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 Token holders Methodology

## 1. Overview

Token holders measures the number of unique addresses that hold a non-zero balance of ADA, the native asset of Cardano. The growth of the holder base is tracked over time to provide a proxy for network adoption and user retention. By identifying addresses with active holdings, the distribution of the native asset across the network is monitored, allowing for a distinction between transient transaction activity and long-term asset ownership.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Native asset net flows from the Cardano ledger, covering Cardano

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Native asset flow extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture the net change in asset holdings for every account address on the network
- **Logic**: Daily net flows for the native asset, denominated in lovelace, are extracted from the Cardano ledger. These flows represent the net result of all incoming and outgoing transfers for a specific address within a 24-hour UTC period.
- **Key fields**: `account_address` (unique identifier), `value` (net change in ADA), `timestamp` (timing of activity)

### Component B: Balance tracking and gap filling

- **Purpose**: Maintain a continuous record of the current balance for every Cardano address
- **Logic**: A running total of net flows is calculated chronologically for each account address to derive the end-of-day balance. Historical balances are carried forward to subsequent days. For days where no transaction activity occurs for an address, the previous balance is propagated forward to ensure every address has a recorded balance for every timestamp.
- **Key fields**: `balance` (calculated cumulative holding), `account_address` (unique identifier)

### Component C: Holder aggregation

- **Purpose**: Count the unique number of addresses with active holdings
- **Logic**: Unique account addresses with a balance greater than zero are identified for each daily timestamp. The count of these addresses is aggregated to produce the final metric. The results are filtered to ensure only valid data identifiers and chains are included in the final output.
- **Key fields**: `tokenholders` (distinct count of addresses)

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

Unique addresses holding a non-zero balance of the project's native token.

CardanoADA

Token holders

Token holders

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