Cardano (ADA) Price Has Struggled After The Launch Of Smart Contracts
Market mood for Cardano was through to roof while the community was waiting for Alonzo hard fork launch. However, since enabling smart contract capabilities, ADA’s price has mainly trended down.
The two leading digital assets, Ethereum and Bitcoin have visited new all-time highs several times in the last few months, Cardano hasn’t seen any new peaks since September. The smart contracts launch didn’t seem to put much wind in its sails, if anything the price and market cap continue to trend downwards.
ADA Price Struggles
ADA price hit $3 early September, and its market cap was close to $100 billion. However, the price corrected rapidly on September 7th with the rest of the crypto market, when El Salvador’s Bitcoin law took effect.
Less than a week later, the team behind Cardano confirmed the deployment of the Alonzo upgrade. This brought smart contract compatibility to the network, using the Plutus framework. ADA’s price saw a short pump back up to $2.71 in the aftermath but inclined back to under $2.50 level the next day.
Since then, things have been somewhat bearish for Cardano. It didn’t go up with the rest of the market when Bitcoin made big moves in October. Instead ADA price has steadily declined to its lowest price point in 90 days. Its market cap now rests below $50 billion, and it’s lost its position as a top 5 cryptocurrency.
Competition
Cardano and Ethereum has been often pitted as rivals by the crypto community – a comparison that the CTO Romain Pellerin has disapproved. Even Pellerin himself framed Cardano as a blockchain that would be “on par with Ethereum” once smart contracts dropped, with a far lower carbon footprint than Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson has argued that Tesla should accept ADA for payment. This happened after May this year, when Elon Musk announced that his company would cease accepting Bitcoin payments due to the cryptocurrency’s environmental harm caused by mining. As a proof-of-stake chain, Cardano does not require such strong energy consumption.
But while Cardano was waiting for smart contracts, another competitor blockchain, Solana, utilized the opportunity and the native token SOL has been soearing throughout the year. Its proof-of-history consensus model drew immense investor interest and allows for a high volume of TPS and low energy consumption and is now the fifth-highest cryptocurrency market cap.
