Cardano (ADA) has been growing in recent months to reach the 6th spot on the list of the biggest crypto at some point. Based on the current momentum in the ADA market, it is possible that Cardano will reach $1 in the future. However, ADA seems to have slowed down settling for the 9th spot as of August 13.
As of July 8, ADA reached a two-year high surpassing $0.138 to record 180% gains within 180 days. Since then, the crypto has surged further currently trading at $0.1398. Will Cardano reach $1? Many traders and analysts ask.
ADA, Cardano’s native coin has been among the top-performing tokens in 2020 and has remained in the top 10 according to CoinMarketCap. The recent gain in ADA pushed its rankings up above VeChain’s VET. Its market capitalization is close to that of Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin SV (BSV).
What Made ADA Rise?
Cardano’s partnership with Coinbase Custody is one of the reasons that made ADA surge. While riding on the bullish market sentiment, traders have focused on Cardano’s announcement of the partnership to allow ADA holders to stake and even store their funds in a secure cold wallet.
The launch on Coinbase is expected to happen in Q4 2020 after the staking rewards on Cardano’s Shelley mainnet become available. This new custody agreement will enable IOHK, the blockchain engineering company that developed Cardano, to offer an institutional-grade storage solution to the Cardano community while also enabling the users to participate in the network.
Cardano’s crypto, ADA may potentially get listed by Coinbase before the end of 2020. In a Coinbase blog that went live in July 2018, five new cryptos would feature on the platform including Basic Attention Token (BAT), 0x (ZRX), Cardano (ADA), Zcash (ZEC), and Stellar Lumens (XLM). The others were listed except for ADA.
The Shelley Mainnet Launch
By description, the Shelley mainnet is a decentralized network of community nodes operating on a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol. This protocol ensures that less central governance comes from the developers. In general, the Cardano network is moving from a centralized network to a distributed network system.
Just like the users anticipated for Cardano to introduce the Shelley mainnet, ADA’s price has benefited majorly from the announcement and successful testnet even before its launch. The deployment of the Shelley code was confirmed to have been successfully released on the mainnet on June 30.
The Shelley hard fork, a remaining move towards full decentralization on the Cardano blockchain happened on July 29. It marked another major milestone for IOHK.
New Technology Ecosystem Fund
Recently, IOHK said that it is launching a new technology ecosystem fund dubbed cFund. The new initiative will be made possible with the partnership with Wave Financial Group and the investments will be made worldwide wit a normal size of $250,000-$500,000.
Notably, the fund will total in $20 million in partnership with the cryptocurrency asset management fund Wave. It will provide money for companies and projects in the Cardano ecosystem. IOHK will commit to half of the fund, $10 million, while Wave will be raising the other half.
Cardano has also released the new Daedalus wallet for the Shelley testnet. It managed to unveil the Daedalus wallet less than a week after the Cardano Virtual Summit. The upgrade comes in a design that enables the users to try out new functions brought by the new Shelley update in a sandboxed environment using test-ADA.
Some of the new features include stake pools, delegation, and rewards distribution. They will be available in the sandboxed environment to simplify the staking process.
Cardano Price Prediction
By 2023, some analysts project that ADA will hit the $2 level. By the end of this year, Coinswitch predicted ADA to reach $1 per token. In five years, the firm expects Cardano to surpass $3.
Nevertheless, other firms like CoinFan and DigitalCoinPrice do not have anywhere near the optimism shown by Coinswitch. CoinFan predicts that the price of Cardano will reach $0.45 in 2025 while DigitalCoinPrice has set the price at $0.20 by 2026. Thus, it is evident that all analysts are bullish on the price of Cardano in the long term.