$31 Billion Worth Of ADA Is Staked In Cardano Blockchain
The amount staked in the crypto protocol Cardano is currently in tens of billions of US dollars.
An online platform, called PoolTool, which is built to provide up-to-date data on Cardano’s metrics, shows that holders have staked over $31 billion worth of ADA into 667,456 addresses.
Staking is a blockchain protocol validation process, which allows crypto investors to generate rewards on their assets by depositing coins into the protocol to validate network transactions. During staking, the staked assets are locked up for a certain period of time, during which they can’t be accessed. In the case of Cardano, unlike Ethereum 2.0, users can unlock their staked ADA and spend their coins at the time of their choosing.
The Cardano 667,456 stake addresses represent an 11% uptrend since early June when Cardano passed the 600,000 addresses milestone. Those addresses are split between 2,665 active pools, according to PoolTool.
The $31 billion worth of Cardano that is staked represents over 71% of the $44.20 billion total supply of the 5th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
The total amount of ADA staked is much more in dollar value than Ethereum currently staked into the ETH 2.0 smart contract. ETH holders who seek to become validators have collectively locked up roughly 5.98 million ETH worth $13.74 billion at time of writing, according to analytics platform Etherscan.
Ethereum 2.0, the highly-anticipated update of the second-largest crypto asset by market cap, is the scaling solution that will shift the network over from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (POS) consensus mechanism. According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the smart contract platform will eventually be capable of facilitating 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) via second-layer solutions.
One of the reasons Cardano has been able to reach such amounts of staked crypto, is that Cardano stakers are able to withdraw the coins at any given time, which Ethereum stakers are locking the coins until Ethereum 2.0 launches.
The Cardano team says the long-awaited integration of smart contract functionality is coming in August. The company is also preparing to launch a converter that will enable users to swap supported Ethereum tokens (ERC-20) to special Cardano-based assets.
