Is Cardano dead? Transactions are down 72% since 2022.

01 · Every five daysCardano pays its stakers on a fixed schedule, whatever the traffic

Every five days, Cardano pays out. Over the past year the payouts averaged about $2.5 million each on the day they arrived, falling from about $6 million to about $1.2 million. They went to holders who had put their coins behind the groups that run the chain.

Cardano is a blockchain that launched in 2017. It has its own coin, ADA, and since an upgrade in September 2021 it has run smart contracts, the programs behind trading, lending and NFT sales. It has no miners. Instead, holders put their coins behind a stake pool, one of the groups whose machines add blocks to the chain. At the end of each five-day period, which Cardano calls an epoch, the chain pays the pool and the holders who back it.

Staking on Cardano locks nothing up, and the coins stay spendable in the holder's own wallet. The chain pays out whether those five days were busy or quiet. Users pay a sliver of that in fees: over the past year, stakers received about 150 ADA for every ADA users paid. The payouts say nothing about whether anyone still uses the chain.

Bitquery's Cardano data covers the chain from its first block. We counted every transaction, sorted each by what it did and followed the ADA that moved between owners. Then we tested the bleakest case we could write down: use has collapsed for good, staking is the main activity, few people pay each other, little is traded, few smart contracts run and no new protocols launch. After a first look at the data, and before the main count, we set a pass mark for each claim.

We found no public list of Cardano's exchange wallets, so we sorted the largest wallets by how they behave. The count also sees only wallets that send, so a holder who stakes without moving coins looks inactive. And our copy of the chain stopped registering new tokens for about three months over the new year, which makes every figure for this year's newest tokens a minimum.

02 · What we countedTransactions, wallets, payments and a coin that lost most of its price

A transaction is any action written to the chain, such as a payment, a trade, a reward claim or a new token. Counting them is the simplest test of use. It is also the easiest to fool, because one bot can send thousands a month.

A Cardano wallet uses many addresses. In most wallets today every address carries the same stake key, a part of the address that ties it to one staking account. We treat each stake key as one owner and call it a wallet, whether or not its ADA is staked. Two kinds of address have no stake key: older ones from before staking, and enterprise addresses. Wallets that use them often send their change, the ADA left over from a payment, to a new address of their own. On the chain, that looks exactly like a payment, so we count those flows separately.

A payment, in this count, is one wallet paying another with both sides using a stake key, no smart contract involved and no bot sending it. At least 5 ADA or a stablecoin, a token built to hold a dollar's value, has to change hands. A bot is a wallet that sends 3,000 or more transactions in a month, unless it behaves like an exchange that year. We read payments from each transaction's inputs and outputs, the coins it spends and the new ones it creates, the same records an exchange reads to detect a Cardano deposit.

Use counted as collapsed only if three measures all fell below half their 2022 level: transactions, sending wallets, and the ADA moved in payments and trades on decentralised exchanges (DEXes). At least two of them also had to fall this summer from last summer. If any of the three stayed at or above its 2022 level, that claim was refuted. Each claim could come out supported, refuted or, in between, mixed. The ADA part matters because this year ADA has averaged well under half its 2022 price, so a figure in ADA can rise while the same figure in dollars falls.

03 · The countTransactions are down 72% since 2022

Cardano was at its busiest in November 2021, near the top of a bull market and two months after smart contracts arrived, and this year it carries about a sixth of that month's traffic. Comparing this year's average day with 2022's, the fall is 72%. It came as a slide, lower every year, and this summer was almost a third quieter than last summer. Measured in ADA, though, more money moved this year than in 2022, and the first claim turns on that.

Part of 2022's traffic was an NFT boom. Transactions that took funds out of NFT marketplace contracts account for about a fifth of the fall on their own.

Bots held up best. Wallets that send 3,000 or more transactions a month lost far less traffic than everyone else, and now send about a third of all transactions. The biggest group are batchers, bots that collect orders for DEXes and fill them in bulk.

04 · Who stopped sendingOf the 2.2 million wallets that arrived in 2021, three in every hundred still send transactions

The bull market brought Cardano its biggest crowd. More than 2.2 million wallets sent their first transaction in 2021, more than the next three years of newcomers put together, and this year three in every hundred of them sent at least one more. Later crowds look a little better partly because they are younger. A year after arriving, the 2024 crowd was sending at a lower rate than the 2021 crowd had, about one in six against more than one in five. Arrivals have slowed to about half a million a year, and so far this year fewer than half as many have arrived as in all of last year.

This count only sees sending. A wallet that still holds and stakes its ADA, which needs no transactions, looks the same here as one that sold.

Sending has also bunched up. In an average month this year, the 100 busiest senders made 44% of the transactions that wallets sent, about twice their share in 2022. Of the 50 busiest, about half are either batchers and similar bots or wallets that act like exchanges, and both kinds send on behalf of many people. Most of the rest are enterprise addresses, which carry no stake key, and we could not class them.

05 · StakingOver the past year, stakers earned 150 times what users paid in fees

The money behind Cardano staking rewards comes from two places, the fees users pay and a reserve of ADA not yet in circulation, which releases a set share of what is left every epoch. Over the past year fees equalled about 1 ADA in every 150 that stakers earned, and the reserve supplied the rest. That works out to a little over 2% a year on staked ADA, before pools take their cut.

The reserve is built to shrink, and it still held about 6.1 billion ADA at the start of September. Staker rewards have fallen by about a sixth a year since 2022, faster than the reserve itself, because less ADA is staked. The part of each payout that unstaked ADA would have earned goes back into the reserve.

The second claim, that staking is the main activity on Cardano, fails once money is counted. Payments and DEX trades moved many times what stakers earned. That held even after we removed pairs of wallets that sent each other a quarter of a million ADA or more both ways, and the largest group of wallets linked by transfers of a million ADA or more. That sets money moving against money earned, and the same coin counts again every time it moves.

The treasury, a pot of ADA spent only by on-chain vote, is paying out too. Most of its income is a fixed cut of what leaves the reserve. Since January 2025, when a network-wide upgrade called a hard fork took effect, withdrawals have gone through on-chain votes. Over the past year approved payouts came to more than stakers earned.

Fewer people are joining in. New stake keys, net of the ones cancelled, are down by more than nine tenths since 2022, and the share of ADA staked fell from about three quarters to under three fifths.

06 · PaymentsPayments between wallets are down 73%

Payments between wallets peaked in 2022 and have fallen every year since, to about a quarter of the peak level. Counting every kind of address, including older ones and those without a stake key, gives almost the same fall. The payments that remain are bigger in ADA, partly because each ADA is worth less. The median payment in ADA has grown every year since 2022.

The second part of the payments test is stablecoins, and on Cardano they barely register. DefiLlama, a site that tracks DeFi data, puts their supply at about $46 million on average over the past year. That is about a third of 1% of what all ADA was worth, which averaged about $13 billion. DefiLlama's figure rose over the year, though its count for one stablecoin, USDM, runs about $6 million above what has been minted on-chain. Stablecoin payments between wallets did grow, to about $11.5 million a month this year from about $66,000 in 2022, and this year's figure is a minimum.

07 · The whalesMore ADA moves than in 2022, in fewer and bigger transfers

Count ADA instead of transactions and the trend turns around. Wallets now pay each other about 3.7 billion ADA a month, more than half as much again as in 2022. In dollars, the ADA paid between wallets fell by 46%, because ADA lost more than three fifths of its price in between. Because the ADA moved rose, the usage claim fails our test even though transactions fell.

Payments of a million ADA or more explain most of the rise. They were about one in every 200 of this year's payments and carried 69% of the ADA. Leave them out, compare the same eight months of each year, and the ADA moved is almost flat.

To see who receives the money, we sorted the 100 wallets that received the most this year by how they behave, with one set of written rules for every large wallet. About four fifths of what they received went to wallets that act like exchanges or custodians, or to groups of wallets that mostly pay each other back and forth. Where the line between those two falls is less clear, and it moves the exchange share from about three fifths to under half, as the table shows.

08 · TradingCardano's DEXes trade a small slice of ADA's value

Most of Cardano's contract traffic is trading, and it runs through a handful of DEXes. Minswap leads, with about two thirds of this year's volume in our count of liquidity pools, the pots of ADA and one other token that traders swap against. In dollars, trading peaked in 2024 and runs at about a quarter of that pace this year. In ADA it peaked in 2023, and this year runs slightly above last year.

Chains differ in size, so the comparison we used sets trading against the value of each chain's coin. Over a year, Cardano's DEXes trade 5% to 9% of what all ADA is worth, the low end by our count and the high end by DefiLlama's. On Ethereum a year of DEX trading comes to about twice the value of all ETH. The XRP Ledger trades less than Cardano, under 2% of the value of all XRP. DefiLlama's count of value locked in Cardano apps also fell over the year, by about 85% in dollars and about a third in ADA.

DefiLlama's Cardano volumes come mostly from figures the DEXes publish through their own APIs. One of them is Dano Finance, a market for bond tokens issued by Optim, another Cardano project. It makes up 18% of DefiLlama's yearly total and 84% of August's. Our count reads trades on-chain but only in pools that pair a token with ADA, plus one aggregator contract, so it leaves out Dano Finance and any pool of two other tokens. Even without Dano Finance, DefiLlama's count is higher than ours.

09 · Smart contractsHalf of this year's transactions touch a smart contract, and a third spend from one

Every year since 2023, at least half of all Cardano transactions have sent funds to a smart contract or spent from one. Since 2023, contract traffic fell with everything else, by about two thirds, while its share of the chain stayed above half.

Most of that traffic is trading, and the share of contract spends that touch a DEX has about doubled since 2022. NFT marketplaces, the biggest users of contracts that year, have almost vanished.

About a quarter of transactions that spend from a contract now touch one we could not tie to any project, a growing part of the chain. Those contracts are missing from our own checks and from the public registry of Cardano app contracts, which is kept up on a best-effort basis.

Our pass mark for this claim counted only transactions that spend from a contract. On Cardano many DEX orders take two transactions, one to place the order and one in which a batcher fills it, so counting sends as well counts many trades twice. By the pass mark, contracts are a third of this year's transactions, level with 2024, and the verdict is mixed.

10 · New launchesNew contracts still catch on, at more than twice the 2022 pace

New contracts keep arriving. In the first five months of this year, about 20 a month went live and caught on, meaning they were used 100 times within 90 days. That is more than twice the rate of 2022 and below the 2023 peak, which one protocol, VyFinance, lifted with 225 of that year's 453 new contracts.

Who built them is harder to say. Of the 99 that caught on from January to May, only one belongs to a named project: Midnight's second NIGHT contract, which we identified ourselves. One more is a router that splits trades across DEXes, which we could not attribute, and the other 97 carry no label at all. Counts of new contracts can also run ahead of new projects, because one app can use many contracts. The wallets deploying new contracts are thinning too, down by more than a third since 2024.

The largest single launch we found is a token. NIGHT belongs to Midnight, a privacy network that works as a partner chain to Cardano. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output Global, the company that built Cardano, announced its debut. NIGHT launched on Cardano first, in December 2025. People who qualified for it claim it in instalments through contracts on Cardano. Transactions that claim NIGHT or move it to a wallet made up at least 9.4% of all Cardano traffic this year, and the unlocks end on 4 December 2026, so that traffic will fade.

11 · Is Cardano dead?Of six claims, two hold up

Two of the six claims held up, and both are about everyday use: few people pay each other, and little is traded for a chain of Cardano's size.

Each rule was also re-run with one input changed, such as a different bot threshold or dollars in place of ADA. The payment and trading verdicts held in every test. The usage verdict turns mixed when value is counted in dollars, and the contract verdict turns refuted once sends to contracts count. The launch verdict is the least settled. Against any base year after 2022 it comes out mixed. It turns supported when only named new protocols count and each launch is tested on its own. That rests on Midnight's share sitting just under the 10% line, and the share is a minimum that misses NIGHT transfers from early in the year.

By this count, Cardano is not dead. About 25,000 transactions settle on an average day, and about 90,000 wallets send ADA each month. New contracts keep catching on, although almost none carry a project's name.

It is much smaller than it was, though. Most of the crowd that arrived in 2021 has stopped sending transactions, and payments between wallets are about a quarter of their peak. Trading is a sliver of the coin's value, and most of the ADA the biggest wallets receive lands with wallets that act like exchanges or with wallets paying each other back. Staking rewards keep arriving from the reserve, and a smaller share of ADA is staked to collect them.

12 · How we countedWhat we checked, and what we could not see

Most transaction and payment counts start from the inputs and outputs of each transaction and can be rebuilt with Bitquery's Cardano data. Staking and treasury figures come from Koios, a public Cardano API, and figures for other chains from DefiLlama. Our earlier Cardano investigation traced how one wallet app's users were drained.

13 · The recordThe wallets and contracts behind the numbers

Stake keys link to their account pages on AdaStat, a Cardano explorer, and contract addresses to Bitquery's explorer.