Cardano (ADA) Surging on Decentralized Exchange and Metaverse Hype  

Cardano’s ADA token has surged 16% over the past 24 hours beating its rivals by a clear margin as most of them are in retreat again during the Tuesday morning Asian trading session.

ADA topped $1.60 on Tuesday morning marking a six-week high and a gain of more than 40% over the past seven days. However, the token is still down 48% from its Sept. 2 all-time high of $3.09.

The move has elevated Cardano to fifth place in the market capitalization charts with $51 billion. Every other token in the top twenty has declined over the past day with Terra (LUNA), Polkadot (DOT), and Cosmos (ATOM) taking the heaviest losses.

The total market capitalization for all crypto assets has declined 2% or $45 billion to $2.1 trillion at the time of writing. Since the beginning of the year, crypto markets have shrunk by 7%.

Cardano Decentralized Exchange Launch

Cardano momentum is coming from a recent highly-anticipated decentralized exchange (DEX) launch announcement. The SundaeSwap DEX will go live to mainnet on January 20 according to a Jan. 16 tweet from the team.

📢The moment we've all been waiting for has finally come!

We're excited and proud to share that SundaeSwap and the ISO will be launching on the evening of Thursday, January 20th (EST)! 🍨

Check out the article below! 👇https://t.co/8oDYU6i3k9 pic.twitter.com/upgNZx2xH2

— SundaeSwap Labs 🍨 (@SundaeSwap) January 15, 2022

Cardano has been suffering a lack of decentralized applications recently, but that appears to be slowly changing for the Ethereum rivaling network.

SundaeSwap will have an initial stake offering (ISO) in which ADA holders can delegate their tokens to earn SUNDAE tokens from the exchange. This is likely to be the main driver of current price action for ADA.

The DEX will also offer yield farming opportunities from January to June in which users can stake liquidity provider (LP) tokens to earn even more SUNDAE. 500,000 tokens will be allocated daily over at least the first six months of the DEX’s operation, it stated.

Into the Metaverse

The buzzword of 2022 is undoubtedly “Metaverse” so it comes as no surprise that Cardano has its own virtual reality ambitions. As reported by FXempire on Jan. 17, a Cardano-based Metaverse project called Pavia has launched, further propelling the network’s native token.

Pavia was first announced in September 2021 when it began selling virtual land plots to early adopters.

On-chain activity has also increased for Cardano and it is now the third-largest network behind Bitcoin and Ethereum for 24-hour transaction volume. According to Messari, $5.3 billion has been transacted on Cardano since the same time yesterday.