Cardano price prediction: What is next for ADA?
By Peter Henn and Nicole Willing
Updated
The cardano cryptocurrency, ADA, has seen increasing volatility in the past months as investors in the project looked for indications of the launch of its delayed Vasil upgrade, making a cardano price prediction a bit trickier than it might otherwise have been, especially in the light of a market upturn in early 2023.
The ADA price rose in early June 2022, with the upgrade expected at the end of that month, but fell in mid-July as testing identified bugs that needed to be resolved before the hard fork could go live.
The price then spiked three times in late July, but has been unable to sustain any lasting gains above the $0.50 level and has suffered, along with the rest of the market, in the wake of the collapse of the FTX (FTT) exchange in November.
On 18 September 2022, the coin’s founder Charles Hoskinson released a video saying that the Vasil upgrade had begun, and that it would be completed by 22 September.
While the upgrade went ahead, market events meant that the ADA coin has not performed quite as well as either its creators or its investors might have hoped.
But what is cardano (ADA)? What is cardano used for? Let’s take a look at what we can find out, and check out some of the cardano price predictions that were being made as of 17 April 2023, too.
Cardano explained
Founded in 2015 and launched with a $62.2m initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), Cardano was one of the first blockchains to use a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
According to its website, it “combines pioneering technologies to provide unparalleled security and sustainability to decentralised applications, systems, and societies”.
Hoskinson co-founded Hong Kong-based blockchain research and engineering company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which develops the Cardano project along with the Cardano Foundation and Japanese software firm Emurgo.
The Cardano blockchain is named after 16th century Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano. The network’s native coin, ADA, is named after Ada Lovelace, the 19th century British mathematician who is widely considered to be the first computer programmer.
The blockchain uses the Ouroboros protocol, which enables the network’s decentralisation and allows it to scale up while remaining secure.
Much like Ethereum, which is in the process of a series of upgrades, Cardano is implementing a series of hard forks to expand what it does. In March 2021, the Mary hard fork enabled the network to become a multi-asset platform.
Vasil hard fork
The most recent upgrade to the Cardano blockchain was the Vasil hard fork, which was delayed from 29 June to 22 September 2022. The upgrade is named in honour of Vasil St Dabov, a Cardano ambassador who died last year.
According to an IOHK blog post: “The Vasil upgrade will bring increased functionality, performance, scalability and interoperability to Cardano through new features and improvements.
“As well as bringing improvements to smart contracts, the upgrade is part of the Basho phase of the Cardano roadmap, which focuses on scaling and network and ledger optimisation and will bring multiple improvements to the ledger.”
Three separate bugs were found during testing of the hard fork in June.
Hoskinson said in an update on 1 August 2022: “This is the most complicated upgrade to Cardano in its history, because it includes both changes to its programming language, Plutus, as well as changes to the consensus protocol and a litany of other things.”
Many of the improvements that the upgrade will introduce originated from Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) raised by developers in the community.
“Additionally, a number of new cryptographic primitives will be provided, and script validation processes will further see adjustments and optimisations contributing to consistency in block propagation times and higher transaction processing rates,” IOHK said.
In addition to work on the upgrade, IOHK launched the Cardano sidechain Alpha using the Ethereum Virtual Machine on 12 June 2022.
The Milkomeda C1 sidechain launched in March. Nico Arqueros, CEO and co-founder of dcSpark and a core contributor to the Milkomeda Protocol, tweeted on 31 July 2022 that the chain had processed close to 7.5 million transactions.
Cardano price history
The ADA coin value has tended to track the cryptocurrency market, rising in the late 2017 and early 2021 rallies, and losing value during broader sell-offs.
Expectations were high when the ADA price hit its all-time high of $3.10 on 2 September 2021, ahead of the Alonzo hard fork, which introduced smart contracts to the blockchain.
Developers deployed over 100 smart contracts following the launch but then, as the chart shows, the ADA token sold off and failed to participate in the November 2021 crypto rally that took bitcoin (BTC) and ether, the two largest coins, to fresh highs.
ADA started 2022 at $1.36 and moved to $1.63 on 18 January. It then slipped to $0.7528 on 24 February as investors sold off assets at the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The price recovered to the $1.24 level in late March, but was unable to maintain the upward trend, falling back to $0.7424 by the end of April 2022.
The coin dropped to a low of $0.4065 on 12 May 2022 as crypto markets reacted to the depegging of the UST stablecoin and the collapse of the associated LUNA cryptocurrency and the US dollar climbed to a 20-year high against a basket of other currencies, known as the Dollar Index (DXY).
ADA rebounded to $0.6823 as crypto prices rose, then pulled back to $0.4234 in mid-June. The price moved up to $0.546 on 20 July 2022 before retreating to $0.4521, then traded at around $0.50 into the start of August. On 14 August it reached a monthly high of $0.5939, before slipping down to trade at around $0.4575 on 31 August 2022.
In September the price initially recovered as investors anticipated the implementation of Vasil, with ADA hitting a high of $0.5235 on 10 September 2022. After that, though, market factors meant that the price dropped. Despite the news about Vasil, ADA’s price dropped to a low of $0.331 on 21 October before making a recovery to trade at a high of $0.4362 on 5 November.
Following that, though, the FTX (FTT) exchange collapsed and the market crashed yet again, leaving ADA at a low of $0.2973 on 21 November in spite of the announcement that the DJED algorithmic stablecoin would launch on the Cardano blockchain.
The token continue to drop, closing the year at $0.2465, representing an annual loss of more than 80%. Since then, though, a market recovery has seen the price of ADA go up and on 16 February it was worth $0.4192, its best price since before the collapse of FTX. After that, it fell down somewhat, with the decline exacerbated by the collapse of the Silvergate bank, and it reached a low of $0.2985 on 10 March. Since then, things have improved, with the coin reaching a high of $0.4606 on 15 April before slipping down to around $0.4435 on 17 April 2023.
At that time, there were a little under 34.78 billion ADA in circulation. This gave the coin a market cap of about $12bn, making it the seventh-largest crypto by that metric.
Cardano price prediction round-up
Let’s now take a look at some of the cardano crypto price predictions that were being made as of 17 April 2023.
It is important to remember that price forecasts, especially for something as potentially volatile as cryptocurrency, are often wrong. Furthermore, long-term crypto price predictions are often made using an algorithm, which means that they can change at any time.
First, CoinCodex had a rather mixed short-term cardano price prediction for 2023, suggesting the coin could rise to $0.448482 by 22 April and then go on a decline to hit $0.42462 by 18 May. The site’s technical analysis was, perhaps appropriately, neutral, with 18 indicators making bullish signals against 15 making bearish ones.
Meanwhile, CaptainAltCoin had a ADA crypto price prediction that suggested cardano could drop to $0.3327 in June 2023 before potentially recovering to $0.6925 in April next year. The site then made a cardano price prediction for 2025 that saw it trade at $1.10, but said there could then be a dip to $1.06 by April 2028.
By 2030, though, the site suggested that ADA could rebound to $2.75, and it even made a cardano coin price prediction for 2040 of a potential $5.49.
Next, PricePrediction made an ADA price prediction which was more bullish for the latter half of the decade, with its cardano price prediction for 2030 estimating that the coin could average $7.66, up from $1.24 in 2025 and $0.61 in 2023, based on its deep artificial intelligence-assisted technical analysis.
Finally, Wallet Investor was rather more downbeat in terms of its ADA crypto price prediction, suggesting that the coin could drop substantially from current levels to trade at $0.0435 by April next year.
When looking for an ADA coin price prediction, it’s important to keep in mind that cryptocurrency markets remain extremely volatile. That makes it difficult to accurately predict what a coin’s price will be in a few hours, and even harder to give a long-term projection. As such, analysts and algorithm-based forecasters can and do get their predictions wrong.
If you are considering making a cardano investment, we recommend that you always do your own research. Look at the latest Cardano news, market trends, technical and fundamental analysis, and expert opinion before making any trading decision. Keep in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, and never invest money that you cannot afford to lose.
FAQs
Is cardano a good investment?
It is difficult to tell right now. A lot will depend on how the market behaves going forward.
In volatile, high-risk cryptocurrency markets, it is important to do your own research on a coin or token to determine if it is a good fit for your investment portfolio. Whether the token is a suitable asset for you to trade will depend on your risk tolerance and how much you intend to invest. Never invest money that you cannot afford to lose.
Will cardano go up or down?
It is hard to tell. While sites such as PricePrediction were bullish as of 17 April 2023, the likes of Wallet Investor were a bit more cautious. You should also remember that price predictions often turn out to be wrong, and that prices can, and do, go down as well as up.
In volatile cryptocurrency markets, it is important to do your own research on a coin or token to determine if it is a good fit for your investment portfolio. Whether ADA is a suitable investment for you depends on your risk tolerance and how much you intend to invest, among other factors.
Keep in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, and never invest money that you cannot afford to lose.
How many cardano coins are there?
As of 17 April 2023, there were a little under 34.78 billion ADA in circulation.
Should I invest in cardano?
Before you invest in cardano, you will have to do your own research, not only on ADA but on other crypto coins.
Ultimately, though, this is a question that you will have to answer for yourself. Before you do so, however, you will need to conduct your own research. Never invest more money than you can afford to lose, because prices can go down as well as up.
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