Cardano’s [ADA] quiet month: Key numbers you need to know

• Cardano development activity totaled 424 in the last 30 days. 
• The network also recorded a decline in user activity in the last month.

 Cardano’s [ADA] development activity declined in the last month.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), on-chain data provider Santiment noted that Cardano came in second place behind the leading Layer 2 (L2) network Optimism [OP], as the blockchain with the most development activity during the period under review. 

🧑‍💻 Here are #crypto’s top coins by development frequency. The team at #Optimism has been the most active over this timeframe. The below list is sorted by counting any non-redundant #github activity from a project, and averaging this daily activity over the past 30 days:

1… pic.twitter.com/q298Z6v0om

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) April 23, 2024

Development activity is an important metric that tracks the number of unique development activity contributors, the count of all events for a project, and the number of unique GitHub activity contributorst.

When a project records high development activity, it often reduces the possibility of the project being an exit scam.

According to Santiment, Cardano’s development activity in the last month totaled 424. Optimism, on the other hand, recorded a development activity of 467.

Cardano in the last month

On-chain data shows that Cardano witnessed a decline in user activity in the last month. According to Artemis’ data, the L1 experienced a decrease in demand from existing and new users alike. 

As of the 21st of April, the count of users that completed at least one transaction on the network totaled 28,000. This marked a 42% drop from the 49,000 daily active users recorded on the 26th of March. 

On a month-to-date, Cardano’s user activity peaked at 51,000 addresses on the 8th of April and has since trended downward. 

Due to the fall in active address count on the network, the number of transactions completed daily also cratered. Between the 28th of March and the 21st of April, Cardano’s daily transaction count fell by 35%.

As the network’s usage dropped, its total fees also dwindled. According to Artemis’ data, on the 21st of April, Cardano’s total fees fell to a year-to-date (YTD) low of $7100.

This marked a 70% decrease from the chain’s YTD peak of $24,000 on the 11th of April.

Cardano’s DeFi and NFT sectors take the hit

Cardano’s low network activity in the last month manifested in the form of a steady decline in its decentralized finance (DeFi), Total Value Locked (TVL), and low sales volume in its non-fungible tokens (NFTs) market.

Read Cardano’s [ADA] Price Prediction 2024-25

As of this writing, Cardano’s TVL was $328 million, per DefiLlama data. The network’s DeFi TVL had climbed to a YTD high of $520 million on the 14th of March, after which it initiated a decline.

Regarding the L1’s NFT vertical, sales volume totaled $3 million in the last month, plummeting by 39% during that period, according to data from CryptoSlam.