Cardano stablecoin protocol Ardana raises $10M in latest funding round

Ardana, a stablecoin ecosystem built on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, received $10 million in seed capital from a group of investors led by Three Arrows Capital and Ascensive Assets.

Ryan Matovu, CEO and co-founder of Ardana, issued the following statement regarding the deal:

“As the first all-in-one stablecoin ecosystem built on Cardano, our platform provides users with convenient access to liquidity, an ever-present concern in the hyper-competitive defi world. We are also able to leverage Cardano’s speed, scalability and security to offer a decentralized financial solution that works for everyone, and soon we’ll even be facilitating foreign exchange on-chain."

Users can send, receive, store, borrow, and lend the stable coin — known as dUSD — freely on the network. It will have a 1:1 exchange rate with the U.S. dollar, and will be fully collateralized with cryptocurrencies such as ADA.

Ardana plans to hold a public sale of its secondary token, known as DANA, for protocol governance as outlined in its roadmap. The project's developers intend for the sale to occur later this year, with 35.625 million out of 125 million tokens up for grabs for $0.30 to $0.60 each. The team also plans to introduce a decentralized exchange, or DEX, called Danaswap by the second quarter of next year. Ardana claims Danaswap will feature low slippage and yield farming opportunities for liquidity providers.

The Cardano network currently has lower transaction fees than other networks Ethereum, which may be advantageous for stablecoin adoption. According to Bitquery and BitInfoCharts respectively, users pay an average cost of $0.43 for each Cardano transaction, compared to $47.23 for Ethereum at time of publication. Cardano's development activity has picked up steam since its Alonzon Fork last month — which enabled smart contract functionality on its blockchain.