Cardano Price News: ADA Outperforms Peers in 2026 – Will It Make a Comeback?

Cardano (ADA) has delivered a 7% gain since the year started, more than tripling BTC’s gains in 2026 while it is also beating all other larger top altcoins during this period.

What exactly could be driving this spike in ADA’s price is unclear, as the token’s trading volumes have dried up in the past four weeks, while on-chain analytics remain heavily depressed.

NIGHT Token Dropped Sharply After TGE

Looking at Cardano’s ecosystem, there’s not much to report apart from the poor performance of NIGHT – the native token of its privacy-focused blockchain Midnight.

According to CoinMarketCap, the token has experienced a 41% loss in the past 30 days, dropping from $0.088 to $0.057 at the time of writing.

NIGHT 30D Performance – Source: CoinMarketCap

The Midnight airdrop has already entered the redemption phase, but eligible wallets will progressively claim their tokens until December 4, 2026, in four different tranches.

Even though privacy tokens like Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) have all experienced big price upticks both in 2025 and the beginning of this year, Midnight does not seem to be moving the needle for investors at all.

Cardano’s Top Stablecoins Moneta Has a Market Cap of Just $15M

Moving to the Cardano ecosystem, its total value locked (TVL) has plummeted from 672 million ADA in October 2024 to 495 million ADA by the end of last year, reflecting a users’ progressive exodus out of this network and into more successful blockchains like Solana (SOL) and Ethereum (ETH).

Cardano’s Total Value Locked (TVL) (in ADA) – Source: DeFi Llama

Minswap is still the largest DEX in the Cardano ecosystem, while Liqwid is the largest decentralized lending protocol powered by this blockchain. Their combined TVL in USD currently sits at $77 million – a meager amount compared to Ethereum and Solana-native peers like Raydium or Uniswap.

Meanwhile, Cardano recently launched its first native stablecoin called Moneta (USDM). This stable asset has a market cap of just $15 million, and it is currently the largest in its category.

Daily Chart Flashes Buy Signals After Hitting Key Support at $0.30

Heading to the charts, we got two daily buy signals in the daily time frame. The first one did not yield a positive result as bulls lacked the strength to push ADA above $0.50 back in January 09.

ADA/USD Daily Chart (Kraken) – Source: Kraken

Meanwhile, the second one might be considered a high-probability signal as it followed a bullish breakout out of a long-dated falling wedge. In addition, it occurred right after ADA bounced off a key support at $0.34.

As we can see in the chart, this was the price level from which ADA rallied strongly right after President Donald Trump was elected President in November 2024.

A bit more than a year later, the price has taken a round trip and has fully shed all of the gains it produced back then. Now, the question would be if investors are still interested in buying ADA at that frantic pace as it retests this key level.

The macroeconomic landscape has improved as the Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates. However, President Trump’s hostile trade policies introduce significant uncertainty and have kept traders away from the market since the October 10 flash crash.

ADA needs to break past the $0.40 mark to reverse its downtrend. If that happens, it could mark the start of a rally toward $0.50 first and then to much higher ground, possibly to $0.75 next.