Once hailed as the “Ethereum Killer,” Cardano continues to lose ground in the cryptocurrency space. According to CoinGecko, Cardano now ranks 11th with a market capitalization of $20.6 billion, a sharp decline from its peak of $91.6 billion in 2021.
Note: CoinMarketCap still places Cardano in the top ten due to the absence of stETH from Lido, valued at $33.6 billion.
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In April, Cardano definitively displaced Toncoin from the tenth position, which managed to grow its market capitalization from $3 billion to $25 billion over 12 months. However, Cardano’s decline began in 2021 when it struggled to effectively handle smart contracts, despite its initial promise.
Following the Alonzo hard fork, the network’s capitalization and ADA’s price plummeted. It took developers over a year to address these issues, but by then, other blockchains with more successful architectures had taken Cardano’s place. Now, Cardano no longer appears as innovative alongside networks like Solana or Layer 2 on Ethereum. Grayscale shares this sentiment, as their legal victories in 2023 paved the way for spot ETFs in the United States.
In July 2021, Grayscale added Cardano to its digital crypto fund, but by April 3rd of this year, the asset was removed due to ongoing concerns. The problem with Cardano lies in its lack of forward momentum. For instance, the network still does not support widely used stablecoins like USDT and USDC. Instead, it introduced its coin Djed, which has seen little growth, hovering around $3-4 million in market capitalization.
K33 Research believes that without integration, Cardano faces obscurity.
In the DeFi sector, the network has dropped to 18th place with $385 million in total value locked (TVL), while newer projects like Base have already surpassed $1.5 billion.
Despite founder Charles Hoskinson’s emphasis on community cohesion, developer activity statistics paint a different picture. A combination of negative factors and investor disappointment has caused ADA to miss out on this year’s rally, trading at a 2% discount.
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