Cardano Breaks Its 2021 Transaction Record: 1.78 Million in Five Days, Vote Lapsed

Cardano processed exactly 1,780,896 transactions in the five days between 6 and 11 October 2026. The chain has never moved more in its history; the previous high, from November 2021, sits 13.7 percent below it. The Cardano price has not responded: ADA stands at around $0.2384, about 5.3 percent below where it was 24 hours earlier.

Most reports name the Cardano governance votes as the cause, above all the proposal for a minimum fee of 75 ADA for stake pools. That explanation does not add up arithmetically. We counted the votes on that proposal one by one: there were 148. This article sets out what the chain data supports about the record, why the proposal has since lapsed, and what follows from it if you hold ADA in Germany.

The figures in this article rest on the public block data of the Cardano chain itself, analysed across all 662 epochs since the chain launched, and on the full list of votes on the proposal in question. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on 12 October 2026.

Epoch 660: 1,780,896 transactions between 6 and 11 October

Cardano counts in epochs rather than days. An epoch is a fixed stretch of five days in which the chain produces blocks, settles rewards and fixes voting rights. Epoch 660 began on 6 October 2026 at 9:44 p.m. and ended on 11 October at the same time.

Within that window, 1,780,896 transactions were written into 21,243 blocks. For comparison: epoch 659, the five days before, carried 158,011 transactions. The jump is 11.3-fold. Epochs 653 to 657 all sat between 89,353 and 130,442 transactions, in other words within the usual band. Epoch 660 is not a trend but a single, extremely sharp spike.

The previous high dates from epoch 304 in November 2021

The old record stood at 1,566,974 transactions and was set in epoch 304, which ran from 21 to 26 November 2021. ADA was then just past its all-time high, the market was in the closing phase of the last big cycle, and the chain had only recently gained smart contracts.

That comparison is the genuinely interesting part, and most coverage leaves it out: in 2021 the load came out of a hot market with prices to match. In 2026 it comes at a price 92.3 percent below the all-time high of $3.09. The same throughput, an entirely different price base. Anyone reading network activity as a price driver gets a counter-example here straight from the chain data.

83.8 transactions per block: the block count stayed the same, the load did not

The decisive observation lies in the ratio, not in the total. Cardano produces a quantity of blocks per epoch set by the chain, and that quantity has not changed: 21,243 blocks in epoch 660 against 21,207 in epoch 659. A difference of 36 blocks, which is to say nothing.

Per block that works out at 83.8 transactions against 7.45 the week before. The blocks were roughly eleven times fuller, not more frequent. The look back is interesting too: in the 2021 record epoch 304, a block held 74.3 transactions at an almost identical block count. The chain packed more into the same frame in 2026 than in 2021, even though block size has not multiplied in that time.

For the technology that means the load was not spread across a larger infrastructure, it was pressed into the existing one. The chain carried that without an outage, and that is the solid finding of the week. It has nothing to do with a capacity upgrade or a protocol change.

337,720 ADA in fees over five days, 0.19 ADA per transaction

The fees draw the same picture from a second angle. Epoch 660 generated 337,720 ADA in transaction fees, where epoch 659 produced 49,495 ADA. The factor is 6.8.

Notably, fees rose less steeply than the transaction count, 6.8-fold against 11.3-fold. In arithmetic terms that means an average fee of 0.19 ADA per transaction in epoch 660, against 0.31 ADA in epoch 659. The transactions were more simply built than usual, then: few inputs and outputs, no demanding smart-contract calls. On Cardano the fee follows the size and complexity of a transaction, not an auction procedure as on Ethereum. A mass event made up of many small, uniform transfers therefore produces exactly this pattern.

At 337,720 ADA and a price around $0.2384, we are talking about roughly $80,500 in fees over five days. For the stake pool operators, whose remuneration was at issue over the same period, that is not a sum that turns a situation around. Precisely that is why the fee question became political on Cardano at all.

The minPoolCost vote on 75 ADA lapsed in epoch 661

minPoolCost is the fixed amount a stake pool retains from rewards each epoch before anything at all is distributed to delegators. That amount stands at 170 ADA today. The proposal voted on since epoch 654 wanted to cut it to 75 ADA. Small pools would have become more competitive, and delegator returns would have shifted slightly.

When we reported on this vote on the minimum fee on 10 October, it stood at 34 percent in favour with the deadline approaching on 11 October. The result is now in, and it moved, but not enough: the delegated representatives' yes votes ended at 44.18 percent of the active voting power, the no votes at 55.82 percent. The majority was therefore missed. The proposal lapsed when its deadline passed in epoch 661, meaning it was neither adopted nor enacted. The 100,000 ADA deposit goes back to the submitters, and the minimum fee stays at 170 ADA.

For delegators that means, concretely: nothing changes in how your staking rewards are distributed. How hard that fixed amount actually presses on returns depends on the size of your pool; across the pools we recalculated at the start of October, returns ran between 2.1 and 2.7 percent a year.

148 votes cast: why the governance explanation does not add up

Now to the question of cause. Several trade outlets trace the transaction record to a rush on the governance votes: users are said to have moved their wallets in order to vote on network parameters, with the deadline coinciding with the end of the epoch. That sounds plausible, because the timings line up.

It can be counted, though, and we counted it. The full list of votes on the minPoolCost proposal contains 148 entries: 87 yes votes and 37 no votes from delegated representatives, plus 19 abstentions and 5 yes votes from the constitutional committee. Each of those votes is one transaction on the chain.

148 transactions against 1,780,896. That is 0.008 percent of the record. Even counting every other open proposal in the epoch and assuming similar participation for each, you do not get beyond a few hundred votes. The governance explanation does not carry the record even as an order of magnitude.

The reason lies in how the system is built: on Cardano it is not individual holders who vote but DReps, delegated representatives who exercise the bundled voting weight of many wallets. A holder who has delegated their voting power to a DRep once need not send a single transaction for any further vote. The whole purpose of the design lies in that bundling. A voting deadline on Cardano therefore produces almost no chain load, structurally.

629 stake pools vote permanently to abstain, 17 to “no confidence”

The vote list shows something else that matters more for placing the vote itself than for the record: not one stake pool voted actively on this proposal. 629 pools sit on the permanent default of "always abstain", bringing a voting weight of some 12.22 billion ADA with them, and 17 more on "no confidence". Among the delegated representatives, a further 10.5 billion ADA or so sits on permanent abstention.

Measured against the active stake of roughly 21.27 billion ADA in this epoch, Cardano parameters are therefore decided by a fairly small, alert share of participants, while the large remainder parks on a default setting. That distribution is what the chain data says and is no judgement on those involved. Anyone who does not want to leave their voting weight unused has to delegate it actively to a representative; with a hardware wallet in self-custody that works directly from the wallet, while with ADA on an exchange it generally does not work at all.

A stake pool report names a HOSKY campaign as the driver of the first three days

If it was not the vote, then what? The only concrete attribution so far comes from the epoch report of a stake pool operator, quoted by the outlet TechBullion. On that account, some 1.08 million transactions fell in the first three days of epoch 660 alone, and most of them traced back to a campaign around the Cardano token HOSKY, in which participants were to send ADA to an address and receive tokens back. A post on the exchange platform KuCoin credits the same campaign with a peak of 440 transactions per second in a single block.

We cannot confirm that attribution. Both accounts rest on the same source, and we have not recalculated a single campaign's share of 1.78 million transactions from the chain data. What we can say is that the pattern fits. An event in which many people send small amounts back and forth produces exactly what the data shows, namely very many very simple transactions at a below-average fee each. The vote does not produce that pattern.

Our assessment: the record is real and the chain carried it without disruption, but it is not a demand signal for ADA. Three pieces of evidence point that way. First, 148 votes do not explain 1.78 million transactions. Second, the fee per transaction, at 0.19 ADA, came in below the previous week's, which argues for mass simple transactions and against economically heavy use. Third, the current epoch 661 is already well lower again. Against that it could be objected that even an artificially generated load test proves resilience, and that is true. Only nobody pays a higher ADA price for resilience.

$66.5 million in Cardano DeFi: the record does not come out of capital

A second angle, alongside price and transaction count, is the capital actually at work on the chain. Around $66.5 million is currently deposited in Cardano applications. That means the sum working in trading venues, lending protocols and similar applications on the chain.

That figure puts the record in proportion. Cardano carries a market capitalisation of roughly $8.95 billion, which places it 17th among the largest cryptocurrencies; 37.55 of a maximum 45 billion ADA are in circulation. Against that stand $66.5 million of active capital in the applications. For comparison: on Solana that value is around $6.1 billion, on NEAR around $262 million. A record number of transactions coming off such a narrow base of capital points to many small movements rather than to new money.

ADA at $0.2384, 92.3 percent below the 2021 all-time high

The price itself gives the record week no confirmation. ADA trades at around $0.2384, after a daily high of $0.2556. Over 24 hours that is about 5.3 percent lost, over seven days around 11.4 percent. Only over 30 days does a gain of about 14.8 percent stand. The all-time high of $3.09 from September 2021 sits 92.3 percent above today's level. Trading volume over the past 24 hours comes to roughly $376 million.

The pattern is striking: the most transaction-heavy week in the chain's history coincides with a week in which ADA loses a good tenth of its value. Anyone reading the record as a reason to buy should read that sentence twice. Network activity and price ran in opposite directions on Cardano this week, and the chain data supplies an explanation for it in the fee per transaction.

Delegation, holding period and purchase route: four points for ADA holders in Germany

A failed vote and a throughput record yield four concrete points for you.

The minimum fee stays at 170 ADA. Do not calculate your staking income with 75 ADA. The fixed amount is retained per epoch and per pool before anything is distributed. With a small pool it eats a markedly larger share of your reward than with a large one. Anyone who meant to move their delegation depending on the outcome of the vote now has no occasion to.

Your voting weight does not lapse, it rests. As long as you have not delegated your voting power to a representative, it counts as an abstention in every vote. That is the default setting where, according to the chain data, the largest share of the stake sits. Delegating and staking are two separate acts: you can have your ADA in a pool and your voting weight nowhere at all.

Staking income is taxable in Germany. Rewards from staking count as other income and are taxed in the year they are received. For the ADA itself, the one-year holding period for private assets applies: sell at a gain within a year and that gain is taxable, after that it is not. Whether and how staking affects that period depends on the arrangement; anyone delegating regularly should document the inflows as they come rather than reconstruct them in March of the following year.

The purchase route decides your access to governance. If your ADA sits on an exchange, the exchange holds the keys. You generally cannot vote then, and delegating to a representative drops away too. Anyone who wants that needs the coins in their own wallet. Anyone who does not need it gets along more easily with an exchange licensed in the EU.

Cardano record: epoch 661 is running at 28 transactions per block

As of this analysis, the current epoch 661 has processed 118,374 transactions in 4,269 blocks. That is 27.7 transactions per block: clearly above the normal band of around 7 in the preceding weeks, but far below the 83.8 of the record epoch. The spike is not holding, in other words. Three steps follow from that:

1. Check where your ADA sits and whether the trading venue is licensed in the EU. Since MiCA, providers targeting customers in Germany have to show an authorisation. Which exchanges hold one and what they charge in fees is set out in the overview of MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Document your staking inflows now, not at tax return time. Every reward has its own date of receipt and its own price. Gathering that after the fact costs time and records. We compare the tools for it under crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
3. Decide whether fees or a say weigh more heavily when you buy. The cheap route over an exchange and the route with your own keys are not mutually exclusive, but both cost something. The terms offered by trading venues are in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

Both can be checked without a detour: the figures for epoch 660 are on Cexplorer's epoch page, and the outcomes of the votes are in Cardano's official governance portal.

(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)