Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Cardano is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson & Jeremy Wood and launched in 2017.

ADA holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Blockchains (L1)

Cardano

# Cardano Staking market cap Methodology

## 1. Overview

Staking market cap measures the total value of native ADA assets currently delegated to stake pools on the Cardano blockchain. The amount of capital helping to secure the network through its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is reflected by this metric. Calculations are performed based on the active stake data recorded at the start of each epoch.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Active stake and epoch boundary records from the Cardano network, covering Cardano
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for ADA

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Active stake extraction and normalization

- **Purpose**: Retrieve the raw quantity of ADA helping to secure the network
- **Logic**: Active stake values are extracted from epoch data records. These values represent the total ADA delegated to all stake pools at the snapshot of a specific epoch. Amounts are converted from lovelace to ADA by dividing the values by 1,000,000.
- **Key fields**: `active_stake` (raw staked amount), `epoch` (epoch identifier)

### Component B: Temporal distribution and deduplication

- **Purpose**: Map epoch-based stake records to a daily time series
- **Logic**: Cardano epochs, which consist of exactly 432,000 slots (five days), are used as the primary measurement interval. The active stake recorded for an epoch is distributed across the five-day period. In instances where overlapping data points occur at epoch boundaries, the maximum stake value is selected for each day to ensure consistency.
- **Key fields**: `start_time` (epoch start timestamp), `staked_ada` (normalized ADA quantity)

### Component C: USD conversion and final aggregation

- **Purpose**: Normalize the metric to USD and ensure data continuity
- **Logic**: Daily ADA stake quantities are multiplied by end-of-day asset prices. A fill-forward strategy is utilized to ensure a continuous daily time series for the project-level metric. All values are calculated with a daily granularity using UTC day boundaries.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily date), `staking_market_cap` (USD-denominated value)

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Value of native tokens currently staked to secure a proof-of-stake network.

CardanoADA

Staking market cap

Staking market cap

Competitive landscape