$ADA: The incredibly rapid growth of Cardano’s NFT ecosystem
The “Mary” upgrade – applied to the Cardano network on March 1 – introduced multi-asset support, enabling the minting of NFTs. Since then, the growth rate of Cardano’s NFT ecosystem has surprised even IOG founder and CEO Charles Hoskinson.
On February 18, 2021, Input Output Global (aka “IOG”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, published a blog post titled “Building native tokens on Cardano for pleasure and profit”, announcing:
“With the “Mary” protocol upgrade, which will be implemented using our hard fork combinator technology, native tokens and multi-asset capability are coming to Cardano.“
The IOG’s blog post went on to say:
“Native tokens will provide Cardano with multi-asset support, allowing users to create uniquely defined (custom) tokens and transact with them directly on the Cardano blockchain…
“The use of tokens for financial operations is becoming increasingly popular. It can cut costs while improving transparency, improving liquidity, and of course being independent of centralized entities like big banks. Tokenization is the process of representing real assets (eg fiat currencies, stocks, precious metals and real estate) in a digital form, which can be used to create financial instruments for commercial activities.
“Cardano will provide many tokenization options. With the ‘Mary’ upgrade, the ledger’s accounting infrastructure will process not only ada transactions, but also transactions that have multiple asset types at the same time. Built-in support provides distinct advantages for developers as there is no need to create smart contracts to handle custom token creation or transactions. This means the ledger will track the ownership and transfer of assets instead, removing additional complexity and the potential for manual error, while ensuring significant cost efficiency.“
Then, on March 1, 2021, the IOG tweeted that the “Mary” fork had taken place on the Cardano network:
The first Cardano NFTs sold were from the CardanoKidz team, who provided the following update on March 10, 2021:
As of April 2022, Cardano’s NFT trading volume was around $27 million (as reported by “opencnft”):
On June 9, 2022, the IOG CEO did an interview with Yahoo Finance, where he had this to say about Cardano’s NFT market:
“A surprising area of growth at Cardano is in the NFT area. About 40% of all applications deployed are NFT related… About $270 million a month in NFT volume. So, $3 billion a year, and there’s tons of incredible work in the metaverse space, like Cornucopias and others, and it’s really impressive to see how quickly it’s grown just in the last year.“
According to “opencnft.io”, here is the current state of Cardano’s NFT market:
As you can see, Cardano NFT’s 24-hour trading volume was around 1.3 million ADA (or around $627,000).
So how does the number compare to the 24-hour sales volume of other blockchains?
If the data from CryptoSlam is accurate, this would make Cardano the most popular blockchain for NFTs by 24-hour tracing volume:
Image credit
Featured image by Quantitatives via Unsplash
