Cardano (ADA) addresses with a balance greater than $1 one thousand thousand take surged 173% during the latest ADA cost rally.

Specifically, the ADA/USD substitution rate gained almost 200% later on bottoming out at $one.007 on July 20. The pair reached its record high of $3.02 in the previous session, a motion that was followed by a 6.42% price correction to $2.73 at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, the same period saw the total number of Cardano wallets that hold at least $i 1000000 worth of ADA tokens surge from 3,625 to 9,830, per data provided by data analytics platforms CoinMetrics and Messari.

ADA addresses with balance greater than $1 meg. Source: Messari, CryptoQuant

Additionally, against ADA's 1,455% twelvemonth-to-date (YTD) gains, the total number of Cardano millionaires surged from 504 to 9,830 — a 1,850% leap. That coincided with erratic spikes in Google Trends searches for the keyword "Cardano," signaling retail interest.

Furthermore, the number of Cardano wallets belongings more than $x million worth of ADA tokens climbed from 504 on July 20 to about ane,000. On Jan. 1, there were only 86 wallets with balances in a higher place $x million.

Hodling makes Cardano investors rich

ADA's rise in 2022 too led to a spike in the sum of its unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs.

UTXOs represent cryptocurrencies that have remained unspent in their crypto wallets after eolith. Therefore, if a blockchain network sees a rise in UTXOs, information technology indicates that most wallets are property the cryptocurrency instead of transferring information technology to other addresses — i.e., a weaker selling sentiment.

CoinMetrics information fetched by Messari shows that Cardano'due south UTXO count surged from 816,600 on January. 1 to two.85 million at the time of writing. That illustrates an incredible rising in Cardano investors' "hodling" sentiment, something that might have worked as a backstop to ADA's i,455% YTD rally.

ADA UTXO count. Source: CoinMetrics, Messari

The decision to hold instead of selling ADA tokens found its cues in Cardano'south potential to unseat its pinnacle blockchain rival, Ethereum, equally the latter experienced problems with network congestion and higher transaction fees at the beginning of this year.

For instance, ADA/USD surged 579% in the commencement quarter on optimism around its "Mary" upgrade, a protocol update that made Cardano a multi-asset blockchain. In doing so, the blockchain became uniform with host projects involved in the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) space.

The update, which went alive on March 1, was followed upwards with some other hard fork in July, called "Shelley." The new mainnet introduced Cardano's proposed proof-of-stake layer, assuasive users to contribute to the transaction validation process either directly (by operating a pale pool) or indirectly (via delegation) in exchange for staking rewards.

ADA daily price chart. Source: TradingView

But despite solid fundamentals, ADA/USD surged a mere nineteen.21% during the second quarter, partly due to Red china'south crackdown on its regional cryptocurrency industry and Tesla CEO Elon Musk'due south anti-Bitcoin (BTC) tweets.

Related: Cardano chalks a bearish wedge as ADA price soars past over 100% in Q3

Nonetheless, the Cardano UTXO count kept surging during the second quarter's turbulence in the crypto marketplace. It topped out at 2.93 million on July 26, when ADA was irresolute hands for $1.25.

Smart contracts

The third quarter has witnessed Cardano finalizing its plans to become a smart contract platform like to Ethereum via its and so-called "Alonzo" upgrade. As a result, speculative bids for ADA, alongside investors' hodling sentiment, have surged.

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