Cardano DeFi Holdings Fall Below $50 Million as Dollar Value Slides

Cardano’s decentralized finance holdings fell below $50 million on Nov. 9, extending their dollar decline since Oct. 20 without showing whether users withdrew Cardano (ADA) tokens from DeFi protocols.

The tracked total stood at $48.9 million, down 3.62% over 24 hours. An Oct. 20 snapshot of Cardano’s DeFi holdings recorded $61.34 million. The Nov. 9 figure was about 20% lower than that earlier dollar reading.

Total value locked, or TVL, measures the market value of assets deposited in DeFi protocols. Those assets include tokens other than ADA, and ordinary network staking is excluded from Cardano’s DeFi TVL. A change in the dollar total can reflect token prices as well as deposits and withdrawals.

The two snapshots therefore do not establish whether users withdrew ADA or, if they did, how much. Dividing the entire dollar total by ADA’s price would express the value in ADA-equivalent terms; it would not count the ADA held in protocols. Measuring a change in ADA deposits would require token balances from the same period.

Minswap held $12.33 million in tracked assets on Nov. 9, while lending platform Liqwid held $8.49 million. Their combined $20.82 million represented about 43% of Cardano’s DeFi total.

In August, the Cardano Foundation backed a 120 million ADA treasury withdrawal for AlphaGrowth’s Cardano PRIME liquidity program. The plan called for roughly 90 million ADA to be held pending a later release decision. The Nov. 9 TVL reading does not establish whether the program has changed protocol deposits.