Cardano (ADA) has emerged as the biggest winner of today’s rally across the top 10 cryptos with 24-hour gains of more than 20%.
Trading volumes have more than doubled during this period and currently account for 8% of ADA’s circulating supply as a short squeeze seems to be unfolding.
Including today’s jump, ADA’s gains in the past 7 days have increased to 30% and the token has managed to trim its year-to-date losses to just 11%.
Cardano has been making new efforts to expand its ecosystem of decentralized apps (dApps) as this blockchain has notably lagged its peers in this aspect in particular for years.
Looking at the network’s transaction volumes, we have not yet seen a major spike in Cardano’s weekly activity.
Cardano Weekly Transaction Volumes (YTD) – Source: Artemis
Cardano’s weekly on-chain TXs hit a peak in January this year as the price of ADA rallied following President Trump’s mention of the token as a potential pick for a U.S. strategic crypto reserve.
Since then, volumes have dried up, moving from 521,000 transactions per week to just 200,000 by the end of June. This indicates that the project’s efforts to bring more volumes to its network via new dApps have not yet paid off.
This week, the Cardano Foundation launched a new tool called Reeve that allows users to create financial reports, record them in its public blockchain, and share them with third parties.
Cardano’s Total Value Locked (TVL) – Source: Artemis
This kind of real-world application is what this blockchain has mostly focused on instead of DeFi.
Although it is a noble effort, they have also missed a big opportunity to showcase Cardano’s use cases by embracing the latter trend and other similar segments like meme coins and even artificial intelligence (e.g., blockchain-based virtual agents).
Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) reflects this as this metric currently sits below $300 million compared to $9.3 billion on Solana. Even Bitcoin, a blockchain considered quite inefficient, has surpassed Cardano by a long shot as its DeFi TVL has risen to $7 billion lately amid the launch of new apps like the Babylon Protocol – a staking protocol.
Looking at the daily chart, ADA has been going up for four days in a row and trading volumes have been rising steadily throughout each of those days.
ADA/USD Daily Chart (Coinbase) – Source: TradingView
The 9-day and 21-day exponential moving averages (EMAs) have sent a powerful buy signal upon making a ‘golden cross’ while the price has also jumped above the 200-day exponential moving average.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has entered overbought territory today, emphasizing the strength of the uptrend and confirming a bullish mid-term outlook for the token.
This latest rally confirmed a bullish breakout of Cardano’s descending price channel and could result in a retest of the external liquidity that lies at $0.87 – the token’s latest swing high in this high time frame.
A retest of the 200-day EMA seems highly likely at some point, especially if that external liquidity is taken. Such a move would provide a decent entry for late buyers who could set their eyes on the psychological $1 threshold.
Alejandro Arrieche specializes in drafting news articles that incorporate technical analysis for traders and possesses in-depth knowledge of value investing and fundamental analysis.