Cardano, a blockchain once hailed as the biggest threat to Ethereum, has become a ghost chain, with little activity occurring in its ecosystem. This article examines some of the key statistics that support these claims about ghost chains.
Cardano Stablecoin Activity is Minimal
Stablecoins have become the largest use case for the blockchain industry, with their market capitalization surpassing $284 billion. Tether and USD Coin dominate the industry, with market caps of over $167 billion and $72 billion, respectively.
Cardano, despite its $20 billion market cap, has just $38 million in stablecoin supply. The market cap of USDC and USDT in the network stands at $3.7 million and $719,000, respectively. In contrast, newly launched networks like Unichain and Sonic have millions in stablecoins.
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Cardano DeFi Activity is Negligible
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is another prominent industry in the cryptocurrency sector, with over $300 billion in assets. Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) stands at $365 million. In ADA terms, the TVL has plunged to 447 million, down from 685 million in October last year.
A quick look at its ecosystem shows that many of its dAPPs are not growing. Liqwid, the Aave rival, has only accumulated $92 million in assets.
Additionally, all its top DEX networks, such as Minswap and Splash Protocol, handled approximately $1.65 million in the last 24 hours, which is significantly lower than what popular DEX networks like Uniswap and PancakeSwap handled during the same period.
Market Share in NFT and RWA Is Also Small
Cardano has not also gained market share in key industries like non-fungible tokens and real-world asset tokenization.
Cardano’s network had NFT sales stood at $2.6 million in the last seven days, much lower than the $44 million that Ethereum handled in the same period.
RWA data shows that Cardano is not in the top 10 in the RWA Industry, which has over $27 billion. Mantle, the tenth chain, has over $247 million.
The same is true in the gaming industry, which is now dominated by the likes of Sei, BSC, and Skale Network.
Most importantly, Cardano is not generating any revenues, especially for a $20 billion company. Data shows that the network has made $289,000 in fees this month, down from $292k in the previous month. In contrast, Tron made $429 million this month, up from $394 million in July.
Cardano is working on measures to boost its ecosystem but it is unlikely to succeed. Neither has its long-promised integration with Chainlink happened nor its partnership to have RLUSD in its network.
Most importantly, its partnership with BitcoinOS, a smart contract operating system designed for Bitcoin, has not generated any fruit almost a year after the deal was announced.
As such, we are sceptical that the upcoming Midnight launch and Leios upgrade will help Cardano. Midnight will be a sidechain designed for privacy, while Leios is an upgrade that will boost Cardano’s speed to between 7k and 65k transactions per second.
Leios and Midnight can only work when there is an ecosystem in place to be scaled, which Cardano lacks.
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