The once very promising project known as the "Ethereum killer" continues to lose points in the crypto arena. According to CoinGecko's ranking, Cardano is now in 11th place by market capitalisation, coming in at $20.6 billion. It reached its peak capitalisation in 2021 when it hit $91.6 billion.

Note: On CoinMarketCap, Cardano was still in the Top 10 since Lido's stETH, which has a market capitalisation of $33.6 billion, is not listed there.

In April, Cardano was definitively pushed out of 10th place by Toncoin, which has managed to increase its capitalisation from $3 billion to $25 billion in 12 months. However, Cardano's collapse started back in 2021, when it turned out that the "Ethereum killer" wasn't capable of properly working with smart contracts. After the Alonzo hardfork, the network's capitalisation and the price of ADA plummeted.

The project's developers needed over a year to resolve the situation. Cardano missed its moment to consolidate its success, and it lost its spot to blockchains with more successful architectures. Now, along with networks such as Solana or L2 on Ethereum, Cardano no longer looks innovative. At least that's the assessment held by Grayscale, whose legal successes in 2023 opened the door to spot ETFs in the United States.

In July 2021, Grayscale added Cardano to its digital crypto fund, and in September, Alonzo identified network congestion after enabling support for smart contracts. The team believed in the product until the bitter end, but on 3 April 2024, Cardano was removed from the fund.

Cardano's problem is the lack of forward momentum. The network still doesn't support widely accepted stablecoins such as USDT and USDC. Instead, it introduced its own coin, Djed, whose capitalisation has been hovering around $3-4 million for a year now. Analytical agency K33 Research believes the lack of integration will lead Cardano to be completely forgotten.

In the DeFi sector, the network dropped to 18th place with $385 million in total value locked (TVL). For comparison, Base, which launched last year, already has $1.5 billion. 

Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, always defends the network by pointing to the community's cohesion, but statistics on developer activity indicate the opposite.

The combination of negative factors and investor disappointment has led to ADA missing out on this year's rally. Instead, it's trading down 2%.

StormGain Analytical Group 
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)

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