Cardano Price Prediction and Market Forecast 2024–2030

Like with any crypto, Cardano price prediction is a tricky business. However, there are some external factors that we know affect the space with a fair amount of certainty.

Over the last year, crypto markets have been in a downtrend with the Ukraine-Russia crisis, news of Biden signing an executive order on crypto regulation, recession fears, and being correlated to a correction in the S&P 500.

Bullish news for Cardano investors: its developers announced three major upgrades, one of which has already been implemented. Read on for more in this guide and our ADA price predictions.

Cardano News

The current price of Cardano stands at $0.3905 (as of August 1, 2024), which shows that its daily value has fallen by 3%. However, ADA also recorded $6.52 billion in large transaction volume within the last 24 hours. This brought it closer to ETH, which recorded $6.94B in the same time period. Since the beginning of 2024, cardano’s products have raised $11 million from traditional investors. This indicates that an increasing number of institutions have become interested in ADA. On top of that, Cardano’s ETPs last week totaled $1.2 million.

However, the factor that will have the biggest impact on Cardano’s future price is its Chang hard fork. This upgrade went live on July 25, 2024, and will mark the beginning of the Voltaire era, which aims to achieve full decentralization. The Voltaire Era will also make Cardano a self-sustaining system and allow ADA holders to vote on changes within its ecosystem.

Cardano Price History

Cardano began trading at just under $0.02 when it became available to the public in October 2017. At first, it was on Bittrex exchange and later Cryptopia. Cryptopia was hacked and liquidated, now defunct — underscoring the importance of choosing well-regulated top crypto exchanges if you invest in Cardano or any crypto asset.

Realizing the 40x return on investment (4000% ROI) made since then as an early investor wouldn’t have been possible if your ADA had been held on a scam site or low-security platform.

During the 2017 bull run that saw retail investor FOMO (fear of missing out) push the Bitcoin price to $20k, ADA spiked to over $1 within three months of launch. In 2018, the bear market retraced the whole spike, and the value went back to $0.02.

That bull run and reversal encapsulates the volatility of cryptocurrency — affirming the old ‘time in the market, not timing the market‘ saying.

Cardano’s All-Time High

The ADA coin price went on to make new all-time highs in 2021 at $3.10, but many Cardano investors would have capitulated and sold their ‘bags’ during the multi-year bear market between those two bull cycles.

Some new investors in the Cardano community have bought the top at $3 and are now wondering if Cardano will go up or if they should sell now. The advice is straightforward — as with all investments, have patience.

Since the start of 2023, the Cardano price has grown from $0.31 to $0.38 — a 22.58% increase. The difference since an ATH is -87.74%, though.

Cardano Current Price

After reaching an ATH, ADA plunged to the $0.24 level by the end of 2022. However, this cryptocurrency surged from the $0.24 mark to a current price of $0.3905, a considerable increase. Despite the current price jump, the token has proven to be quite volatile in the past few months.

Cardano Price Prediction 2024

Despite the majority of forecasts being optimistic, certain factors make us question the outcome. The highly anticipated blockchain update is expected to drive prices up, but what if it doesn’t live up to expectations and falls short?

Cryptocurrency prices often respond positively to upgrades, as demonstrated by Ethereum’s EIP-1559, which sent its value soaring above $3,000. However, Cardano’s value plummeted by almost 50% after the launch of Alonzo. Despite this setback, Cardano remains dedicated to improving its products, even in a bear market. This makes it a solid investment choice as its utility expands, setting it apart from its competitors.

This trend supports a positive outlook for Cardano, leading many experts to believe that ADA will hold its value over time. Investing in Cardano’s utility token may pay off as the cryptocurrency market picks up again, potentially sending ADA’s price soaring past its previous ATH.

Consequently, Cardano could continue its rise as it strives to enter the $2.5 zone in the coming months.

Cardano Price Prediction 2025

The next Bitcoin halving is projected to take place in March 2024, and the 2021 crypto bull run took place shortly after the 2020 Bitcoin halving. That saw Bitcoin move past its previous top of $20k to $69k, and the total crypto market cap went from $1 trillion to $3 trillion.

Assuming Cardano holds its relative value vs Bitcoin on the ADA/BTC pair — now 0.000016 — if the Bitcoin price one day hits $500,000k, as some investors predict, that would put the ADA coin price at $4.

That’s based on Cardano not underperforming or outperforming Bitcoin from this point onwards. It’s holding stable in relation to it — 0.000015 ADA/BTC is an important historical confluence level.

Cardano Price Prediction 2030

Will ADA reach 10 dollars in 2030? It’s hard to predict. Cardano is currently an undervalued cryptocurrency that has great growth potential due to its wide range of applications.

However, if Cardano becomes a fully operational decentralized system by the end of 2030, its price could hit $10.

In fact, some analysts believe that by the end of 2030, its value could range between $9.12 and $10.32. Keep in mind that its price will also be affected by market trends and the 2028 BTC halving. Will Cardano go up during the halving? Most likely. If the price of BTC goes up, the same will happen with other cryptocurrencies.

Meme coins, which are becoming increasingly popular among crypto investors, could also boost ADA’s price. Although most meme coins run on Solana, tokens like $SNEK, $HOSKY, and $NIKE that operate on Cardano could surge due to a lack of competition.

With that in mind, our Cardano analysis for 2030 is based on speculation. So take this information with a grain of salt.

Cardano Price Prediction in the Next Bull Run

Cardano would need to go on a 5–6x bull run the remainder of the year sparked by news of all its upgrades being successfully implemented and the optimizations being noticeable. That kind of price expansion has happened before in Cardano’s price history.

Potential Highs & Lows of Cardano

The most optimistic bullish Cardano price prediction would have it flipping ETH (as some predict) and then flipping BTC if Bitcoin dominance and market share drops as DeFi, NFTs, and the Metaverse take over the crypto space. Here are potential highs and lows for the coin:

What Is Cardano Used For?

Founded in 2014 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, Cardano is an open-source, decentralized, third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain intended to be a more efficient, scalable, and environmentally friendly crypto project than proof-of-work (PoW) networks like Ethereum.

That’s a mouthful, but its basic aim and mission statement is to provide financial services — including peer-to-peer (P2P) payments using its native cryptocurrency ADA, smart contracts, and Dapps — to an unbanked population of the globe, which it has termed ‘RealFi’.

Smart contracts give anyone access to banking using a public, decentralized ledger, removing middlemen, bankers, and brokers like Western Union or Paypal — Paypal stocks crashed 25% on their worst-ever trading day in February last year, losing $50 billion in valuation.

So Cardano is a central part of decentralized finance, gaining ground on traditional financial institutions and within DeFi itself. Ethereum, at one point, had almost 100% dominance and market share within DeFi, which has since lowered to 70% due to Cardano, Solana, and Polkadot picking up momentum.

Real-World Cardano Business Applications

Cardano announced their partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry for Education to ‘create a national attainment recording system to verify grades, monitor school performance and boost nationwide education‘.

They are also now collaborating with World Mobile in Tanzania to ‘connect the unconnected‘ and enable access to essential online services through blockchain.’

Cardano is also associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is involved in creating a digital ID system. That has met with some controversy — CIGIOnline.org reported on Cardano’s blockchain-based digital identity pilot involving five million Ethiopian students.

The non-profit Cardano Foundation has also announced strategic partnerships with global land restoration and tree planting verification companies (e.g., Veritree). These companies use blockchain tech to provide immutable, transparent reports of reforestation efforts—with a lower carbon footprint than other blockchains.

Alongside climate change and sustainable development concerns, ADALend is Cardano’s decentralized lending protocol governed by DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations), another important business application of DeFi.

With decentralized crypto loans, loan approval is instant without credit checks, not over-collateralized, and the whole process is automatic and streamlined with trustless custody and lower interest rates.

What Drives the Price of Cardano?

In the short term, crypto prices can fluctuate between support and resistance levels regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes. Swing traders simply look at price action (PA), apply technical analysis (TA), and ‘trade the chart’.

Whales can also manipulate token prices to find liquidity — areas where other traders are stopped out, compelled to panic sell, or liquidated. A liquidation cascade of long positions allows them to fill large orders, then the price moves up again once selling pressure is absorbed.

Long-term investors should be more concerned with fundamental analysis (FA), such as an increase in addresses on the network and total value locked (TVL) signaling greater mass adoption of a crypto project and why Cardano will be huge, most likely.

Cardano vs Bitcoin

Our thesis is that Bitcoin is Gold 2.0, that it will disrupt Gold as a store of value. If it does that, it has to have a market cap of $9 trillion, so we think it could price one day at $500,000 per Bitcoin.

— the Winklevoss twins, speaking to Business Insider in 2020

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the Gemini exchange, became billionaires by investing in Bitcoin after Mark Zuckerberg allegedly stole their idea for Facebook at Harvard. The social media giant has since rebranded to Meta, and metaverse crypto projects have entered the markets.

Many decentralized finance projects continue to be built on the Cardano blockchain, and Layer-2 (L2) DeFi coins run those Cardano DeFi projects. More than 20 million tokens have been produced on Cardano, many of which are NFTs rather than fungible assets.

Can Cardano Be the Next Ethereum?

In the most bearish case, developments to ETH 2.0 could improve Ethereum’s gas fees and transaction speeds, removing some of Cardano’s use cases. Other altcoins and Layer-1 (L1) crypto projects can also compete with ADA to be an ‘Ethereum killer’—for example, Solana.

All altcoin projects can potentially be abandoned by developers. Unlike Bitcoin, altcoins have routinely died and never recovered when their developers moved on to other projects. Litecoin has been in a bear market versus BTC for four years since founder Charlie Lee left and famously sold his coins at around the $400 level.

Cardano is still 1800% higher than its initial trading price, while some altcoins have dropped 90% and then another 90% on top of that. That kind of price crash would put Cardano back at $0.02, although it’s unlikely to happen given the range of crypto projects running on Cardano.

A black swan event affecting the entire crypto market would be necessary to bring Cardano back to its initial trading price, and even that can be temporary. After the March 2020 COVID crash where BTC dropped to $4000, crypto rallied to new highs within months.

Is There a Future for Cardano?

Cardano’s roadmap consists of five development phases: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. The goal is to make Cardano’s network sustainable, interoperable, and scalable. The last phase will focus on creating a decentralized governance model. To accomplish that, its developers will launch the Chang upgrade in the summer of 2024, which could push the price of ADA to $3.

Cardano’s advantage is that it’s still considered one of the best blockchains for creating dApps. Many analysts believe that Cardano could recover by the end of 2024, especially if the market becomes bullish.

In other words, Cardano’s future will depend on the success of its network upgrades, market sentiment, and the state of the DeFi sector.

Conclusion

Given its potential to democratize finance and realize a new world of decentralized applications, Cardano price predictions in the double and triple digits are not out of the question. Those high price targets may take time to play out, however, as Cardano is already a top 10 crypto by market cap.

An alternative altcoin that may see price discovery sooner, given its low market cap, is Bitcoin Minetrix. It aims to redefine the survey industry by incentivizing users to vote on polls with cryptocurrency.

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