According to CryptoPotato, Cardano has seen significant development activity in September, consistently fueling the network's advancement. Based on a chart posted by CryptoDep using Santiment's data, Cardano topped the chart for developer activity over the past 30 days with a score of 572, even during the crypto market slowdown. This puts the network ahead of prominent projects such as Polkadot, Hedera, Chainlink, and Cosmos.

Despite facing setbacks in the second half of 2023 due to regulatory concerns and competition from layer-2 networks like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism, Cardano has made a comeback with a significant uptick in developer activity. With a 572 score throughout the month, Cardano has continued to dominate in terms of development activity in its public GitHub repositories. Cardano's native token, however, traded mostly below $0.25 for the entirety of September, indicating that the team has not given up even in the face of underwhelming price performance.

Trailing closely behind Cardano are projects like Polkadot and Chainlink, with 501 and 388 scored, respectively. These projects are followed by Hedera, Cosmos, Aptos, and Avalanche, with 358, 338, 248, and 242, respectively. The total value locked in Cardano has also picked up pace, exceeding 615 million ADA after weeks of stagnation, due to thriving decentralized finance (DeFi) projects running on top of it. Minswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Cardano, saw a notable spike across various metrics after months of low activity. Over the past 30 days, the platform's UAW was up by more than 7% to 19.92k, while its volume witnessed a boost of over 943% during the same period and currently stood at $3.53 billion, according to data from DappRadar.