On Thursday (March 16), a popular pseudonymous $ADA whale commented on the growing importance and popularity of Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem.

Cardano blockchain released its new node version v.1.35.6, which comes with functionality called Dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networking.

Though the Valentine upgrade was rolled out with much optimism, Cardano [ADA] has failed to capitalize on the opportunity. According to CoinMarketCap, ADA dropped significantly over the previous week, plunging 13%, at the time of writing.

Roughly over a week since launch, the Cardano-based over-collateralized stablecoin Djed has attracted over 30 million ADA tokens as backing.

Cardano released the weekly development update on 10 February. It highlighted some notable statistics but did not shore up buyer confidence in the short term. Instead, the price retested $0.37 as resistance before another move downward.

An upcoming upgrade on Cardano will make enhancements to cross-chain functionality for decentralized finance applications (dapps) building on the network, developers tweeted Thursday.

Cardano (ADA) is seeing a massive uptick in whale activity, as whale transactions worth $100K+ have drastically increased since January 30, with up to 36 more addresses holding between 1 million and 100 million tokens added to the network since the beginning of this year.

DeFi protocols in Cardano, a proof-of-stake smart contracting platform, have locked over $100 million in user assets as of February 7.

The Cardano (ADA) network underwent a substantial upgrade in September 2021, incorporating smart contract functionality and enabling the blockchain to process transactions more efficiently and at a faster pace. Despite a decline in the price of Cardano in 2022, the network’s development continued to grow through 2023.

The total value of assets locked (TVL) on Cardano-based overcollateralized stablecoin Djed crossed $10 million during the first 24 hours of its launch, according to DeFillama data.