Cardano’s First AMM DEX Crosses 100 Million ADA In Trading Volume Amid Explosive DeFi Growth

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been seeing explosive growth on the Cardano blockchain. SundaeSwap, the first automatic market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange on Cardano, has crossed 100 million ADA in volume traded since launch. SundaeSwap is also one of the fastest-growing DeFi platforms in the crypto market as well.

SundaeSwap on proving Cardano’s critics wrong

In a tweet, the AMM protocol announced the milestone it crossed. The tweet also called out critics who have been calling Cardano a “ghost chain”.

SundaeSwap is currently the biggest DeFi protocol on Cardano, over $128 million in total value locked. This gives it a 67.5% dominance over other DeFi protocols on the proof-of-stake blockchain per data from DefiLlama. Similarly, according to data released last week by CryptoRank, SunadaeSwap was 5th among the top 10 DEXs by TVL growth. SundaeSwap is marking its latest achievement shortly after the Cardano blockchain has come under fire from Chris Burniske, a crypto pundit, for not delivering on its promise.

Meanwhile, the developers of SundaeSwap have continued to engage actively with the Cardano community. SundaeSwap introduced its model of an Initial Stakepool Offering (ISO) in which the community voted on stake pools that would be involved in the distribution of its tokens at launch. The ISO model, which invariably strained smaller validators on the Cardano network, has received some criticism. 

Following the pushback, SundaeSwap held a vote and has decided to have a Reverse ISO. The new development that is aimed at promoting decentralization of the Cardano network will allow delegators to earn rewards by staking to selected small stake pool operators.

Massive room for growth

Things have started picking up momentum for Cardano in 2022 following the takeoff of dApps on the network. The burst of activity on the Cardano network that SundaeSwap has been a part of has seen the PoS blockchain surpass Bitcoin in daily transaction activity for the first time in its history. On February 13, the proof-of-stake blockchain recorded the highest number of transactions while also having some of the lowest fees going by data from Messari.

Cardano also has a line of updates that will bring more transaction speed and lower fees. Regardless, the current and planned activities have not been able to convince all observers that the network has come to maturity. A report by Footprint Analytics asserts that Cardano will only be a safe bet when it sees the launch of more dApps.

“Cardano will be a safe bet only when more dApps are implemented to ensure the proper operation of on-chain applications and users can participate in ecosystem construction, not just token trading,” the report noted.