This article is from:CoinDesk, original author: Shaurya Malwa, compiled by Odaily.

Earlier this year, Cardano performed several upgrades that attracted users and developers to join the network, resulting in an increase in Cardano transaction volume.

A report by analysis firm Messari pointed out that there has been growth in Cardano's on-chain value locked and transaction volume indicators when comparing the development situation in the second quarter and the first quarter. This is due to technical improvements and an increase in the number of developers. The growth of the decentralized trading platform Minswap is particularly significant, but other new DApps have also contributed to the growth.

The report indicates that despite the growth in transaction activity, the number of daily active users has declined by 4%, which is the fourth decline in address activity in the past five quarters.

Although the number of active users has declined, the ratio of transactions to active addresses has steadily increased in the past five quarters, indicating that the average user now is more active than before. In the second quarter, the transaction/active address ratio was 1.19, which increased by 6.1% on a month-on-month basis and by 13.2% on a year-on-year basis.

According to DefiLlama data, as of Monday, the locked token value of Cardano is $175 million, reaching the highest level this year, but still 50% lower than the historical peak of $340 million reached in May 2022.

These phenomena are caused by the key upgrades of Cardano this year.

The upgrade that took effect in June reduces epoch. Conversion, making the blockchain smoother for users. An epoch is a period of time on Cardano, with each epoch lasting 432,000 slots, each of which is one second. During these epochs, ADA tokens are pledged, Cardano network generates new blocks, and operators will receive block rewards faster, thereby increasing token liquidity.

This year in March, Milkomeda's new feature began allowing Cardano blockchain users to access EVM smart contracts with any Cardano wallet, expanding the utility of the ecosystem. This new feature will allow Ethereum application developers to build on the Cardano network using Solidity, without the need to install new toolkits or learn a new programming language.