Cardano’s new update comes just in time for Valentine’s Day. Meanwhile, the adoption of the stablecoin DJED grew, and ADA rose 7% in price.
In Short
- The optimistic narrative around Cardano grows stronger.
- Cardano’s new mainnet update, Valentine, is live.
- DJED adoption has grown, and stablecoin now has over 31 million ADA reserves.
Cardano Upgrades as DJED Gets Backing. Devs updated their blockchain to the Standard for Efficient Cryptography (SECP) this February 14. The Input Output (IOG) team had previously announced on Twitter the proposed update for the mainnet, jointly submitted by the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo.
Dubbed “Valentine” in honor of the activation date, the new update will bring some enhancements to the Cardano network. Including new Plutus-integrated functions that handle elliptic curve digital signatures (ECDSA) and Schnorr signatures, which will allow users to “verify the integrity of specific signed hash data,” IOG explained.
The planned upgrade to the mainnet enables better compatibility. The team added in a tweet that they also want secure development of decentralized applications (dApps) between chains with Plutus. “The Cardano’s Valentine (aka SECP) update comes to Cardano to encourage secure cross-chain DApp development with Plutus while advancing Blockchain interoperability.” Valentine, which IOG has assured, is a less complicated upgrade than Vasil, with less impact on existing dApps. It went live on the Cardano network this Tuesday at the start of epoch 394.
DJED now has 31.4 million ADAs
The arrival of the update comes amid the growth of the DJED stablecoin, a development that has also generated a lot of excitement among users in the Cardano community. Launched in early February, DJED is Cardano’s first decentralized stablecoin. The asset, developed by IOG and issued by COTI, is backed by cryptocurrencies. It operates through a unique 400% – 800% over-collateralization mechanism designed to maintain parity with the US dollar at all times.
DJED’s adoption has grown remarkably along with its reserves in just two weeks. The asset is backed by just over 31.4 million ADA tokens, or about $11.5 million, for a total of 2.27 million DJED tokens. The project’s Twitter account reported that the DJED reserve ratio is at a ratio of 515%.
In addition to Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, DJED is backed by a second token: SHEN, currently priced at $0.39. It has a circulating supply of 23.3 million tokens. The new stablecoin launched a fortnight ago on major decentralized exchanges (DEX) Cardano, MinSwap, Wingriders, and MuesliSwap, as well as on the centralized Bitrue platform. The project expects to continue to innovate, with some upgrades and other developments planned for 2023.
Other reasons for excitement around Cardano
The arrival of Valentine and the growing adoption of DJED does not seem to be the only thing driving the Cardano narrative. Cardano’s daily development activity on GitHub has increased in recent weeks. Development speed outpaces ten other top ten Blockchain projects for the seventh time, according to data shared on Twitter.
On the other hand, a recent spike in Cardano’s whale activity has also been seen. Following a report by Santiment picked up by U.Today, the Cardano network has seen a massive spike in transactions of more than $100,000 since the beginning of February.
That report also highlighted that whale addresses holding between 10,000 and 10 million ADA had accumulated 659.53 million ADA. The accumulation occurred since the collapse of FTX in November 2022, which is a positive sign for the asset. Although there are also some negative metrics, including a decline in daily active addresses.
The positive developments could generate bullish sentiment among investors. ADA, Cardano’s cryptocurrency, has seen a more than 7.5% price rally in the past 24 hours. The recent rise has taken ADA into the $0.37 range, removing some of the losses it had accumulated during the week.