Despite the overall cryptocurrency market trending downwards in recent days, and accounting for its uninspiring results since September 2021, Cardano (ADA) has been on a massive rally the past week, rising over 26.7% in prices even as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) consolidate around the $40,000 and $3,000 mark, respectively.

The major factor behind Cardano’s inspired run is the news of the launch of Sundae Swap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the Cardano network. This will be the first major dApps release on Cardano since its Alonzo hard fork network upgrade that brought in the functionalities of smart contracts.

Sundae Swap will feature most of the familiar decentralized financial services seen on other DeFi protocols, such as staking, swapping, and yield farming. SUNDAE, the underlying coin of the Sundae Swap DEX, will be allocated as a reward to yield farmers participating in the liquidity pools.

Sundae Swap will be launching with a Beta label. The official statement regarding the anticipated launch said:

“While the DEX’s smart contracts have been fully audited and the DEX will meet all industry standards for security, the implementation of fully decentralized governance will not be immediately possible due to existing transaction size limits on the Cardano blockchain.”

And thus, even with the DEX being completely functional, due to the lack of fully implemented governance system Sundae will be proceeding in a Beta stage until its completion.

Adding to the ADA hype is Pavia, the first Cardano-based metaverse. 60% of the land parcels in Pavia have already been sold, showing that there is a strong interest when it comes to the potential opportunities that could arise in Pavia.

Cardano’s price has slowed down slightly today, but it is still up tremendously compared to its cryptocurrency peers over the past week. Here is a snapshot of ADA’s price since January 12, compared to Ethereum.

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