Cardano Beats Ethereum in Dev Activity, So Why is ADA Still Struggling? 

Cardano leads in code commits, but ADA’s price and real-world traction remain underwhelming.

Robot working on a Cardano coin in a wireframe landscape.
Created by Gabor Kovacs from DailyCoin

Cardano (ADA) blockchain has reached a major technical milestone, overtaking Ethereum in core developer activity. Despite this technical achievement, the price of ADA remains largely unaffected, and community sentiment is far from celebratory.

Cardano Tops Ethereum in GitHub Commits

According to data from Cryptometheus, Cardano registered 21,388 code commits across GitHub repositories during the past month, outpacing Ethereum (20,824) in total development activity. 

Sponsored

The network, co-founded by Charles Hoskinson, currently hosts 36 active projects and boasts developer participation across more than 4,050 linked repositories.

Commits are considered a key metric of network development, reflecting updates, bug fixes, and new feature integrations. 

Cardano’s technical community sees this surge as evidence of its long-term commitment to building a scalable and decentralized blockchain infrastructure.

Yet, despite this progress, the market has responded with indifference. ADA’s price has remained largely flat over the past week, registering a slight 0.65% decline and trading around $0.71, as per CoinMarketCap. This is still 77% below its all-time high of $3.10 reached in 2021.

Cardano (ADA) price made no significant gains during the past week. Source: CoinMarketCap

Cardano Community Disappointed

In the meantime, this disconnect between development and price performance has sparked 

frustration within the Cardano community

On Reddit, users expressed growing dissatisfaction, arguing that surpassing Ethereum in commits is not a sufficient measure of success. 

“I’m sick of the narrative of overcoming someone, let’s focus on our own success,” one user wrote

Another added, “I won’t consider it a success until they do something more useful than meme coins or the price goes back to $3.”

Lacks Real-World Applications

The major reason for that is that Cardano has limited traction in real-world applications. 

Unlike Ethereum, which hosts major DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave, or Solana, which offers high-speed, low-fee networks supporting platforms like Raydium, Cardano has struggled to gain significant adoption in decentralized finance (DeFi).

As of today, Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) in DeFi stands at just $341 million, significantly trailing Solana’s $8 billion and Ethereum’s nearly $52 billion, according to DeFiLlama.

Ethereum TVL significantly dominates over Solana’s and Cardano’s TVL. Source: Defillama

Why This Matters

Cardano’s surge in developer activity underscores a strong commitment from its technical community. However, without meaningful DeFi adoption or impactful dApps, this growth risks becoming irrelevant in the eyes of users and investors.

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Author
Alex Costa

Alex Costa is a crypto writer and investor specializing in researching, analyzing and reporting on promising small-cap projects that are gaining traction in the industry. He has been in crypto since 2018, when he began looking for hidden gems in crypto. Today, he is dedicated to finding the next top performing NFTs and tokens.

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