Tens of billions of dollars are now staked in the crypto protocol Cardano.
PoolTool, an online platform built to provide up-to-date data on Cardano’s metrics, shows that holders have locked up over $31 billion worth of ADA into 667,456 staking addresses.
Staking allows crypto investors to generate rewards on their assets by depositing coins into the protocol to validate network transactions. While staking, those assets are locked up for a certain period of time, during which they become unspendable. In the case of Cardano, users can unlock their staked ADA and spend their coins at the time of their choosing.
The 667,456 stake addresses represent an 11% increase since early June when Cardano passed the 600,000 addresses milestone. Those addresses are split between 2,665 active pools, according to PoolTool.
The $31 billion worth of Cardano that is staked also represents more than 71% of the $44.20 billion total supply of the digital asset.
The total amount of ADA staked far exceeds the dollar value of Ethereum currently deposited into the ETH 2.0 smart contract. ETH holders who seek to become validators have collectively locked up roughly 5.98 million ETH to the tune of $13.74 billion at time of writing, according to analytics platform Etherscan.
Ethereum 2.0, the highly-anticipated update of the second-largest crypto asset by market cap, is the scaling solution that will shift the network over from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (POS) consensus mechanism. According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the smart contract platform will eventually be capable of facilitating 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) via second-layer solutions.
The team building Cardano says the long-awaited integration of smart contract functionality is coming in August. The firm is also preparing to launch a converter that will enable users to swap supported Ethereum tokens (ERC-20) to special Cardano-based assets.
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