Cardano’s TVL is valued at around $219.42 million without the inclusion of staked governance tokens.
Total value locked (TVL) refers to the total value of crypto assets deposited in a DeFi protocol—or in DeFi protocols. Cardano has seen consistent growth in TVL since January, following the launch of projects Sundaeswap and Minswap, both of which contributed significantly to its TVL.
Cardano has seen nearly 50,000% growth in TVL since the start of 2022, with all-time highs of $434.74 million in TVL reached on March 28. Despite its rapid growth, Cardano is still a long way behind other major “Ethereum killers” such as Terra, Avalanche, and Solana.
Cardano is currently ranked 28th among decentralised finance platforms in DefiLlama’s rankings.
According to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, the apparent delay in growth is due to many decentralised applications (dApps) waiting for the Vasil hard fork to benefit from pipelining.
Pipelining is a scaling solution that accelerates the process of distributing blocks, reducing the “dead time” between them significantly. This would enable more aggressive changes, such as reference scripts, to be implemented, potentially significantly increasing the blockchain’s overall performance.
At the moment, there are ten dApps contributing to the total value locked on Cardano. In late December, MuesliSwap became the first decentralised exchange to launch on the mainnet. Sundaeswap debuted in January, while MinSwap debuted in March.
According to recent IOHK updates, nearly 900 projects are currently being built on Cardano, with DEXes accounting for nearly 4% of the total.
