Milestone Week For Cardano: MELD Lending Launched, Daedalus Updated

The Cardano blockchain has undergone massive improvements this week. As of today, the network should have increased data throughput, expanding the Cardano block size by 11% up to 80kB.

On top of this milestone, Cardano’s parent company, IOHK, recently announced the release of a new version of Cardano’s open-source wallet ‘Daedalus.’ 

The updates wallet is said to support Cardano node v1.33.0 and bring significant performance improvements. The Cardano network also hit another significant achievement after it surpassed 3 million wallets this week.

In other positive news, the adoption of the decentralized lending and borrowing protocol is gaining momentum on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain.

Earlier this week, MELD launched its first non-custodial DeFi lending and borrowing protocol based on Cardano smart contracts. The Singapore-based MELD is the first non-custodial DeFi liquidity protocol used for borrowing fiat against crypto collateral, and earning yield on deposits. Its overall vision is to serve over 2 billion of the world’s unbanked population.

Almost 100 million of its native MELD tokens were staked on the protocol within the first three days since its launch.

Meld allows users to claim an instant fiat loan against their cryptocurrency holdings, which is then instantly transferred to their bank accounts anywhere in the world. At the same time, the protocol allows users to lock their digital assets to MELD’s liquidity pools in order to generate yield. Users can then make monthly payments to pay back the loan, and will have their collateralized assets returned to them whenever the loan is paid off.

The MELD protocol was the first ever to launch an ISPO (Initial Stake Pool Offering) in July 2021, which attracted over $1 billion in contributions in less than 3 months. 

In addition to MELD, another Cardano-based decentralized lending protocol, ADALend, has announced a partnership with the Robatz Network, a software development company, to develop and launch a new DeFi lending protocol on the Cardano blockchain within the first quarter of 2022.