Cardano Becomes Sixth Biggest Crypto With 27% Surge

The global crypto market is experiencing a small relief rally. Cardano is leading the bounce with a 27% price surge, overtaking Ripple to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Cardano Flips Ripple 

Cardano is outperforming the majority of the cryptocurrency market. 

The smart contract blockchain’s ADA token has rallied 27% on the day amid a market-wide bounce, surpassing Ripple to reclaim its place as the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The rally comes ahead of Cardano’s highly-anticipated Vasil hardfork upgrade; the blockchain is slated to see a testnet release on Jun. 2 with a mainnet launch on Jun. 29. Upon full release, the Vasil upgrade will represent the network’s most significant overhaul since the Alonzo hardfork in September 2021. 

While the Alonzo upgrade gave Cardano smart contracting capabilities, unlocking a range of new DeFi use cases, the upcoming Vasil hardfork will supposedly improve the scalability and usability of the network. Specifically, Vasil will include four Cardano Improvement Proposals, CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40, which are supposed to reconsider the logic of how Cardano’s Plutus scripts are submitted to the blockchain. Together, the CIP upgrades are supposed to lower the transaction fees, improve the network’s throughput and decentralization, and solve the so-called “concurrency” issue that has severely impaired the scalability of the apps on the blockchain to date.

Although Cardano was one of the first smart contract-based Ethereum competitors to hit the market in 2017, it has fared significantly worse in terms of ecosystem than most of its counterparts. It launched smart contracting capabilities long after other blockchains like Solana had already built out their own DeFi and NFT ecosystems, and still sees significantly less activity than most other leading Layer 1 networks eight months later. According to data from Defi Llama, Cardano has around $158 million in total value locked across its decentralized apps, about 25 times less than Solana and 455 times less than Ethereum. Interestingly, Ethereum’s market cap is about 11 times larger than Ethereum despite the significant lead it has in the DeFi space. 

ADA is currently trading at around $0.66, up around 27% from today’s low of $0.51. That puts Cardano’s market cap at about $22.3 billion. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.