The first usable decentralized finance (DeFi) application on the Cardano ($ADA) ecosystem has launched after conducting an under-the-radar offering. The network’s first DeFi platform, MuesliSwap, now has over $1 million in total value locked.

According to data from tracking website DeFiLlama, MuesliSwap was launched earlier this year and quickly saw its total value locked jump over $1.2 million as the cryptocurrency’s community gained more and more interest in it.

The price of ADA exploded last year ahead of the rollout of the widely anticipated Alonzo hard fork, which brings smart contracts into the network and allows it to compete with the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana ($SOL).

The Alonzo hard fork is part of the network’s “Goguen” era, named after Joseph Goguen, an American professor of computer science from the University of California and the University of Oxford. The Goguen era comes after the Shelley phase, in which Cardano became a decentralized blockchain and community members became validators.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has notably revealed he believes projects like Cardano will be “ “as ubiquitous as the internet and used by billions” in the future. The Cardano network notably led the cryptocurrency market in developer activity last year, with Kusama and Polkadot behind it.

Most market participants expected SundaeSwap, a decentralized exchange built on top of Cardano that was backed by cFund, an “early-stage sector agnostic venture firm in the Blockchain industry anchored by IOHK and managed by Wave Financial,” Alameda Research, and Double Peak Group, be the first to launch on the network. Although SundawSwap is now security audited, its contracts haven’t yet been launched on the mainnet.

MuesliSwap is a decentralized exchange with launchpad functionalities that has also been launched on top of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. The platform is not available on either Ethereum or the Binance Smart Chain, two of the largest DeFi platforms by total value locked.

As CryptoGlobe reported, the number of Cardano wallets grew over 1,200% year-over-year from 190,000 to 2.5 million, showing that adoption of the cryptocurrency’s network has been steadily growing, partly thanks to the implementation of smart contracts.

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