In face of the recent drop in network activity, Canto’s total value locked has held steady at $189 million.
The number of daily active addresses and transactions for Canto, a Cosmos-based layer 1 blockchain that launched in Aug. 2022, both show high degrees of volatility in the start of the year, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis.xyz.
Canto says it is a permissionless blockchain running the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and in its technical documents it states its three primitives – the Canto decentralized exchange, unit of account and lending market – are “public utility protocols, or Free Public Infrastructure.”
Sitting at 244 on Jan. 1, the number of unique wallet addresses that sent at least one on-chain transaction, jumped 10,965% to about 27,000 by Feb. 3, per Artemis. In the same time period, the total number of transactions registered on-chain in a rolling 24 hour period soared 4,858% from roughly 2,400 to 119,000.
Canto’s daily active addresses and transactions have dropped 89% to roughly 2,400 and 22,700, respectively, Artemis’ most recent data shows
While daily active addresses and transactions are still up on the year, the decline in the month for both figures demonstrate how the activity of the nascent network has cooled off.
Canto’s total value locked (TVL) is a different story, holding steady around $189 million with 65.82% of its TVL coming from the largest decentralized exchange on the blockchain, per TVL aggregator DeFiLlama. Canto’s TVL grew roughly 28% since the start of February and 182% since Jan. 1, highlighting how users are still interested in depositing their assets into the layer 1 blockchain even in times when activity has declined.
The interest in Canto may stem from its zero-fee DEX for liquidity providers.
Users use CANTO, the native token for the layer 1 blockchain network, to pay gas fees for transactions and to secure the network by being able to be staked. With an initial total supply of one billion tokens, the CANTO token’s price and market capitalization stand at $0.50 and $221 million, respectively, according to CoinGecko.