A significant 180 million Cardano (ADA) have been caught up in whale activity in recent days. According to Ali, a crypto analyst, whales have bought over 180 million Cardano (ADA ) in just the past week.

The accumulation stint might be bullish, especially as the crypto market experiences mixed price action and uncertainty surrounding broader economic developments. Whales, or large holders, are often known to accumulate during periods of decline or consolidation.

Cardano saw a sharp dip to lows of $0.743 last Friday as the markets were jolted by macroeconomic concerns, and it has since resorted to a tight range trading between $0.728 and $0.777.

At press time, ADA was up 0.32% in the last 24 hours to $0.752 but down 6.16% weekly.

The buying spree by whales comes at a crucial time for Cardano, as the blockchain continues to strengthen its ecosystem with the first-ever on-chain transaction between Bitcoin and Cardano completed and the introduction of the Cardinal protocol.

Cardano strengthens ecosystem

Bitcoin Ordinals can now be wrapped and bridged to Cardano via Fairgate's BitVMX interoperability protocol, with the first on-chain transaction between Bitcoin and Cardano completed.

This historic technical milestone was made public this week at the world's largest Bitcoin convention in Las Vegas.

According to Input Output, this is a preview of what is to come: a full integration between Bitcoin and Cardano that will open up a whole DeFi universe for the Bitcoin community, unlocking an estimated $1.5 trillion in cross-chain volume.

Cardinal, a protocol that enables Cardano’s infrastructure to play a pivotal role in augmenting Bitcoin, was also introduced. Cardinal defines a mechanism for Bitcoin holders to access DeFi by wrapping their UTXOs (as demonstrated with Ordinals) and enabling a variety of conceivable use cases like staking, lending, borrowing and more.