Singapore-headquartered cryptocurrency trading platform Bitrue has announced that Cardano ($ADA) is being added as a base currency on its exchange, with the launch of nine new trading pairs set to come on February 24.

According to the exchange’s announcement, it will pair ADA against various cryptoassets including Cartesi ($CTSI), flux ($FLUX), Reserve Rights ($RSR), DigiByte ($DGB), Bancor ($BNT), Kyber Network ($KNC), and Loom Network ($LOOM).

A base currency, it’s worth noting, is the first currency appearing in a currency pair. IT represents how much of the second currency – the quote currency – is needed to get one unit of a base currency.

As CryptoGlobe reported, last year Bitrue became the first cryptocurrency exchange to offer support for native assets on the Cardano blockchain. The first user-defined Cardano token to be supported was $OCC, the utility token of OccamFi, a “suite of DeFi solutions tailored for Cardano.” 

Bitrue first listed ADA trading pairs in April 2019, against USDT, BTC, and XRP. Its integration with Bitrue grew later that year as it was added to more products the exchange offers. Last year, Bitrue also launched ADA community staking pools and open-source contributions.

As CryptoGlobe reported, the ADA network has seen its transaction volume explode to $12.7 billion earlier this week, doubling Ethereum’s $6.3 billion transaction volume over the same period.

Activity on the Cardano network has been surging over time. The number of daily new addresses being created on the cryptocurrency’s network jumped 167% on February 18, a matric that on-chain analyst Ali Martinez said generally “precedes a spike in price volatility for ADA.”

Data shows that in January large ADA token holders more than doubled their holdings in the cryptocurrency, taking advantage of a price drop of more than 30%. Data suggests Cardano addresses holdings between 10,000 and 1 million ADA have increased their holdings by 113%, accumulating $53.6 million.

Cardano developer Input Output has proposed increasing the network’s block size by 11% from 72 KB to 80 KB after network load surged above 90% with the launch of SundaeSwap.

According to CryptoCompare’s latest Asset Report, the number of Cardano hodlers has grown 10.9% in January to hit 309,000, while the number of cruisers rose 5.85% to hit 3.19 million. The number of addresses holding ADA hit a new high last month of 4.53 million.

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