The smart contract blockchain Cardano ($ADA) has seen a significant rise in user activity over the last 30 days, with the number of active wallet addresses reaching a one-year peak of over 600,000 after surging nearly 40% over that same period.

According to data from Cardano-based decentralized exchange Danogo, the number of active wallet addresses on the network hit a lot of 297,000 back in September 2023, when the price of ADA was trading at $0.24 before a wider cryptocurrency market rally kicked off earlier this year with the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETFs) in the United States.

Cardano’s growing number of active addresses comes at a time in which the total value locked (TVL) on its decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols keeps on growing, having surged from around $60 million at the beginning of 2023 to over $480 million at the time of writing.

In ADA terms, the amount locked in these protocols surged, meaning the rise in total value locked didn’t just come from rising asset prices, as 200 million ADA were locked in Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem in early 2023, compared to over 650 million now, according to DeFiLlama.

Data shows that collateralized debt protocol Indigo leads the Cardano DeFi ecosystem with over $120 million in total value locked, followed by decentralized exchange Minswap’s $100 million and lending protocol Liqwid’s $63 million.

Despite these protocols’ lead when it comes to total value locked, Danogo’s data shows that Minswap leads in active wallet addresses over the past 30 days with 30,677, followed by JPG Store with over 17,000 active wallets and by Spectrum, with 9,600 active wallets.

As adoption grows so has Cardano’s price, which is now trading close to the $0.75 after rising nearly 200% over the past six months amid a wider cryptocurrency market rally that saw Bitcoin’s price top a new all-time high above $73,000.

Featured image via Unsplash.