By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
Decentralized finance activities on Cardano have grown to new heights in recent weeks.
The Coinbase exchange has announced that it now offers staking rewards for Cardano blockchain’s native cryptocurrency ADA. The addition complements the platform’s listing spree and is a testament to its commitment to offering more ways for customers to earn crypto rewards, according to its blog post.
With this addition, ADA becomes the fifth coin listed by the exchange to provide staking services. This comes after the likes of Algorand, Cosmos, Ethereum and Tezos joined the exchange list.
While an average user might find the staking process to be overwhelming and technical when they do it on their own or via a delegated staking service provider, crypto exchanges like Coinbase help to simplify the process by pooling the tokens together and redistributing the rewards.
According to Coinbase’s senior product manager, Rupmalini Sahu, the exchange “plans to continue to scale our staking portfolio in 2022,” this is in congruence with the statement of its firm CEO, Brian Armstrong who revealed that the firm was going to list as many assets as possible.
Benefits to Platform Users
With Coinbase staking, users are exposed to a wide range of benefits, including earning rewards on their crypto and the ability to retain significant control.
Once a user’s initial holding period completes (20–25 days), they get rewards directly to their account every 5–7 days.
As regards control, Sahu explained that a user’s Cardano would always stay in their account while they earn rewards passively just by keeping their asset on the platform. Also, they can choose to opt out of the service at will.
Cardano’s Recent Price Performance
Decentralized finance activities on Cardano have grown to new heights in recent weeks. According to available data on DeFiLlama, the total value of assets locked on the blockchain is now worth over $400 million.
A cursory look at the data would show that the TVL is dominated by Minswap, a decentralized exchange whose TVL also rose by over 100% within the last seven days to over $190 million.
The DEX controls 48% of the entire space beating SundaeSwap, the former leader of the space. Interestingly, Minswap TVL helped to more than double the overall Cardano TVL to its current level.
Apart from the meteoric rise of its TVL, the asset’s price is also one of the best-performing currencies currently on the market. Per data from Coingecko, Cardano’s price has risen by over 14% within the last 24 hours to $1.13, this is a continuation of its current green run which has seen it add over 30% to its value within the last seven days.