The price of Cardano’s native token $ADA has recorded its highest returns in 18 months in January of this year after its price rose 58.9% to $0.39. Its performance was the best it has seen since August 2021, and made it one of the strongest assets by performance among the top digital currencies.

According to CryptoCompare’s latest Asset Report, which details its performance saw it outperform the MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 100 Index (MVDA), a market cap-weighted index that tracks the performance of the 100 largest digital assets that recorded a return of 31.7%.

Cardano’s price action, CryptoCompare details, was accompanied by a spike in trading activity, with its trading volumes on centralized exchanges rising 158% to $9.87 billion. The surge marked the first increase in trading volume the cryptocurrency has seen in 13 months in a “much-needed rebound after hitting the lowest monthly trading volume since October 2020 in December 2022.”

Source: CryptoCompare

CryptoCompare’s report also details that in January, there was a 49.9% increase in the Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Cardano blockchain, reaching $99 million. This marked the first increase in TVL in six months and was the highest recorded on the Cardano network since August 2022.

Despite Minswap remaining the largest protocol with a TVL of $30.7 million, its dominance in the ecosystem declined to 31% from 42% in August 2022, the report adds, due to the launch of new protocols and the growing popularity of other decentralized applications.

Meanwhile, the lending protocol Meld and the synthetic asset protocol Indigo experienced a 48.4% and 76.5% rise in their TVL, reaching $36.7 million and $16.5 million, respectively.

As CryptoGlobe has been reporting, this year Cardano saw the launch of Djed ($DJED), a formally verified algorithmic stablecoin for Cardano that is backed by cryptocurrency, IOG, the company behind the development of Cardano, designed the stablecoin, while COTI Group is responsible for issuing it. The stablecoin was announced back in September 2021, and launched this month.

The recently launched Cardano-powered algorithmic stablecoin is now backed by over 31.5 million $ADA tokens, as its adoption keeps on growing and its reserve ratio remains high.

Cardano’s market capitalization surpassed that of the widely known meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin ($DOGE) earlier this month, during a period when $ADA was rebounding from its second-largest dip in value.

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