Things have been a bit quieter with Cardano and its token ADA recently. After a lot of buzz in late August and early September, the release of smart contracts, exciting news coming out every day and reaching a new all-time high of 3.1 USD, it certainly feels like Cardano lost its momentum.
The chart above shows that ADA has been going sideways at around 2 – 2.2 USD for around 6 weeks now. Yet this makes me really bullish and excited about what’s likely to come next. These long consolidation phases are in fact very typical for ADA. As you can see on the chart below, we had similar patterns around November-December 2020, again in January 2021 and then from late February to late April. Each of these consolidation phases was between 4 and 8 weeks longs.
The reason why I’m excited is because of what happened between these phases. Each time we observed an increase in price between 100% and 160%. If this pattern repeats itself again, we could see ADA going to around 4-5 USD on its next leg up.
Of course, the main difference is that in the past, these price movements were based almost purely on speculation, while the next move up will also depend on the actual usability of the Cardano ecosystem. This is probably why we’re not seeing ADA moving much now.
While I remain very bullish on Cardano and it’s still my second biggest investment after Bitcoin, what I’m excited more about are various projects within the Cardano ecosystem. Cardano’s market cap is around 66 billion USD, which makes it quite slow to move as any significant price movement requires a very large cash inflow. However, as Cardano started going sideways, perhaps even a little bit bearish you could say, a lot of alts dipped in price or didn’t recover much from the summer bear market.
These alts present a great buying opportunity right now and once ADA starts going up, they are very likely to go up at a much faster pace due to their much lower market caps.
Below are a few projects, which in my opinion are particularly interesting. For full disclosure, I either invested in recently or bought more due to their current low price or I’m considering buying them.
Cardstarter – 90 mil market cap and currently around 86% down from its all-time high. These numbers alone suggest that it’s potentially a great buying opportunity. Cardstarter is a launchpad and every blockchain needs launchpads so it certainly has potential.
OccamFi – 128 mil market cap and down around 53% from its ATH. It’s a suite of DeFi protocols that include a launchpad, DEX and liquidity pools. DeFi protocols and in particular DEX are a key element of every crypto ecosystem.
Charli3 – around 19 mil market cap and down around 75%. This makes it VERY attractive in terms of its potential for growth and it’s an oracle which similarly to launchpads is something needed for every blockchain. My only concern is that Chainlink – the biggest oracle - is going to be implemented on Cardano so this may potentially somewhat cripple Charli3’s potential.
Gero Wallet – 20 mil market cap and 87% down. Non-custodial wallet plus DeFi platform.
Another project with a tiny market cap and substantially down from its ATH, so with a huge potential to be the next moonshot.
COTI – 506 mil market cap and only 12% down. This one is a bit different. COTI had a ton of bullish news in the last few weeks and is actually performing much better than most of the Cardano ecosystem. It’s probably the safest bet on this list but due to its relatively large market cap, it’s likely to move up at a much steadier pace. In my view, it’s a great mid-to-long term investment. COTI is a payment solutions platform that provides a whole array of options for online and offline payments, crypto and stable coins, credit cards, etc. They are also working on creating DJED – Cardano’s stablecoin.
To conclude, I think all of these projects have immense potential for growth. The ones with a lower market cap present the biggest opportunity but also come with the highest risk. But at a 20 mil market cap, all it takes is just one mention from a big crypto influencer and the price can shoot up 3-5x in a matter of hours.
Aside from pure speculation, there’s no doubt that the Cardano ecosystem is gaining utility, slowly maturing and it will eventually explode. While I expect ADA to start moving up before the end of this year, I think the real pump will come much later, potentially as late as mid or late 2022.
As always – the key to making big profits in crypto is being ahead of the game and looking at what is likely to pump next. If you’re investing now in meme coins, you’re already late to the game and you have to be extremely careful. Gaming cryptos have much more long-term potential but some of them have already pumped a lot so again – you have to be careful. On the other hand, the Cardano ecosystem is going slow and NFTs are currently in their own bear market and that’s why my attention is on these projects.
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Disclaimer
The content covered in this article is NOT to be considered investment advice. I’m NOT a financial adviser. These are only my own speculative opinions, ideas and theories. Do NOT trade or invest based purely upon the information presented in this article.