Indeed, Cardano has been ranked as the top blockchain protocol by development activity in 2022, followed by Polkadot (DOT) and Cosmos (ATOM), according to the list published by the on-chain and social metrics platform Santiment on December 30. Ethereum (ETH), which this year went through the major Merge upgrade, has assumed fourth place, followed by Internet Computer (ICP), Elrond (EGLD), Flow (FLOW) Optimism (OP), Aptos (APT), and Polygon (MATIC), which ranked 10th. The development activity rates of the Cardano team during the entire year of 2022 were the highest among all the observed protocols, although, in terms of its return on investment (ROI) since the token sale, ADA has ranked sixth.

Continuous development

For Cardano, the recent results are a confirmation of its previous success, taking into account that the development activity rates in its public GitHub repositories in November were 18% higher than the next highest-ranked asset, recording 572.67 generated events. On top of that, Cardano’s key network activities have recorded significant growth in 2022, with its smart contract feature accounting for a growth rate of 394% compared to 2021, hitting the milestone of 4,445 contracts as of December 16. At the same time, native tokens on the platform increased 192%, hitting the 7.3 million mark, as the transactions on Cardano surged 139% to 56.9 million, the number of wallets surpassing 3.8 million – a growth of 47% compared to the year before. Meanwhile, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed that his team was working on the new privacy-focused blockchain called Midnight, which aims to solve the problem of confidentiality of smart contracts, as Finbold reported. Earlier, the Cardano developers reactivated the testnet version of the Djed stablecoin, which offers new capabilities, including compatibility with the Vasil hard fork, which was launched in late September and introduced improved smart contract functionality. 

Cardano price analysis

Elsewhere, the price of Cardano’s native token ADA is at press time changing hands at the price of $0.2421, down 1.39% on the day and 6.59% across the previous week, as demonstrated on the charts. As things stand, the cryptocurrency is currently the ninth-largest in terms of its market cap, which amounts to $8.36 billion, as per data retrieved from the crypto tracking platform CoinMarketCap on December 30. Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.