The transaction volume seen on the Cardano ($ADA) network has briefly surpassed that of the Ethereum ($ETH) blockchain ahead of the launch of a highly-anticipated decentralized exchange on Cardano called SundaeSwap.

According to data from Messari, Cardano’s daily transaction volume was at one point above the $7 billion mark, surpassing the daily transactions volume seen on Ethereum of around $5.4 billion. Both networks remained far below BTC’s $16.8 billion.

 Transaction volumes on Cardano exploded after SundawSwap, a “native, scalable decentralized exchange and automated liquidity provision protocol” announced it was preparing to launch on mainnet on January 20. The platform is backed by cFund, Alameda Research, and Double Peak Group.

The decentralized exchange will launch with an Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISO), which will see people delegate their ADA to staking pools taking part in the ISO, so that every epoch – a period of around five days – delegators are given tokens.

Cardano’s transition volume explosion was accompanied by a significant price rise, with ADA moving up 8% in the last 24-hour period. The cryptocurrency’s price appreciated over 17% over the last few days as new smart contracts start being used on Cardano.

ADAUSDT Chart via TradingView

Notably, SundaeSwap isn’t Cardano’s first usable decentralized finance application. The network’s first DeFi platform, MuesliSwap, conducted an under-the-radar offering and saw its total value locked explode to over $1 million in little over two days. It now has nearly $4 million in total value locked.

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.

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.

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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