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- Lunar Crush analytics predicts that ADA is close to attaining an ATH for social activity, with total transactions made crossing 112,000.
- With Ethereum breaking past the $4,000 mark, Cardano fans are eagerly eyeing ADA’s path toward the coveted $1 milestone.
Cardano’s native token, ADA, has been lighting up social media lately, with online chatter closing in on all-time highs. Price-wise, ADA is up 13% over the past week and 0.71% in the last 24 hours, even as daily trading volume fell by 33% to $1 billion.
At the moment, ADA is trading around $0.81, with eyes on the next target at $0.93 and a bigger resistance level near $1.25. The network is gearing up to take on Solana in the race for dominance among institutional-grade Layer 1 blockchains.
Market watchers like Ali Martinez are bullish, with Martinez noting, “A breakout above $0.84 could set Cardano on a path toward $1.30!” On the derivatives side, things are a bit mixed; overall trading volume is down 27.5% to $2.16 billion, but open interest has inched up 3.9% to $1.49 billion, showing more value in outstanding contracts.
Options trading has taken a steeper dive, with volume plummeting nearly 93% to $6,590, and open interest dipping slightly to $374,920.
Still, Cardano’s DeFi footprint is holding strong with $363 million in total value locked and $37 million in stablecoin market cap, securing its spot among the top 10 cryptos. LunarCrush’s social analytics team has taken to X to ask, “What’s up with Cardano?” pointing to the network’s wave of upgrades and headline-grabbing developments. Let’s have a look.
What’s Being Built: Cardano Upgrades to Watch
First up is Vector, a new Cardano-aligned chain that has just gone live. Announced at Rare Evo, the blockchain combines a UTxO architecture with high throughput, built specifically to handle the scale and speed institutional Web3 environments demand. It offers instant transaction finality and delivers ten times the throughput of the Cardano mainnet.
The result? For the first time, a Cardano-affiliated chain has reached these speeds, backed by independently verified data. In optimal scenarios, nearly 99% of transactions are completed within 13 seconds, with most finalizing instantly, setting a new performance benchmark for the extended UTxO framework.
On top of that, a new USDC Direct Bridge between Sui and Cardano has just launched. Wanchain, in an X post, pointed out the cost efficiency: “Sending 1,000 $USDC from Cardano to Sui is only $2!”
The Midnight Foundation’s Glacier Drop is also in motion, a two-month-long airdrop that will be distributing NIGHT tokens across eight blockchains: Cardano, Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Ripple (XRP), BNB, Avalanche (AVAX), and Brave’s BAT. To qualify, participants needed to hold at least $100 worth of native tokens in a self-custody wallet during the snapshot period.
However, Charles Hoskinson, ADA founder, recently notified the community of a software limitation in Ledger hardware wallets that are blocking some Cardano users from joining in.
Cardano crossed a new governance milestone on August 3, when more than 73% of voters supported a proposal from Input Output Engineering to put treasury spending directly in the hands of the community.
Previously, funding decisions were routed through indirect channels, but now token holders will be steering where the money goes, starting with infrastructure upgrades and the development of technical tools to strengthen Cardano’s scalability and performance long-term.
