EMURGO concluded its first two Cardano Commercialization Workshops in Tokyo and Fukoka on March 29 and 30, respectively.
These workshops aimed to foster dialogue with the local Japanese community to promote greater understanding and raise visibility with DReps.
In this blog, we wanted to provide insights and clarity into the current challenges facing Cardano from a commercial adoption perspective, with subsequent blogs that will focus on solutions to address these and a more specific breakdown of our partners’ proposals.
Please note that it is our partners who will be the ones submitting their own budget proposals and then receiving a budget. EMURGO’s role is to ensure that these partners successfully enter the Cardano ecosystem and are properly integrated across various aspects — whether it’s infrastructure, technology, networking, or any other related capacities.
Cardano’s Original Vision
Thanks to the efforts of everyone in the community, Cardano has grown into a globally adopted ecosystem and blockchain platform recognized by developers, investors, institutions, organizations, and nation-states.
The foundation of these Commercialization Workshops in Japan is to foster greater awareness and community support for our partners’ proposals to realize the original vision of Cardano. Furthermore, many DRep supporters in Japan remember and are aligned with Cardano’s original vision and are committed to fulfilling its objectives.
Cardano’s original vision was to be “a fully open-source project that aims to deliver an inclusive, fair, and resilient infrastructure for financial and social applications on a global scale” with a goal “to bring reliable, secure financial services to those who do not currently have access.”
Where Cardano Stands and Its Current Challenges to Navigate
To achieve this ambitious vision, Cardano needs to become commercially stronger by addressing the following three key issues: liquidity, increased transactions, and higher TVL. While Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem has grown, it still needs to expand its growth significantly to catch up to market competitors and more strongly demonstrate its commercial viability.
To demonstrate, there is currently approximately $900B in TVL across DeFi, with a stablecoin market cap of around $235. In Cardano, by comparison, it ranks 20th in TVL among chains with $270M in TVL, and its native stablecoins have a market capitalization of $30M.
As such, there are still numerous hurdles ahead to overcome for Cardano to reach the next level of adoption from a commercial perspective. Cardano has a relatively underdeveloped DeFi ecosystem due to a variety of factors that are not mutually exclusive.
An assessment of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem leads us to the following:
- A lack of significant liquidity
- Limited DeFi activities due to insufficient liquidity
- Lack of involvement with key external participants such as exchanges and third-party market makers
- Lack of key Cardano ecosystem token listings to bring external liquidity. If Cardano stablecoin USDA and other DeFi tokens are listed on major centralized exchanges, more external liquidity coming into Cardano can be expected, including listings of Cardano stable token pairs with widely adopted stablecoins USDT and USDC.
Addressing these issues would significantly help to improve Cardano’s overall infrastructure, liquidity, and visibility, demonstrating its commercial viability as an ecosystem and blockchain platform to market participants and thereby setting the foundation for Cardano to onboard more commercialization projects and institutional capital.
In our next blog, we will go over our proposal to address these issues and set Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem to accelerate its growth.
Join Us on April 18 in Tokyo
The next Cardano Commercialization Workshop is scheduled to be hosted on April 18, 2025, in Tokyo.
Register here and join us to learn more about the strategies to strategically boost DeFi, onboard RWA tokenization, and more.
Also, stay on top of more scheduled workshops and news by following EMURGO on X and LinkedIn.
About EMURGO
- Official Homepage: emurgo.io
- X (Global): @EMURGO_io
- YouTube: EMURGO channel
- LinkedIn: @EMURGO_io
Disclaimer
You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained herein shall constitute a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by EMURGO to invest.
