Key Takeaways
Why did Cardano fail to implement its liquidity increase plan?
The enactment window expired earlier than the governance may act on it. General, it may derail DeFi exercise.
How’s the ADA market holding up?
Within the final 10 days, whales dumped 400 million ADA, triggering a 27% worth decline.
Regardless of lagging behind its friends on sure fronts, Cardano [ADA] plans to double down on privateness, AI, and DeFi to completely seize the following wave of mainstream blockchain adoption.
In actual fact, it has adopted the Ethereum [ETH] summit and regional ecosystem hubs mannequin to foster collaboration between enterprises and academia.
The most recent Cardano Summit 2025 in Berlin, Germany, was a part of such an initiative. In accordance with the attendees, together with enterprise capital Tim Draper, belief has emerged as the important thing worth proposition for blockchains.
Assessing Cardano governance actions
Nevertheless, the governance actions have fallen brief in delivering the mission’s bold growth targets.
For instance, Cardano’s DeFi exercise stays comparatively low in comparison with its friends. On the time of writing, it had solely $214 million in TVL (whole worth locked), whereas Solana boasted figures of $9 billion and Ethereum had $68 billion.
In actual fact, the DeFi liquidity is so low that one dealer misplaced $6 million whereas swapping into an illiquid stablecoin on the chain.
Though the Cardano Basis and Charles Hoskinson, the chain’s founder, acknowledged the liquidity difficulty, governance motion to treatment it failed.
The plan to create a 50 million ADA fund to spice up stablecoin and DeFi liquidity was permitted, however did not be carried out throughout the set timeline (expired), rendering it ineffective.

Supply: Cardano
For perspective, solely a proposal that has been permitted and enacted inside a specified timeframe can take impact and be carried out.
At press time, the one lively and essential proposal was a 5 million ADA mortgage to assist listing Snek [SNEK], a token throughout the Cardano ecosystem, on world platforms.
An analogous plan was floated lately however was rejected, elevating considerations about how the mission plans to assist the ecosystem gamers or the so-called “supporting DeFi” initiative.
The on-chain traction has additionally cooled off. After a slight uptick in community exercise between July and August, Cardano’s on-chain traction declined and stagnated, with a each day common of round 20,000 lively addresses.

Supply: Santiment
In the meantime, the current bout of ADA sell-off was primarily pushed by whale wallets holding 10 million to 100 million tokens (yellow). This cohort offloaded over 400 million ADA within the final ten days.
Over this era, ADA dropped additional by 27% to $0.44, driving its total losses to 66% from final yr’s peak of $1.3.

Supply: Santiment
