ADA (Cardano) was one of the few coins to remain stable after the May sell-off. This is due to the upcoming Vasil upgrade, which will allow developers to create more efficient dApps thanks to the optimization of smart contracts. In anticipation of future growth, sharks are actively buying up ADA, which has propped up its price for the past two months.

The inclusion of support for smart contracts came as an unpleasant surprise to the community and investors, as expectations ran counter to reality, and a year ago the network experienced significant congestion following the Alonzo update. The release date of new projects has been postponed and the coin's price has dropped from $3 to today's $0.45.

But things should pick up after Vasil's major upgrade, which was pushed back from June to September. Developer Charles Hoskinson assured users that he does not anticipate further delays to the Vasil hard fork, despite the scale and complexity of its implementation. Many things will change, from the programming language to the consensus protocol.

Hoskinson has promised that this will result in Solana-like performance by the end of 2022. So far, Cardano has very little to boast about: DeFi has locked funds totalling $82m, compared with $1.5bn for Solana.

However, the community is still confident in the blockchain, as demonstrated by a recent Cointelegraph survey.

For the same reason, Robinhood recently announced the listing of Cardano, and mid-September will see the launch of Aada Finance, a new DeFi platform built on the Cardano blockchain. In addition to the standard lending and borrowing and protocols, Aada will offer its users NFT bonds.

Hoskinson is not alone in expecting a significant increase in network usage following the deployment of Vasil. Sharks (10k to 100k ADA) added 79m ADA July and another $138m in the first week of August. 

If the upgrade goes smoothly and leads to the expected results, Cardano stands a good chance of reversing the long-term downtrend. The hardfork is expected in mid-September.

StormGain analytics team

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