DripDropz, MuesliSwap & Sundaeswap spearhead Cardano DeFi explosion

Some individuals in the crypto space have loosely called Cardano a ghost chain. Well, DripDropz, MuesliSwap, & SundaeSwap have been working to put that characterization to rest.

Last year was huge for Cardano's ecosystem and its native token, ADA. Since January 1st, 2021, ADA is up from $0.18 to now $1.18, representing gains of about 660%. These gains were a lot higher, immediately after the Alonzo hard fork that brought smart contracts to Cardano in September.

Since smart contracts functionality was integrated onto Cardano's mainnet, the Cardano community has been busy building dApps for the ecosystem. Now, most of those dApps are preparing to launch.

The most popular of those is SundaeSwap, which is hoped to be the most impactful DEX on Cardano. Regardless of how that expectation turn outs eventually, SundaeSwap now reigns as the 'golden boy' DEX for Cardano's community.

SundaeSwap successfully deployed its testnet in early December. In late December they announced that they had conducted a successful audit. Just last week, they prepped the community on what to expect in terms of performance on their DEX, at least immediately after its launch.

Within Cardano's circles, be it on youtube or its social media community, a lot of ADA fans are eagerly waiting for SundaeSwap to go live. This expectant mood is fueled by several questions:

1. What's the price of SundaeSwap going to be on launch?

2. Will $Sundae be as lucrative as say, UniSwap?

3. Will the launch of SundaeSwap jumpstart ADA's price rally? That's if bitcoin and other macro factors hold the bears at bay.

4. What will be SundaeSwaps ISO criteria be? The DEX team announced that there will be measures to ensure that the rewards aren't skewed in favor of whales. However, one can't help but be curious how the actual distribution will be like.

   One thing is clear though SundaeSwap will allocate 100,000,000 SUNDAE tokens via the ISO. Learn about SundaeSwap tokenomics.

5. Will SundaeSwap live up to the hype? That's will it best other DEXs like ADAX Pro, WingRiders, ErgoDEX, MinSwap?

6. Will the UX experience on SundaeSwap be comparable to what we have seen on other blockchain ecosystems e.g UniSwap?

How DripDropz, MuesliSwap, & SundaeSwap spearhead Cardano's DeFi explosion

Firstly, it's important to qualify that there are at least a dozen of other dApps that are also fueling the ecosystem takeoff. For that, they deserve their fair share of credit. However, these 3 stick out to me most because of the way in which they have done it.

They encouraged ADA holders to move their holdings from exchanges to personal wallets.

Before the news about the SundaeSwap SPO vote, I had was reluctant to move my small ADA holdings off an exchange. This is in spite of having heard of Nami, Yoroi & Daedulus.

It seemed like too much trouble to go through to stake a few dozens of ADA. A thing that I could already do on the exchange.

When I read about SundaeSwap's SPO and ISO, I decided to give Nami & Yoroi a try. Unlike Daedulus, you don't have to run a full Cardano node. Now, I get most of the benefits of self custody on ADA. More on that later.

Ever since there have been a lot of youtube videos and tweets by stake pool operators encouraging ADA holders to stake their holdings with the SundaeSwap Scoopers. It's plausible that this campaign has prompted most individuals to open personal Cardano wallets, actively stake and participate in the community.

DripDropz has added momentum to this campaign by enticing ADA holders to stake advantages of airdrops of various native Cardano tokens.

What's DripDropz?

DripDropz is a Cardano project that provides token dispensing services to the Cardano community. During every Cardano epoch, ADA stakers can claim native Cardano tokens from DripDropz website.

The claiming feature is pretty straightforward. You enter your staking address and the service check if you're eligible for token drops.

Thanks to Cardano's UTXO technology, individuals can withdraw up to 10 different tokens per transaction. Most people have paid roughly 2 ADA for each withdrawal.

Currently, the value of most of those tokens is close to worthless. In fact, most of them are obviously shitcoins and have awful tokenomics. However, most promising dApps & ada meme tokens are opting to use the dripdropz service. Similarly, some of the tokens e.g $DRIP token are trading at a profitable price on MuesliSwap.

Since, withdrawals are available per every Cardano epoch (every 5 days), it currently makes economic sense to claim the $DRIP token. Every epoch, most staking addresses are eligible to withdraw 1000 DRIP. At the time of this writing, each DRIP trades at 0.006 ~ 0.009 ADA. Hence, each DRIP withdrawal is about 6 ~ 9 ADA minus transaction fees.

Someone on twitter really put things into perspective. Since DripDropz avails token after every 5 days (i.e during each Cardano epoch), you could in theory accumulate 52000 DRIP token in a year. Assuming the price of each DRIP token doesn't fall below 0.005. That would be 250 ADA worth.

One can opt to trade their DRIP withdrawals immediately via MuesliSwap.

How is MuesliSwap helping Defi takeoff on Cardano Chain.

While other Cardano DEXs are preparing to launch, MuesliSwap has been running since late November last year. Yes, MuesliSwap, not SundaeSwap, is the first DEX to launch on Cardano, and it works fairly well. It uses an order book model to match trades.

Earlier this afternoon, I took it for a test drive. The experience was pretty straight forward:

1. Connect your ADA wallet. MuesliSwap works with Nami, Eternl (previously CCvault) & Gero Wallet.
2. Setup the trade (market or limit order)
3. Sign the transaction
4. Wait for your order to be matched.

In my case, the trade was almost instantaneous. In less than a minute, my 2000 DRIP tokens were gone and 13 ADA were added to my wallet.

You can trade a lot of Cardano assets and dApp via MuesliSwap. Just last week one happy Reddit user was thrilled to use MuesliSwap to trade LQ tokens that they got from Liqwid Finance airdrop at 45 ADA per LQ token. LiqWid Finance is a DeFi lending protocol launching on Cardano.

Updates

A few days after we published this article, SundaeSwap has announced that it mainnet launch for Thursday, the 20th of January. As we speculated this announcement sent the price of ADA on a pump by upwards of 20%. Since then Cardano's price has been trading between $1.35 ~ $1.55 range.