Cardano Founder Reveals Who Is To Blame For ADA’s DeFi Decline

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Cardano has drawn attention once again following its current price decline that pushed it below $0.57, with network activity and investor confidence showing weakness. Reports have suggested that co-founder Charles Hoskinson blamed the Cardano community for the blockchain’s DeFi stagnation. 

However, Hoskinson has now publicly refuted those claims, calling them a misrepresentation of his comments. In a fiery response on the social media platform X, he criticized crypto media outlets for twisting his words, noting that he never blamed users for ADA’s DeFi struggles but instead highlighted a participation imbalance within the ecosystem.

Hoskinson’s Clarification: I Never Blamed Anyone

In a video on X addressing the controversy, Hoskinson expressed frustration at what he described as “fundamentally dishonest” reporting. He stated that the headlines portraying him as blaming Cardano users for the network’s DeFi woes were entirely false. 

He insisted that his initial comments were meant to identify a structural issue within the ecosystem. The structural issue is based on the difference between those who stake ADA and those who engage in decentralized finance, and it is not to assign blame.

According to Hoskinson, over 1.3 million users actively participate in Cardano staking, while far fewer engage with the blockchain’s DeFi protocols. This disparity, he argued, explains why ADA’s total value locked (TVL) is modest compared to other networks. 

He estimated that if the same level of engagement were mirrored on both sides, Cardano’s DeFi TVL could range between $5 billion and $10 billion. Hoskinson pointed out that this observation was not a criticism of the community but an analytical point about user behavior and ecosystem growth patterns. “There’s not a single person in the Cardano ecosystem who I am blaming for our DeFi situation,” he said.

A Closer Look At Cardano’s DeFi Sector

Hoskinson went on to explain that the problem lies not in lack of community engagement, but in the absence of proportional participation between governance and DeFi. According to him, Cardano’s large user base and strong staking participation prove the network’s health and scale, and this contradicts claims that it only has between 10,000 and 50,000 active users.

The real challenge, he said, is understanding why the majority of participants who stake their ADA are not also contributing to DeFi liquidity. These challenges could be factors such as slippage, fees, user experience, yields, and education.

Despite the controversy surrounding the misinterpretation of Hoskinson’s remarks, there is still an underlying issue of Cardano’s sluggish DeFi growth. On-chain data still shows that ADA’s daily active addresses have dropped from over 32,000 in mid-October to around 24,000 in early November.

According to data from DeFiLlama, the Cardano network currently has the 26th largest TVL, with only about $243.2 million in 60 protocols. At the time of writing, ADA is trading at $0.5417, down by 6.2% in the past 24 hours. However, the decline is not limited to Cardano alone, as the entire crypto market is currently down by 4% in the past 24-hour timeframe.

Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com

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