Many in the Cardano community are unhappy with their assets, and things reached a point where founder Charles Hoskinson threatened to instantly block anyone who whined to him about ADA prices.
New Twitter policy. If you complain about price or ask to burn coins, then instablock. Let’s see how quickly this cleans up the feed and how many bots it exposes
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) December 1, 2021
Also, while crypto exchange eToro limited ADA liquidity for US-based customers, the alt coin was listed by Bitstamp. To make sense of the mixed signals, crypto researcher Max Maher took a closer look at the metrics, and Cardano’s community.
Carding through Cardano
Analyzing ADA’s real volume, Maher noted the vast drop in recent days when compared to levels from earlier in the year. At press time, ADA’s real volume was about $542 million, but this had spiked above $9 billion just a few months ago.
Source: Messari Research
However, Maher reported,
“It’s a different story though, if we look at new addresses holding Cardano. You might find it surprising that the total wallets holding at least $100 in ADA has pretty steadily increased with only some slight dips in the last few weeks. And the total wallet addresses regardless of dollar amount has increased even more, very steadily, and recently passing three million total wallets.”
In fact, during a recent livestream, Hoskinson himself claimed,
“…ADA has more liquidity than almost every cryptocurrency [in the] space.”
Why things don’t ‘ADA’ up
It’s important for a reader to note that Maher himself has invested in Cardano and holds more than 41,000 ADA.
Even so, when studying the ecosystem’s development, Maher suggested that many may have misunderstood Cardano’s Alonzo hard fork. The researcher guessed that disappointed community members expected to instantly see smart contracts, DEXs, crypto games, and other advanced features in the ecosystem – but were not prepared for the development time these projects require.
Calling it “build time” for Cardano, he estimated that new projects and higher transaction volumes would help drive up ADA’s price. Maher said,
“I wouldn’t bank on it in a month or even two months, but come three to six months, I think that we’ll see many solid usable dApps running on Cardano. And the bottom line is, if you want a crypto that’s going to 10x in a month, you shouldn’t be in Cardano.”
Coming to performance, Maher also added that he could only find one instance of Cardano experiencing downtime, which he claimed lasted for about an hour.
The researcher concluded,
“So it’s my thesis that Cardano was hurt by its own hype.”
No winter blues here
The Cardano Foundation announced that there had been a “significant increase” in Plutus Scripts since around the time of the Alonzo Hard Fork. From no Plutus-based smart contracts in early September, the Cardano Foundation recorded more than 800 in December.
👀Significant increase in the number of Plutus based #smartcontracts on the Cardano blockchain.🆙🚀 pic.twitter.com/DCJZsDthQ0
— Cardano Foundation (@CardanoStiftung) December 8, 2021