Cardano (ADA) Down 94%: Why Building Hasn't Lifted the Price

At 18 cents, it's a dead and failed project.

That's Charles Hoskinson, the man who started Cardano. He was describing how a lot of people see ADA right now just from looking at its price. Back in 2021, ADA was the third biggest coin in the world. Right now, it's about 18 cents. So if you bought anywhere near that top, about 94% of your money is gone, and plenty of holders have given up on it.

But Cardano never stopped building. This year alone, it went through a big upgrade, launched a second network, and got a brand new digital dollar. So why hasn't the price followed all those updates? Well, a price only comes back when new buyers show up. So for anybody holding ADA, the real question is whether any of that building will bring new money in.

And that wasn't the worst of it. In that same video, Hoskinson also said something about ADA's price that a lot of holders still haven't forgiven him for. And this year, ADA was just two days away from an easier path to its own ETF. That's a fund that lets everyday people buy ADA as easily as a stock. What happened in those two days is something most ADA holders never even heard about.

So is Cardano ever coming back? And if you're holding it right now, is it still worth holding on to, or is it time to let it go? That's what a lot of ADA holders are asking themselves right now. So let's run it. All right, Bull Runners, welcome back to the channel.

Now, to really see how bad this drop is, let's look at what it did to $1,000. Say you put $1,000 into Cardano near its top in September of 2021. Right now, that's worth about $64. The same $1,000 in Bitcoin would be worth $1,560. And XRP and Solana have had rough years of their own, but they've still held on to most of that $1,000.

ADA lost almost all of it. And to get back to break even from here, ADA would have to go up more than 10 times. And it isn't getting any easier. In just the last month, Cardano fell about 26%. That's worse than any of the biggest coins.

That's about four times what Bitcoin lost over the same stretch. So when Cardano holders say they're tired, this is what they mean. And a lot of them are saying it loud. ADA will never make a new all-time high. After more than five years of waiting, plenty of holders feel exactly that.

A lot of ADA holders were right about Cardano. They said it would keep building, and it did. The price just never came with it, and after five years, that gets exhausting. So, what did Cardano actually build this year? Because if all you've watched is price, you've missed a lot.

In July, Cardano went through a big upgrade, a hard fork called Van Rossum. And for the first time in Cardano's history, ADA holders got a vote on it. So, how do ADA holders get a vote? Well, on Cardano, the more ADA you hold, the bigger your vote. Holders use it to pick people to represent them, a bit like shareholder voting at a company meeting.

Those people then vote on which upgrades go in and how the money in Cardano's own treasury gets spent. And for most of Cardano's life, the company that built it made those calls. Now the holders do. And on top of that, in March, the company behind Cardano launched a second network called Midnight. It's built for apps that need to keep some of their information private.

Then just last month, a new digital dollar called Real Fi went live on Cardano, where it's backed by real-world things like bonds and loans, and you could use it in Cardano's apps from day one. And Real Fi wasn't the only digital dollar to arrive. USDC, the one from Circle, came to Cardano this year too. So did Pyth, a service that feeds live prices into apps. And that's definitely a big deal because the bigger apps want a solid digital dollar and live prices before they'll even think about building on Cardano.

So on paper, it's been a busy year for Cardano, but for a lot of holders, all that work doesn't mean much when the price keeps falling. In October, one of them told Hoskinson exactly what most people think. Most people just want their money back, and Hoskinson fired back, Explain what I should do differently. We just launched Real Fi. Po Gun is on the way, and he ended it with, What the hell else can I do?

And that Po Gun he mentioned is the team's plan to let Bitcoin holders lend and borrow on Cardano. So if Cardano really is building all of this, why hasn't the money come with it? Well, you can see it in one number, and it's how much money people have put in Cardano apps. It's called total locked value, and on Cardano, it's only about $51 million. That puts it 33rd out of all of the networks.

Now, compare that with Solana. It launched years after Cardano and it has about $5.2 billion. That's roughly 100 times more. Even Stellar, which most people don't think of as an app network, has about 213 million. That's about four times Cardano.

And if you hold ADA, that gap is a huge problem. Every time someone uses an app on Cardano, they pay the fee in ADA. And a lot of these apps need ADA locked up inside them to work. So the more people use Cardano, the more ADA they need to buy. And when the apps sit nearly empty, hardly anyone needs to buy it.

And it's going the wrong way. In August, that number was about $68 million. Now it's down to about $51 million. And some of the tools people build on Cardano didn't make it at all. One of them was Tap Tools, a big charts and data site for Cardano.

In June, it said it was shutting down because running it had gotten too expensive. And the same week, Hoskinson hit his limit. He said, I'm taking a break. After a wave of abuse in his replies, he went live on video the next day. That's the video you heard at the start of this video.

And when he got to ADA's price, he said straight out how much he cares about it. This is the line a lot of holders still haven't forgotten.

What I'm not passionate about is making the price of ADA go up so that speculators can dump it and go on to the next thing.

Now imagine hearing that from a man who started Cardano while you're down more than 90%. And he didn't stop at the price. A few seconds later, he said he doesn't wake up thinking about how to get more money into Cardano's apps either. Remember, that's the money that's already down to about $51 million. And a couple of minutes later, he explained why he won't chase the price.

You'll never win because there's always a new person to demand the token go up even more.

So in his eyes, chasing the price is a game that nobody wins. And later in that video, he said he keep working at midnight, but he was done with public videos and interviews for a while. And when he posted the video on X, the title answered what everyone was asking. No, I'm not leaving. So he wasn't walking away from Cardano, but for a lot of holders, the damage was already done.

And by September, he was daring his critics. Hoskinson's answer to one critic was saying, I love somebody to explain step by step how a post Charles goes to the moon. In other words, show me how ADA gets there without me. Now, remember those holder votes? The same month, his team asked Cardano's treasury for about 12 million ADA to build Pogon.

And the people the holders picked voted it down. About 64% of their votes said no. So the people with the votes aren't just following the founder anymore. And around the same time, Hoskinson said something else ADA holders should fear. From now on, his company will pick whichever network fits each project best instead of putting Cardano first.

And that matters for ADA holders because Midnight, the network he said he'd keep working on, has its own coin called Night. It's worth about $670 million. And when Night launched, Midnight set aside half of all its coins for ADA holders. So a lot of people holding ADA last year could claim some. But Night going up doesn't move your ADA.

And the more his company builds on other networks, the less of its time goes into Cardano itself. So if the founder doesn't want to help the price, can the holders do something about it themselves? Well, in August they did. They voted to spend 120 million ADA from Cardano's own treasury to get more money into Cardano's apps. The goal is to push that $51 million past 200 million.

So that's about four times where it is right now. And that ADA won't go out all at once either. It gets paid out in stages. About 73% of the ADA that voted yes, 27% said no. So not every holder was on board.

And nobody knows yet if it'll work, but this time it's the holders themselves who voted to put that money on the line. And there's more coming. Cardano's next big upgrade, called Leos, is expected to launch late this year. So we only have two months left. It's built to let the network handle a lot more transactions at once.

And ADA itself still has some things going for it. Even after this drop, ADA is still big coin, worth about $7 billion in total. And about 84% of all the ADA that will ever exist is already out there. So there aren't many new coins still to come in circulation. So yes, there's a real case that ADA isn't finished, but all of it still comes back to new buyers coming in the market.

And this year, one company was in a position to bring a lot of them in. And that company is Grayscale, one of the biggest crypto fund companies in America. And in February, it gave ADA holders some bad news. Its crypto fund dropped ADA and put BNB in its place. That fund holds the five biggest coins on an index, and ADA had fallen out of the top five.

But that wasn't the Grayscale fund ADA holders were really watching. It had also filed for an ETF that would hold only ADA. Now remember why an ETF matters so much here. Somebody who would never open a crypto app can now buy it in their normal brokerage or retirement account the same way they can buy a stock. No crypto wallet, just a couple of clicks.

Bitcoin, XRP, and Solana already have that. And ADA was getting close to a fast lane that could have put the fund on the market without a long wait. And here's how that fast lane works. Traders can bet on a coin's future price on a big regulated exchange like the CME. And under the SEC's rules, once that's been going for 6 months, a fund like this can skip the long separate review.

And for ADA, those bets started on the CME in February. So it would hit 6 months on August 9th. So by early August, ADA holders were just days away. And on August 7th, 2 days before the date, Grayscale pulled it. It told the SEC it does not intend to proceed, and it never gave a reason why.

So think about waiting for that and watching it get pulled right from under your feet right at the finish line. Grayscale pulled its Hedera and Polkadot funds the same way, and it didn't explain those either. But for you as a holder, the reason doesn't change much. Right now, no other company has a fund like that waiting in line. The only fund that tracks ADA is on its own futures, and it holds about 1.5 million.

XRP holders know what that fast lane can bring in. XRP funds have taken in about 1.8 billion dollars since they launched, and that's the buying ADA doesn't have. And you see what even that buying does to the price. It doesn't really matter that much if liquidity is not coming into the whole industry from stable coin inflows. So the easiest way for everyday investors to buy ADA is shut for now.

And that's where a lot of new buyers would have come from. So, is ADA ever coming back? Is it still worth holding? Well, here's where it really stands. Cardano was still building.

This year alone, it had its first upgrade voted in by its holders. It launched midnight and it got a new digital dollar. Its holders are even putting up their own money to get its apps going. But the money in those apps is down to about $51 million. And there's no ADA ETF left in line to bring new buyers in.

So, if you're holding Cardano, ADA is far from dead, but it still hasn't found the new buyers that it needs to bring the price back. And if you sold, nothing this year has proven that you're wrong yet. And if you never bought, the thing to watch is whether there's new buyers ever show up. And if you've held ADA since 2021, none of this is easy to hear. You held because you believed in what Cardano was building.

Heck, I even bought Cardano back in 2017 and I watched my portfolio go up massively from it. But if you bought near the top, that $1,000 is still sitting at about $64 if you're holding till today. And remember what Hoskinson said. He's not passionate about making ADA's price go up. And if the man who started Cardano isn't losing sleep over ADA's price, then the only one thinking about the money you put in is you.

And after 5 years, holding ADA can stop being about what you believe in. A lot of people are still holding because selling would make that loss real. So, they wait for the next upgrade and then the one after that, hoping that they can recover their unrealized losses. And that waiting has a cost. Leos is next and that 120 million ADA is only starting to go out.

But ADA still has to go up more than 15 times just to get you back at even if you bought the top. And every year you wait, that money stays tied up in one coin. So, ask yourself, how long you're really willing to give Cardano? Another year? Another five?

And if those new buyers never show up, what happens to the money you've got sitting in it? And the longer you've held, the harder that is to answer. Every time you think about selling, you remember what you paid and it feels like giving up right before the turn. And every time you think about buying more, feels like throwing good money after bad. So, most people end up doing nothing at all.

And after 5 years of holding, you deserve better than one more round of hoping. And it really helps to look at it with someone who doesn' sit through every one of those drops with you because they're not emotionally attached to the project and they can see it with a clear view. So, book a strategy call with an expert on my team. We've been in the industry for the past decade. We'll look at everything you hold, how much of your money is really riding on ADA coming back.

Then you'll work out together how much you're comfortable leaving in ADA while you wait. Now, it's not financial advice. We're not going to tell you what to buy or sell. We just tell you what we do with our money and what you choose to do is up to you. Because what do you do if those buyers never come back?

Because when Leo arrives and everyone starts getting excited about ADA again, you'll know your next move before the excitement even starts and ultimately lets more people down. Now, I genuinely hope Cardano does well. I hope ADA goes to the moon, but I personally believe there's much better projects in crypto right now worth holding. So, click the first link in the description, book the call. It says get your free crypto portfolio review.

If you're on mobile, tap the button that says more. It's the first link at the top. There's a short video that explains the process, then a quick form, and then you pick a time that works for you. Because either way, if you're still holding, watch the money in Cardano's apps. That 120 million ADA is supposed to push it past 200 million.

If it barely moves, that'll tell you more about whether ADA is coming back than any upgrade. So, as always, I'll see you on the next video through the link below. I'll see you at the top. You know what to do. Stay bullish.

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