The total amount of blocked funds (TVL) in the Cardano network has decreased by 1.7% over the past 24 hours, amounting to $68.17 million. The main part of these funds is occupied by stablecoins. The leaders of decentralized finance (DeFi) in the ecosystem are Dano Finance ($14.15 million), Minswap ($13.18 million) and Liqwid ($12.36 million). These figures highlight Cardano's significant lag behind competitors: the current TVL in Ethereum reaches $41.32 billion, and in Solana – $4.78 billion.

Against this background, the founder of the network, Charles Hoskinson, stated that the ecosystem will develop on its own path, without entering into direct competition with other blockchains. The key growth driver should be the Cardano PRIME initiative from the AlphaGrowth project. The developers requested 120 million ADA tokens from the Cardano treasury, as well as a fixed fee of 11 million ADA and bonuses of up to 29 million ADA when completing KPIs. If successful, this program should increase the network's TVL to $290 million within a year.

Hoskinson also has high hopes for the development of the RealFi direction, which transfers traditional financial applications to the blockchain, and the launch of the Pogun bridge. The latter will allow bitcoin holders to use their assets in decentralized applications (dApps) of the Cardano ecosystem. The technological basis for this was laid by the Van Rossem hard fork in July, which successfully reduced the cost of executing Plutus smart contracts and prepared the network for future large-scale updates.