Founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson decided to bet on the potential swing of momentum in Cardano’s favor after the Ethereum’s merge which was underwhelming, to say the least. Cardano’s developers rightfully believed that the merge would not bring any significant changes to the layer 1 mainnet.
Indeed, the increase in throughput was marginal (18% is nothing to scoff at, but it is still not as impressive as Algorand’s fivefold increase to 6000 TPS).
What Cardano wanted to do?
One of the biggest speculations is that the Vasil hard fork was rescheduled due to the desire of developers to implement their upgrade after the conclusion of the Ethereum merge. The Vasil upgrade was rolled out on September 22. Interestingly enough, it did not improve the performance of the network, but significantly expanded the capacity of each block. While it creates a foundation for future improvements, it is not something that can excite investors right now.
The gamble did not pay off. The current price of ADA, Cardano’s mainnet token, dropped to 0.4341 at of time of writing. It is 11.6% less than it was on September 14 and 38% less compared to its August high when it was pumped by the Bulls.
The bearish trend is quite apparent. Many other networks are implementing improvements just like Cardano meaning that investors have other venues to look into. If the asset manages to hold on to the $0.42 support line, it may be able to stabilize. However, the future looks grim for the network that has no more hidden aces under its sleeve.
Can Cardano recover during a “crypto spring”?
ADA is doing quite badly compared to other cryptocurrencies issued by PoS blockchain networks. Algorand is slowly recovering. Polygon deployed on Ethereum is shooting through the roof following big news about new partnerships with VC Plays, Starbucks, and more. Cardano desperately needs something big that could prop up growth.
In the nearest future, prospects of ADA look depressing. However, we do not know what will happen after the “crypto winter” is over. In 2023, the situation can be very different.