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400 new projects and 100K new wallets in a month on Cardano

The number of ADA wallets has increased by 100,000 since March 22, with the total figure standing at 3.268 million as of April 19.

Activity on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain is starting to heat up, with 400 new projects in the works, along with 100,000 new wallets being created over the past month.

According to an April 19 Twitter post from Cardano creators Input Output (IOHK), there are nearly 900 projects in development on the network. The figure has grown by roughly 400 since March 11, after IOHK Vice President Tim Harrison stated that the total stood at around 500 via Linkedin post.

Cardano is a public and decentralized proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that was created by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson in 2017, after he left the team over disputes on the future direction of the network.

Pointing to some of the positive developments on Cardano over the past 10 days, IOHK highlighted six projects ranging from token swaps to DeFi applications that went live on the mainnet, entered test nets, or launched via open beta.

One new project getting considerable attention is the AGIX ERC-20 Converter Bride which was developed in collaboration with SingularityNET.

The tool went live this week and it enables users to bridge over Ethereum-based ERC-20 Tokens for use on Cardano, with the network’s DeFi sector expected to be a significant beneficiary.

Despite increasing numbers of projects in development, the number of DApps up and running on Cardano appears to be limited, with DeFi Llama listing just 10 different platforms accounting for $224.96 worth of total value locked (TVL). Notably, four of those platforms have $0 TVL also outside of their native tokens.

On the NFT side of things, Cardano doesn’t even make the top 15 blockchains in terms of sales volume over the past 24 hours, despite fifteenth ranked Theta only generating $375 during that period.

It has been a slow burn for Cardano since launching smart contracts in September, with the network yet to fully take off and provide the promised competition to Ethereum (ETH), or even fellow “ETH killers” such as Solana, Avalanche and Flow.

However founder Charles Hoskinson recently suggested in a video posted to his YouTube channel that the tide could soon turn with the upcoming Vasil Hard Fork upgrade in June. He stated that it will provide a “massive performance improvement to Cardano” and its smart contract capabilities.

Related: 67% of Cardano holders underwater and most bought less than 1 year ago

ADA Wallet surge

One area of strong growth at the moment is wallet activity on Cardano, with data from Cardano Blockchain insights showing that the number of ADA wallets has increased by 100,000 since March 22. The total figure as of April 19 stands at 3.268 million.

Within that time frame, the average rate of new ADA wallets per day has surged from around 2,000 to 8,129. The number of transactions/payments per day has barely nudged however, decreasing from 106,952 on March 22 to 106,525 on April 19.

Zooming out however, transactions larger than $100,000 have increased by 50X since the start of 2022, suggesting strong institutional demand may already be there.

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Over 2,300 Cardano Smart Contracts Are Waiting in Timelock, ADA Price Slides 20% Over 2 Weeks

Over 2,300 Cardano Smart Contracts Are Waiting in Timelock, ADA Price Slides 20% Over 2 WeeksFollowing the successful Alonzo hard fork, the Cardano network now has a large swathe of new smart contracts. However, developers must wait to use them as they are locked in a timelock contract. At the time of writing, metrics show an aggregate total of 2,352 smart contracts since the Alonzo upgrade was implemented. Cardano Has […]

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Sell the news? ADA price drops 10% following Cardano’s long-awaited smart contracts rollout

The so-called "Alonzo" upgrade did little in protecting Cardano from falling in tandem with the rest of the cryptocurrency market, though bullish technical factors remain.

The price of Cardano (ADA) fell on Sept. 13 in line with the other top cryptocurrencies despite the completion of its hard fork upgrade dubbed "Alonzo," which introduces smart contract functionality.

The ADA/USD exchange rate dropped 10.67% to reach its intraday low of $2.3, partly due to profit-taking sentiment among traders following the pair's 1,200%-plus price rally this year. Additionally, the intraday sell-off also surfaced in the period of an overall crypto market decline, with top tokens Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) falling 4% and 6.97%, respectively.

Top 10 cryptocurrency tokens and their performance in the last 24 hours. Source: Messari

Cardano's drop appeared when its core foundation rolled out a long-awaited smart contracts feature on its public blockchain for the first time. The launch expects to tap the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) sector as they grapple with slower and costlier transaction fees on the leading smart contracts platform, Ethereum.

As a result, anticipations for an extended upside boom in the ADA markets were high, with the Value Trend, a financial analyst at Seeking Alpha, expecting the Cardano native token to hit $10 should it flip Ethereum to become the leading smart contracts platform.

Overall, the belief helped ADA/USD deliver strong profits in the days approaching the Alonzo upgrade. On July 20, the pair was trading for as low as $1. Later, on Sept. 2, its value has risen to a record high of $3.16, a 200% rebound.

Bullish continuation signals persist

Bullish assets tend to consolidate sideways or lower following a strong move upside, majorly as some traders decide to secure their profits. At the same time, investors with a long-term bullish outlook buy the asset from weak hands to build long-term investment strategies.

The Cardano chart below hints at undergoing a similar consolidation phase after delivering a strong 200%-plus bull run. As a result, the probability of the ADA/USD exchange rate continuing its uptrend remains high.

ADA/USD daily price chart featuring Bull Flag formation. Source: TradingView.com

The rectangle pattern appears like a Bull Flag. And, as a general rule, the profit target for bulls in a Bull Flag scenario is the same as the length of the previous uptrend.

ADA/USD daily price chart featuring Bull Flag target. Source: TradingView.com

A break above the upper Bull Flag trendline (at $2.93) could put ADA/USD en route toward $4.5.

Additionally, the Cardano token would need to maintain its foothold above its 50-day exponential moving average (50-day EMA; the velvet wave) near $2.27 to keep its interim bullish bias intact. A drop below the Bull Flag support and 50-day EMA floor would risk sending ADA to $1.92, its support line from mid-August.

Related: Institutional exposure to altcoin products retests all-time high

Analysts shared deeper price targets, with a pseudonymous Twitterati spotting a "Double Bottom" scenario, adding that traders are selling the news.

Cerbul, another market analyst, said ADA's ongoing plunge was not due to the "sell the news" sentiment, adding that more capital would flow into the Cardano ecosystem from the DeFi sector.

"Accumulate," he said.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

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Cardano defies Peter Brandt’s 90% crash warning, ADA price doubles to new high

Bitcoin and Ethereum's upside exhaustion, Cardano's smart contract FOMO, and an overall boom in the altcoin market catalyzed ADA's gains.

Cardano's native token ADA ignored a serious price crash warning to rally to a new all-time high.

The ADA/USD exchange rate reached $2.56 for the first time on Aug. 20, following a 154.54% price boom that started on July 20. In doing so, the pair also ignored veteran trader Peter Brandt's 60-90% price crash warning, which was based on a classic bearish pattern called the Head and Shoulders.

But a flurry of bullish fundamentals assisted Cardano to ignore bearish technical setups.

Capital rotation

At first, ADA/USD's upside rally in the early days appeared largely in the wake of a similar boom across the cryptocurrency market, led by the euphoria surrounding its rival Ether's (ETH) major software upgrade and fresh endorsements for Bitcoin from Tesla's Elon Musk and Twitter's Jack Dorsey.

ADA prices also tailed Bitcoin (BTC), the benchmark cryptocurrency that recently rallied above $48,000 for the first time. But the Cardano token started outperforming Bitcoin after Aug 17 as the latter turned choppy around the Federal Reserve's tapering decision, as Cointelegraph covered here.

Cardano price trends (black and white) versus Bitcoin price trends (red and blue). Source: TradingView.com 

In detail, the ADA/USD exchange rate surged by up to 36.81% from its Aug. 18 low of $1.87 versus BTC/USD's 7.91% rally in the same period.

Other top alternative cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, also posted better profits than Bitcoin, hinting that traders merely rotated capital out of the flagship crypto's market on overvaluation risks.

Altcoins 24-hour adjusted performance against the U.S. dollar and Bitcoin. Source: Messari 

Smart contracts FOMO

Traders' bids for ADA also surged due to hype surrounding Cardano's "Alonzo" upgrade by mid-September. The update expects to deploy smart contracts functionality onto the Cardano blockchain, a step that the project’s supporters say will make it a direct rival to Ethereum.

Smart contracts would enable Cardano to integrate more decentralized applications in its ecosystem, particularly decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms that enable automated borrowing, lending, and trading services.

Technical outlook

Brandt's bearish setup appears less likely to be realized by traders against Cardano's bullish fundamentals

The ADA/USD daily chart shows the pair in price discovery. Meanwhile, a Fibonacci retracement graph sketched from the swing high of $2.51 to the swing low of $1.05 spots ADA testing $2.51 as its interim resistance level.

Related: Bullish cup and handle pattern sets Cardano (ADA) price up for a new ATH

A close above the said price ceiling puts ADA/USD en route to the next resistance line at 1.618 Fib line near $3.41.

ADA/USD daily chart technical setup. Source: TradingView.com

Conversely, ADA's daily relative strength indicator (RSI), now above 70, alerts about its interim overvaluation risks. As a result, ADA/USD can undergo a certain degree of correction to neutralized its overbought status, with the next support target sitting near 0.786 Fib line (at $2.20).

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Cardano’s Alonzo Upgrade Date Revealed — ADA Gains Over 16% After Announcement

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Cardano Launches Testnet to Move Closer to Smart Contracts, Polymarket Odds Bet Against Project

Cardano Launches Testnet to Move Closer to Smart Contracts, Polymarket Odds Bet Against ProjectOn July 14, IOHK, the Cardano network developers, announced the project’s latest testnet called Alonzo white has been deployed. IOHK detailed that it has onboarded new participants and the move will help the project move “closer to smart contracts.” Two days later, a Cardano-based project called Spores raised $2.3 million to build a non-fungible token […]

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