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According to the latest Q4 report released by Messari, Cardano has seen 673% growth in stablecoin value on a year-over-year basis.
iUSD was the most dominant in terms of market cap. In a positive development, Mehen’s USDM fiat-backed stablecoin is expected to be available in March, adding another option to the existing iUSD, DJED and Wanchain bridged stablecoins.
Per Messari, Q4 capped off a year of strong ecosystem growth for Cardano, impacting TVL (USD) and stablecoin value locked. These metrics grew by 166% and 37%, respectively, in the past quarter.
This surge in liquidity moved Cardano’s TVL ranking up from 34th to the current 16th place, according to DefiLlama data.
This rise was seen across both established protocols like Minswap, which had the highest transaction activity, and recent entrants like Indigo, which emerged as TVL's largest protocol in Q4. At the same time, Cardano's infrastructure development progressed.
Midnight's specifications, including the use of Substrate, were released in Q4. Midnight is a sidechain/partner chain that focuses on data protection.
In Q4, Hydra, a family of scaling protocols, was released in V0.14.0. Hydra Head, the first solution in the Hydra Head family, is an off-chain mini ledger that operates between a small set of players, similar to other popular state channels such as Lightning.
Cardano's average daily transactions and daily addresses have seen growth, with the ratio of transactions to active addresses continuously rising over the last year, indicating an increase in "power users."
The higher average activity per user could be attributed to all of the new protocols deployed and developed in 2023, particularly DeFi protocols.
At the time of writing, ADA was up 3.28% in the last 24 hours to $0.59, and likewise higher by 12.3% on the weekly. According to Messari, ADA’s price increased 127.2% in Q4, outperforming the overall crypto market’s growth of 53.8%.