Cardano at nine: 8.87 transactions per block, and ADA 92.3% off its high

Cardano's genesis block was minted on 23 September 2017, and the Foundation marked the ninth anniversary with a set of network figures. They are worth dividing into each other, because the result explains the entire current roadmap.

Nine years, in the project's own numbers:

• 13,978,119 blocks and 123,982,111 transactions, which works out at 8.87 transactions per block.
• 2,890 stake pools, or about 42,900 transactions each over the nine years.
• 36,322 governance votes on 158 on-chain actions, an average of 230 votes per decision.

The first line is the one that matters. Across 3,287 days the chain has averaged 4,253 blocks and 37,719 transactions a day, and 8.87 transactions per block. That is not a congested network running at its limit. It is a network running at its designed block rate with room left in almost every block, and it is exactly why the published roadmap leads with throughput: Leios is targeted at a 10 to 65 times increase, with Hydra handling layer-2 scaling alongside it.

“Nine years ago, Cardano's first block was minted.”

— Cardano Foundation, Ninth anniversary statement

The Cardano Foundation, marking the anniversary

The part with no obvious comparison

Governance is the part with no obvious comparison elsewhere. A ratified on-chain constitution, 158 formal actions and 36,322 votes cast is a working mechanism rather than a white paper, and 230 votes per decision is a real participation figure for a system this young. Whatever else is argued about Cardano, this is the piece that other chains talk about wanting and have not shipped.

The engineering cadence has also held. Eleven named upgrades since Byron in 2017: Shelley in July 2020, Alonzo in September 2021, Vasil in September 2022, Valentine in February 2023, Chang in 2024, Plomin in 2025, Van Rossem on 18 July this year. Ahead of that, the published schedule puts Dijkstra Phase 1 in the fourth quarter of 2026, the Amaru node producing mainnet blocks in November and Peras in the second quarter of 2027.

Nine years, both halves

The market has gone the other way, and an anniversary piece that leaves this out is not worth reading. ADA trades at $0.2376 with a market value of $8.9bn, seventeenth by capitalisation. That is 92.3% below the $3.09 it reached on 1 September 2021 and 71.1% lower over the past year. Meanwhile 37.53bn of the 45bn maximum supply is already issued, which is 83.4%, so most of the token that will ever exist already does.

Both halves are true at once, which is the honest summary of nine years. The chain ships on schedule, governs itself on chain and has never been the bottleneck it is now being scaled past. The token is among the 79% of large assets that are still down over the year. Which of those facts decides an allocation is a separate question, and it is one our asset guides exist to help with.

Informational material, not investment advice. Network figures are as published by the Cardano Foundation for the ninth anniversary; price and supply data are CoinGecko readings for 23 September 2026. The per-block and per-day ratios are our own arithmetic.