Cardano (ADA) continued to make waves in the cryptocurrency market towards month’s end after an epic rise of over 50% since the start of the year. The altcoin, which ranks eighth by market capitalization, topped $0.3990 at one point Sunday before recoiling on Monday.
Cardano’s growth over the past month comes amid a wider cryptocurrency market recovery as investors remain hopeful that the worrisome global economic data will soon ebb. In hindsight, Cardano has also benefited from the rising interest in its Decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
Apart from making major progress on projects such as Cosmos and Hydra in the past few weeks, the Cardano community has been abuzz anticipating Djed. This decentralized and overcollateralized stablecoin is scheduled for launch this week. Djed is intended to be the primary currency for paying transaction fees on the Cardano network, bringing greater usability to the stablecoin landscape and making transaction costs more predictable.
On that note, a wall of money has been flowing into ADA purchases, as investors predict the launch will be a boon for the asset’s price. Late Sunday, crypto analyst Ali noted that nearly 92,000 addresses had purchased around 4.39 billion ADA worth about $1.72 billion between $0.365 and $0.376. The pundit noted that that price range could prove to be crucial support, adding that “as long as this demand wall holds, ADA will have a good chance of reaching higher highs.”
However, in a subsequent tweet, Ali shared a chart by Santiment showing that ADA’s recent surge has also triggered some selling from whales looking for exit liquidity.
“Since Cardano surpassed the $0.38 level on Jan. 21, roughly 31 addresses holding 100,000 to 1,000,000 ADA have sold or redistributed their ADA tokens, shows on-chain data from Santiment,” he wrote.
According to data from crypto analytics platform IntoTheBlock, 71% of ADA holders are currently holding at a loss, with just 26% being “in the money”. By comparison, 62% of Bitcoin investors are currently in the green, with just 35% in the red. However, according to the firm, ADA’s low profitability count “may very well indicate that this is not a bad point for entering new positions.”
Moreover, despite ADA’s price still being in the woods following a harrowing crypto winter, the total number of addresses has been increasing pretty steadily, topping at 4.38 million compared to just 734,000 addresses in the same period in 2021.
At press time, ADA was trading at $0.378, down roughly 5% in the past 24 hours.