Cardano (ADA) token trading volumes have surged, with daily averages around $720 million in February, and soaring past $1.4 billion in March.

This spike is attributed to a social media post from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who included ADA within the nation's strategic crypto reserve, signaling endorsement to a wider audience.

In February, daily average trading volumes for Cardano’s ADA token hovered around $720 million, but they surged past $1.4 billion in March, according to data from crypto analytics firm Token Terminal.

The spike in trading activity follows a recent social media post by former U.S. President Donald Trump, where he mentioned that the nation’s strategic crypto reserve includes ADA, signaling endorsement of the token to a wider audience.

“The U.S. has now included Cardano’s ADA in its strategic crypto reserves,” Trump wrote in a recent post on Truth Social, referring to a report by The Block.

The post sparked reactions from members of the Cardano community, with one user on X, formerly Twitter, sharing a screenshot of Trump’s post and tagging the official Cardano account.

“We’ve made it,” one user wrote.

Another user expressed hope that the development would bring recognition to Cardano among a broader audience.

“Hopefully, this will get more people interested in Cardano and learning about it,” the user wrote.

The Cardano blockchain, launched in late 2017, has quietly established a formidable presence in the crypto landscape, earning notice for different reasons lately.

While the ADA token currently boasts a market cap of $25.6 billion, the numbers behind the scenes with Google’s data counter showing over 5 million unique wallets and 1.3 million delegates, with the network seeing thousands of new wallets being created daily.

Cardano's TVL now stands at $329 million, although CEO Frederik Gregaard believes the metric is often overstated in crypto. He highlights the importance of "non-value transactions," which span real-world applications like minting decentralized IDs, tracking metadata, and documenting verifiable actions. Gregaard envisions an environment where 50% of transactions on the Cardano blockchain serve these non-financial purposes.

One initiative highlighting Cardano's real-world footprint is its partnership with Veritree. Together, they facilitated donations of over 1 million ADA tokens to plant 1 million mangrove trees in Kenya, with every transaction comprehensively recorded on the blockchain.

Another collaboration with Brazil's largest state-owned IT firm, SERPRO, positions Cardano to accelerate blockchain adoption in South America, streaming 33 billion annual transactions for a substantial portion of Brazil's federal administration and offering blockchain training to 8,000 employees.

In contrast to peers like Solana, which experienced a meteoric rise in TVL—from $2.2 billion to over $10 billion by 2024—Cardano's journey has been steadier, progressing from $445 million to $537 million in the same timeframe.

Cardano's outlook is defined by a focus on foundational use cases rather than speculative financial vehicles like NFTs or memecoins.

The burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) sector on Cardano reflects this ethos. For instance, Minswap, the platform's dedicated decentralized exchange (DEX), has recorded a cumulative trading volume of $3.4 billion this month, boosted by a peak of nearly $271 million in December, as reported by DefiLlama. Lending protocols such as Liqwid, Lenfi, and Optim Finance contribute to a TVL of over $116 million in Cardano's lending market.

While Gregaard emphasizes projects that fortify Cardano's mission, he also acknowledges the friction that can arise among the blockchain's three principal entities: the Cardano Foundation, IOG (led by Charles Hoskinson), and Emurgo. This tripartite structure can lead to strategic dissonance.

An anonymous community member once claimed that recent initiatives by the Foundation might be efforts to overshadow the other two entities, a sentiment Hoskinson acknowledged while discussing the complexities of governance within Cardano.

However, Gregaard approaches the dynamic with a cooperative mindset.

"There’s no monetary exchange going on between us, but we do work very closely together," he says, detailing joint sponsorships at conferences, differentiating their operational model from the more centralized treasury management seen in entities like the Ethereum Foundation.

"We [Cardano Foundation] are the liability umbrella for the community and the blockchain," he adds, highlighting the crucial regulatory and legal responsibilities they shoulder within the global financial landscape.