Cardano Smashes 1.3M Wallet Milestone as Network Activity Explodes

Cardano’s ecosystem flexes its muscles—crossing 1.3 million wallets and 10.7 million native tokens. Growth doesn’t lie, even if Wall Street still thinks ’blockchain’ is a type of salad.

Network metrics scream bullish: adoption isn’t slowing down, and developers keep shipping. Meanwhile, legacy finance still can’t tell a smart contract from a Starbucks loyalty card.

• Cardano sees consistent growth with nearly 2,000 projects and over 1.3 million delegated wallets.
• Node 10.4.1 and Lace v1.22 bring improved performance, Firefox support, and Bitcoin beta integration.
• Governance, smart contracts, and scaling initiatives mark a forward-looking phase for the ecosystem.

InputOutput’s latest Cardano weekly report provides us with a picture of steady but uneventful progress. The growing ecosystem of the network now hosts 1,997 projects in progress, with 1.33 million actively delegated wallets.

These numbers indicate a sticky user base and sustained faith in the staking model of the chain. On-chain usage witnessed steady transaction volumes of 108.98 million, showing a marginal but significant rise of 0.23%, indicating steady on-chain usage.

Smart contract deployment is further increasing. There have been a total of 131,917 Plutus and 6,507 Aiken scripts deployed, indicating growing adoption of programmable infrastructure.

Native asset issuance is steadily increasing, with more than 10.78 million native tokens created under 213,259 token policies. Developer enthusiasm is seen with the 259 GitHub commits, which reflect active work and improvements in the Cardano codebase.

Governance on the blockchain is still participatory, with 1,282 registered DReps and 954 active, a 1.66% increase from last week. These figures only enhance Input Output’s narrative of a maturing ecosystem with increasing democratic participation from its holders.

Cardano’s Lace Wallet Enhances Performance

Cardano’s native wallet, Lace, has been upgraded to version 1.22. Firefox browser support and Bitcoin beta integration expand the scope of its usage. Backend optimizations towards increased performance and providing ease of usage to Web3 users are also introduced by the upgrade.

On the tech side, the Node 10.4.1 release brings a production-ready UTXO-HD backend. Although the default is in-memory, there is a version using LMDB aimed at experienced users that is available.

As stated by blockchain infrastructure expert Lars Brünjes, upgrade benchmarks pointed to no network slowness and slight CPU optimization, with memory heap growth remaining very low compared to previous versions.

Smart contract teams prioritized efficiency, using strictness analysis to minimize execution time and script size. Work is in progress towards the upcoming hard fork, with final specifications and testing on major primitives such as dropList and modular exponentiation.

Scaling With Hydra and Mithril as Voltaire Advances

Hydra released version 0.21.0, representing an important milestone in Layer 2 scaling. Attention now is on supporting Glacier Drops and polishing beta workflows.

In parallel, Mithril pre-release 2517.0-pre introduces support for the new Cardano node and allows file signing with IOG keys. Development of database certificates and proof-of-concept aggregators is in progress.

In governance, the Voltaire epoch moves on with Intersect elections in progress and constitutional committee candidate registration in progress. Voting and civic participation will shape the next developments in Cardano’s self-government framework.

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