Cardano (ADA) exchange rate: what became of the cryptocurrency price in 2024?
The beginning of Cardano (ADA) (2017 - 2020)
Cardano cryptocurrency appeared in October 2017 — just two months before the peak of the first large-scale boom in the crypto market, due to which it showed significant growth almost immediately. At the time of listing, the price of ADA cryptocurrency was $0.024, but in early January 2018, it reached its first all-time high (ATH) at $1.17. The value of this asset has risen almost 50 times in just two months after its launch.
This is more of a lucky coincidence, as most cryptocurrencies saw significant growth during the crypto boom - even the most worthless and obscure ones. There weren't any fundamental factors behind this, although there were. Cardano's listings on leading crypto exchanges like Binance and OKX fueled much of the growth.
However, in January, a global correction began in the crypto market, resulting in the ADA cryptocurrency dropping to $0.16 by March, more than 7 times. This correction continued until 2020. After reaching a local peak of $0.37 in May 2018, the Cardano cryptocurrency declined in price, reaching $0.03 in November of the same year before rising to a yearly high of $0.097 in June 2019. That same year, Cardano saw significant growth against many other cryptocurrencies, likely due to the launch of a staking mechanism introduced as part of a substantial protocol upgrade called Shelley.
The correction then continued, with the ADA cryptocurrency collapsing to a two-year low of $0.025 in March 2020.
DeFi market blossoms and new highs (2020 - 2021)
Almost immediately after the March 2020 crypto market crash, the ADA cryptocurrency rate resumed its growth, and by the end of this year, it reached $0.17. Almost six months later, the price of Cardano updated its historical maximum at $2.3, and in September 2021, it set its current record ATH (as of September 2024) at $3.1.
This time, Cardano's growth was the generally growing trend in the cryptocurrency market, and the fact that ADA was already in the top five cryptocurrencies by capitalization at that time, for a specific time, even overtaking Binance Coin (BNB) by this indicator. However, after the subsequent correction, the cryptocurrency Cardano began to lose its position, although it remained among the crypto market leaders.
And correction again (2022 - 2023)
After a new large-scale crypto rally, the ADA cryptocurrency's exchange rate dropped again, falling more than 10 times and reaching $0.24 in January 2023. This fall, with periodic rebounds, lasted for more than a year. In 2023, the price of cryptocurrency Cardano reached $0.4. A large-scale upgrade of the Vasil blockchain protocol may have played a role in this, but by October, the ADA rate returned to $0.24 amid a prolonged correction in the crypto market.
Even the emergence of Cardano's own DeFi ecosystem and decentralized applications that actively used the native cryptocurrency of its blockchain platform did not save the situation. After the first decentralized applications were launched, blocked assets (TVL) quickly grew from zero to $317 million. However, by the end of 2022, this figure fell to $50 million but almost immediately resumed growth.
Cardano (ADA) new wave of growth (2023 - 2024)
After starting a new localized bullish trend in the crypto market in October 2023, the price of the ADA cryptocurrency rose more than 2.5 times in less than two months, from $0.24 to $0.64. Then, after a short correction, the rate of Cardano reached a new local maximum of $0.76 in March 2024. Still, since then, it has been gradually correcting until September of the same year, when the price of ADA amounted to $0.34, about 9 times lower than the maximum recorded in September 2021.
Nor did the launch of the biggest update after Vasil — the Chang hard fork, which aims to introduce a decentralized management function for the Cardano blockchain network — save the situation. Nevertheless, Cardano developers continue to develop their ecosystem by introducing new features and adding new DeFi protocols.
According to DeFi Llama, Cardano is one of the top 30 largest ecosystems in the decentralized finance market by TVL, which is $188 million as of September 2024. However, one of Cardano's biggest challenges is its isolation from other DeFi ecosystems. For comparison, the TVL of the largest DEX exchange in the Cardano ecosystem, called Minswap, is only $50 million, while the same figure, for example, of PancakeSwap, is $1.6 billion. The project developers may present solutions for integrating extensive DeFi protocols with the Cardano blockchain platform in the future. According to the roadmap, the team has other priorities, such as creating a fully decentralized ecosystem.
