Cardano ($ADA), the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has seen a surge in buying activity from large investors, colloquially referred to as whales. These large token holders have added a total of 150 million tokens over the past month.

According to data shared by crypto analyst Ali Martinez from IntoTheBlock, a blockchain analytics platform, Cardano whales holding between 1 million and 10 million ADA have been on a buying spree, collecting over $57 million worth of the smart contract platform’s native token in a few weeks.

This indicates that these whales are confident in the long-term prospects of Cardano, which aims to provide a scalable and sustainable platform for smart contracts, decentralized applications, and digital identity.

As CryptoGlobe reported, data from Input Output Global (IOG), responsible for Cardano’s research and development, has revealed that the network has been widely adopted by developers, as it now has over 1,200 projects being developed on top of it.

Over 8 million native assets have been minted on top of the Cardano blockchain, nearly doubling the figure seen in May 2022 when there were 5 million. The Cardano network, it’s worth noting, started accommodating these assets on March 1, 2021.

According to data from pool.pm, there are now 8.03 million native assets on Cardano deployed across over 70,900 policies. Minting policies, according to Cardano’s documentation, are a “set of rules that govern the minting and burning of assets scoped under that policy.”

Native tokens themselves are bespoke assets  that can be interacted with “right out of the box – without the use of smart contracts.” The network’s documentation notes native assets can “practically be treated as ada in every sense because the capability is already built-in.”

Meanwhile, as CryptoGlobe reported, the total value locked on Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has recently hit a new all-time high of 382.8 million $ADA tokens, worth over $138.77 million at the time of writing. The total value locked on Cardano surged this year.

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