Newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who recently won a leadership contest of the Liberal Party to replace Justin Trudeau, has dramatically increased his odds of winning the next federal election in the eyes of Polymarket bettors.

Carney now has a 49% chance of winning the next Canadian election, compared to 26% a month ago. Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre’s chances are at 51%, down from 72% in February.

The next Canadian federal election is scheduled to occur on October 20, 2025.

However, under Canada’s Westminster system, if the opposition Conservatives and NDP jointly vote against the minority Liberal government on a confidence motion after Parliament resumes from prorogation on March 24, requested by Trudeau on Jan. 6, as he announced his resignation plans pending a new Liberal leader, the government would fall, triggering an election.

Carney closing the gap against Poilievre on Polymarket – despite a lag between prediction markets and the polls – echoes what the polls are showing.

The Conservatives are just one percentage point ahead of the Liberals, according to Canadian pollster Nanos Research, down from nearly a 16-point lead a month ago according to a polling average.

Observers credit this dramatic shift to trade threats from the U.S., with pollsters indicating Canadians prefer Carney’s business sense and central bank experience over his opponent.

This is all a bit of a contrast to last year’s U.S. election, where prediction markets consistently showed that then-Republican candidate Donald Trump had a lead over his Democratic opponents.

The election result, as CoinDesk wrote in an editorial at the time, was only a surprise to those who get their information from CNN.

Crypto on the Canadian campaign trail?

Crypto doesn’t seem to be a major plank of a hypothetical Canadian election. While Poilievre holds a Canadian-issued BTC ETF, according to disclosures, and has previously made pro-blockchain and crypto comments, most of the campaign rhetoric appears to be about the trade war.

Likewise, Carney, who has made mixed if not skeptical comments on crypto in his role as Bank of England governor hasn’t yet spoken about the topic in his new role as Liberal leader.

Trading volumes for Cardano’s ADA token have exploded of late with daily figures averaging around $720 million in February while exceeding an average of $1.4 billion in March.

This rise was spurred by a social media post by U.S. President Donald Trump, who mentioned ADA as one of the tokens that would be included in the nation’s strategic crypto reserve.

Although Cardano is enjoying its moment of mainstream attention, the layer-1 blockchain has been quietly emerging as a crypto juggernaut since it went live in late 2017.

Adoption metrics

The ADA token has a market cap of $25.6 billion but what’s more notable is what’s under the hood; data from Google shows that the Cardano blockchain has more than 5 million unique wallets and 1.3 million delegators, with thousands of new wallets being created per day.

The blockchain also has $329 million in total value locked (TVL), although Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard believes that metric is overemphasized by crypto communities.

Instead, he points to «non-value transactions» associated with people conducting real-world – albeit non-financial – activities on blockchain rails: Minting a decentralized ID, tracking metadata, recording documents, that sort of thing. Cardano’s a hotbed of such activity, he said.

«I’m fighting to ensure that 50% of the activity is a non-value transaction,» Gregaard told CoinDesk.

One example of this is Cardano’s partnership with Veritree, which saw the Cardano community donate over 1 million ADA tokens to plant 1 million mangrove trees in Kenya, with each donation verified and tracked on the blockchain.

Last week, the Cardano Foundation also announced a deal with SERPRO — Brazil’s largest state-owned IT company – to accelerate blockchain adoption in South America. SERPRO processes 33 billion transactions annually for 90% of Brazil’s federal administration. Additionally, 8,000 employees will also receive blockchain training.

Cardano’s perspective differs from the likes of Solana and the slew of layer-2 networks like Base that pride themselves on total value locked (TVL) and hype-driven movements like memecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

TVL on Solana grew from $2.2 billion to more than $10 billion in 2024, Cardano meanwhile zipped from a modest $445 million to $537 million in the same period.

DeFi on Cardano

Whilst Cardano Foundation’s CEO said his focus is on real-world use cases, the blockchain still boasts a bustling DeFi ecosystem under the surface.

Minswap is Cardano’s native decentralized exchange (DEX). Its cumulative trading volume hit $3.4 billion this month with December alone notching a near-record $271 million, DefiLlama data shows.

There are also a number of lending protocols including Liqwid, Lenfi and Optim Finance, with TVL across Cardano’s lending sector exceeding $116 million.

But the key part of Gregaard’s mission, he insists, is not to exceed that 50% level for financialized transactions. He sees it as staying in line with the Cardano Foundation’s non-profit ethos, even if it limits potential exponential growth of hype-fueled movements like memecoins.

Cardano Foundation vs Hoskinson vs Emurgo

Fulfilling that ethos has its own challenges, mostly because the blockchain is run by three main entities: the Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson’s IOG and Emurgo. The latter two are commercial businesses, which can cause friction between them and the foundation.

«The intent of having a non-profit was that you can optimize decision-making based on 10 years, it’s different than if you optimize decision-making tomorrow,» Gregaard added.

Some of the friction was highlighted by an anonymous Cardano community member in December, who penned an email on a path forward and detailed how the entities running Cardano were at loggerheads.

«CF’s recent burst of activity is part of a larger strategic play—an attempt to undermine Charles, IOG, Intersect, and the broader governance roadmap,» the email read.

«It’s been a long and difficult road, but I do agree with some of the sentiments of the whistleblower,» Hoskinson wrote in response on X.

Gregaard, however, was more diplomatic about any potential rift.

«There’s no monetary exchange going on between us, but we do work very closely together,» he said.

«We sometimes go to [a conference] and we share a booth. So we come together and we sponsor booths together, that’s the closest you will get to any affiliates, which is very different compared to both the Ethereum foundation or Tezos foundation, where they basically control the Treasury and control the disbursements.»

«On the flip side, we [Cardano Foundation] are the liability umbrella for the community and the blockchain, which means that we are the one who interacts with the SEC and the CSDC and the FMA, and I negotiated MICA with the European Parliament.»

The Delaware bankruptcy court handling the FTX estate approved a petition on Thursday from Three Arrows Capital (3AC) to significantly expand its claim against the estate from $120 million to $1.53 billion, marking a major development in the ongoing fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.

3AC, once a dominant crypto hedge fund with over $3 billion in reported net assets, collapsed in 2022 while it still had deep financial ties to FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s soon-to-collapse crypto exchange. The hedge fund initially filed a proof of claim worth $120 million against FTX in July 2023 — adding its name to a long list of users and investors in FTX who lost money as a result of its sudden insolvency.

In November 2024, 3AC’s liquidators amended their claim after discovering new evidence suggesting that FTX had liquidated $1.53 billion in 3AC’s assets just two weeks before the hedge fund commenced its own liquidation proceedings two years prior. They argued that FTX’s liquidation of 3AC’s funds was carried out to satisfy a $1.3 billion liability to FTX, an obligation that 3AC claimed was not sufficiently substantiated.

FTX’s bankruptcy said the $1.3 billion liability represented collateral for a loan FTX made to 3AC, but the court ruled in favor of 3AC, finding insufficient evidence to support FTX’s loan claim.

The ruling allows 3AC to pursue a significantly larger portion of FTX’s remaining assets, potentially reshaping creditor payouts.

FTX, which began distributing funds to creditors in February 2025, said the expanded claim should have come sooner, arguing that it would burden other creditors and complicate its reorganization plan. The court, however, determined that 3AC’s delay was justified, given that the liquidators only uncovered the full extent of their claim in mid-2024 due to missing financial records from FTX and a lack of cooperation from 3AC’s founders, Zhu Su and Kyle Davies.

3AC, founded in 2012, had grown into one of the most influential financial firms in the cryptocurrency industry by 2022. Its collapse was among the first and largest dominoes to fall before the broader crypto market imploded in 2022, which ultimately set off the chain of events that revealed fraud in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.

Bankman-Fried is currently pursuing an appeal of his criminal conviction and 25-year prison sentence. Following the collapse of 3AC, Su was detained in Singapore and sentenced to four months in prison for failing to cooperate with 3AC’s liquidators. Davies did not face any charges connected to the hedge fund’s collapse.

The 3AC founders reunited in 2023 to launch a short-lived crypto exchange called OPNX — designed to allow users to trade bankruptcy claims of failed crypto companies — which shut down in February.

With the court’s decision, 3AC’s liquidators now have a significantly larger position in the FTX. bankruptcy proceedings, raising questions about how the expanded claim will impact distributions to other creditors. The ruling also underscores the lack of transparency at both FTX and 3AC — further complicating efforts to untangle both firms’ assets and obligations.