On this page, you can always find the up-to-date Cardano price. In fact, it is ADA’s price, because ADA is the native token of the Cardano platform. You will also find information about Cardano’s price development in recent years and basic information about Cardano. The price is reported in dollars and euros. Save the page in your browser’s bookmarks, so you can stay up to date with price changes easily!
Cardano price USD & EUR
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Cardano and ADA token
Let’s start with the basics first. What is Cardano and what is the ADA token? Cardano is a smart contract platform that competes with cryptos like Ethereum and Solana. You can think of Cardano as an operating system (Android, iOS, Windows) for distributed applications.
Cardano is the name of the project and the entire ecosystem. ADA, on the other hand, is Cardano’s native token. It is named after the English mathematician, Ada Lovelace. ADA is used in the Cardano network for transaction payments, staking, and value transfer.
Many would argue that the Cardano price (technically ADA price) goes up or down based on the demand of the network. The more people there are staking and making transactions, the more demand there is for the native token ADA.
The head of Cardano is Charles Hoskinson. He is one of the most famous people in the crypto industry. Despite his young age, Hoskinson has been involved in many things. He is also one of the founders of Ethereum!
Hoskinson founded a company called Input Output Hong Kong in 2015. This company is responsible for Cardano’s software development.
Cardano runs with a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. It is also a two-level protocol, which brings certain advantages. The platform can process events on two different levels, which is the reason why Cardano enabled token creation in 2021 before it had even smart contract capabilities.
There are a huge number of ADA tokens in circulation, a total of 35 billion. This explains the small unit price of the token. The ADA price serves as a good example of why token prices are not comparable with each other, but rather it is worth paying attention to the project’s market value.
When referring to the Cardano price, you should talk about the ADA price. In practice, however, most investors are talking about buying Cardano and investing in Cardano instead of ADA.
AboutBitcoin.io also has a comprehensive Cardano beginner’s guide, which goes through the project’s history and technology in more detail. You can find an introduction to this and all other cryptos in the guides link in the main menu.
Cardano price development
Next, let’s examine how the Cardano price, i.e., the price of the ADA token, has developed over the years.
The ADA token was created during the ICO in 2017. In the ICO, the price of one ADA coin was only $0.0024. In the crypto boom of 2017-2018, ADA moved as high as $1.33. This means ICO investors made a gigantic profit in a short time. Most of the ICO investors were Asian.
Cardano attracted investors even though there was no finished product. Unlike many other cryptocurrency projects, Cardano rose to the attention of the general public practically immediately after its launch.
The ADA price fell in the spring of 2018 along with the rest of the crypto market. In the following years, ADA holders faced a boring and steady wait, because during the years 2018, 2019, and 2020 practically nothing happened in the price. The graphic below shows the Cardano ADA price for 2017-2022.
The Cardano price stayed below ten cents for a long time. At the same time, the development work of the project was stalled, and many competing projects were passing by from the right and the left.
In the summer of 2020, the Cardano price finally rose above ten-dollar cents. That’s when the Shelley update made staking possible in Cardano. This was a significant step forward, which clearly attracted the attention of investors as well.
At the beginning of 2021, the Cardano price started to skyrocket along with the rest of the market. During the spring months, the price of Cardano first rose above the $1 mark, and the end of May saw a quick spike above $2.
In addition to the general crypto craze, the rise was influenced by the Mary hard fork, which enabled the creation of tokens and the NFT market on the Cardano platform.
Cardano’s price peaked in September 2021 with the Alonzo hard fork. It brought long-awaited smart contracts to the Cardano ecosystem. However, Cardano’s ADA price collapsed quickly after the update, due to the so-called “buy the rumor, sell the news” phenomenon.
Cardano’s ADA token has fallen by the end of 2021, along with the rest of the market, to almost 90 percent below its peak price.
Cardano staking brings additional income
As mentioned above, Cardano utilizes the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. This is the “opposite” of the Proof of Work consensus used by Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s PoW solution requires physical mining machines, while PoS uses validators.
Cardano’s blockchain is built by validators. These are essentially servers that run the Cardano software. In addition, each validator must stake a certain amount of Cardano’s ADA tokens.
Validators form pools called stake pools. One stake pool can contain tens or hundreds of different members. Cardano’s system is implemented in such a way that the rewards received by the pool decrease proportionally as its size increases.
This solution keeps the staking pools small enough so that one party cannot control the network too much. The picture below shows the statistics of the stake pools; there are currently more than 3,200 betting pools online. Almost 900,000 ADA holders delegate their coins to pools.
An ordinary user should not set up his own stake pool. You can instead delegate your own ADA tokens to existing staking pools. This can be easily done from the Cardano wallet. The most famous Cardano wallet is Daedalus.
Currently, more than 70 percent of the ADA tokens in circulation are staked. In other Proof of Stake platforms, the reading is in the 60-70 percent range. Steikkaus locks coins out of circulation and helps the ADA price stay higher.
Cardano ADA price potential
What is the Cardano ADA price potential in the long run? How high could Cardano rise in the years 2023-2024, for example? Let’s think about this next.
We already went through Cardano’s price history earlier in the article. If you have been involved since the ICO (2017), then your investment has increased by thousands and thousands of percent. This is despite the fact that the ADA price is just over $0.3 at the time of writing this article.
The first target of ADA’s price potential is of price level of the old All-Time High. If Cardano has already reached that price level earlier in history, it should be able to reach it again. Is this achievement realistic?
Cardano reached its current ATH ($3.10) in September 2021 due to the huge hype surrounding the Alonzo hard fork. Smart contracts were implemented in Cardano at the time, meaning its ecosystem really started to grow. Then why did the price collapse, then?
The Alonzo hard fork took place at the peak of the crypto boom, so the timing was bad. Cardano would have collapsed along with the rest of the market anyway. On top of that, Alonzo was technically disappointing.
The Vasil hard fork released about a year later fixed many of these problems. However, Cardano did not get a boost from this release because it happened in the middle of a bear market.
In our opinion, the ADA price potential is at least at the level of the current ATH reading. Cardano is stronger, more decentralized, and technically better compared to when that price was reached. Its ecosystem has also expanded significantly.
A price of around $10 would not be an impossible idea at the top of the next bull market around 2024-2025. Of course, this requires the growth of the entire crypto market.
The future of Cardano
What does the future of Cardano look like? Is it a high-risk investment or is it also suitable for a beginner crypto investor? Most likely, the answer lies between these two extremes.
Cardano’s ADA token has cemented its position among the top 10 cryptocurrencies on the market. It has been on the market for more than five years. In addition to this, significant updates have been made to the Cardano ecosystem in recent years.
Cardano is now finally ready to challenge Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and other smart contract platforms!
It is also easier for the investor to assess Cardano’s potential compared to coins such as Shiba Inu, Dogecoin, Litecoin, or Chainlink. Cardano is an operating system for decentralized applications. You can think of it as Android or iOS.
The more applications, users, investors, wallets, and transactions there are in the Cardano ecosystem – the more demand there is for the ADA token. And the higher the Cardano price (the ADA price) eventually rises. Don’t forget the staking either.
It is also easy to invest in Cardano in many popular exchanges such as Binance.
Cardano is a potential target for a person who wants to invest in smart contract platforms and needs wants to diversify the portfolio from Ethereum.