasis, decentralised insurance capital provider Ensuro, transaction platform Celsius, wallets such as Medusa and Trezor, and a whole host of other non-fungible token (NFT) based games and related projects.

A crypto project refers to a use case built on top of a blockchain, which uses the underlying technology and its properties to provide various use cases. These projects form the web3 ecosystem of apps and services, and include collectibles through NFTs, lending and finance tools, decentralised storage and more.

While Cardano is among the bigger PoS blockchains, data from DeFi analytics tracker DeFi Llama state that it does not have the highest total value locked (TVL) figures in terms of DeFi projects on the chain. The latter refers to the total dollar value of all tokens that have been staked, lent or put in liquidity pools from a blockchain. While the relation is not empirical, a very high TVL typically signifies a greater number of crypto projects done on a particular blockchain.

Among PoS blockchains, DeFi Llama data shows BNB Chain, Avalanche and Solana to have greater TVLs than Cardano, with $12.77 billion, $11.26 billion and $6.9 billion respectively. As of today, Cardano has a TVL of $227.7 million.

Showcasing Cardano projects that went live over the past one week, Input Output stated that the range of the latest projects based on the blockchain include SingularityNET’s ERC-20 blockchain bridge (which allows Ethereum tokens to be transferred to Cardano and back, if needed), OccamX decentralised exchange (DEX)’s ADA-based liquidity mining (which would allow Cardano holders to lend ADA to an exchange in return for interest payouts), and more.

Cardano has been billed as an environment friendly blockchain, with its PoS validation format considered to consume significantly lesser energy in comparison to what PoW blockchains such as Bitcoin do.