Cardano now has almost 574 million ada in its treasury or almost 1.5 billion USD to fund YOUR projects and ADA HODLers having been voting on them throughout 2021! This is how self-sustainable ecosystem with governance looks like!

Exactly a year now ADA HODLers have been staking and delegating their ADA to stake pool operators = validators and getting their rewards every epoch (= 5days) and on average yearly delegation rewards of around 5%. Meaning that if you started with 100k ada you'll end up with around 105k after one year... Note that the rewards from one epoch are added to the next and the next rewards are calculated based on that, pretty sweet!

Cool thing about staking with ADA is that your ADA is never locked and you can move it at any time, which is not the case for ETH2 and others...Also, pretty cool!

About 70% of the total CIRCULATING supply is staked, see https://adapools.org/press and you can imagine what that means for the price once the smart contracts drop on mainnet on 9/12!

Here's the excel file with the treasury info. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xny1W7HhHANLNeQcnbr8El5rakJ80VIM7fgDwJ-uqys/edit#gid=0

Check out https://cardano.ideascale.com/ to submit your own proposal!

With addition from u/Strictly_Haram see below:

Cardano has a treasury built into the protocol and currently is the largest decentralized innovation fund in the world. It’s called Catalyst, and you use your ADA to vote on proposals/fund development for different dapp ecosystems, etc.

This will eventually become full on chain governance (Voltaire) which will allow ADA holders to have full control of the chain. Whether it’s changes different parameters, funding development, etc. It really is something special and it’s unfortunate that it’s so misunderstood because it is has created a lot of hidden value for the entire crypto ecosystem.