Cardano
About Cardano
The price of Cardano (ADA) is $0.34328369 today, as of Sep 16 08:17 p.m., with a 24-hour trading volume of $217.51M. Over the last 24 hours, the price has decreased by -3.05%. Cardano currently has a circulating supply of 35.66B and a market cap of $12.24B.
Launched in 2017, Cardano is billed as a third-generation blockchain, following Bitcoin and Ethereum, which were the first- and second-generation blockchains. Cardano aims to compete directly with Ethereum and other decentralized application platforms, saying that it is a more scalable, secure and efficient alternative.
Decentralized applications, or dapps, are similar to applications on a smartphone. The main difference is dapps run autonomously without a third party operating in the background. They achieve that autonomy by using smart contracts, which are computer programs designed specifically to perform a function when certain predetermined conditions are met.
For example, you could create a collateralized borrowing dapp that loaned money to anyone if they deposited a certain amount of collateral in a wallet beforehand. The smart contract, in this instance, would be programmed to send a transaction (the loan) to the borrower immediately after the collateral wallet received the right amount of funds. The smart contract could also be programmed to liquidate the collateral (keep the locked-up funds) if the borrower failed to make repayments on time.
Cardano also touts itself as being the only extensively peer-reviewed blockchain platform in the industry, and it routinely publishes academic research papers on its website.
Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, ADA, was launched in 2017 following a public sale of 25.9 billion ADA tokens, which began in September 2015. A further 5.2 billion tokens were issued and shared among the three separate entities that market and develop the Cardano protocol. They are Input Output Global (IOG), Emurgo and the Cardano Foundation. IOG was issued 2.46 billion tokens, Emurgo 2.06 billion and the foundation 648 million.
When the token became publicly tradable, ADA’s price was $0.02. Within 96 days, prices skyrocketed to their previous all-time high of $1.31 in tune with the rest of the crypto market during the 2017 crypto bull run.
Like the prices of most crypto assets in 2018, ADA’s price fell sharply that year. By November 2018, it had fallen back to $0.02.
It took more than two years before ADA returned to above $1.31. Spurred by a new bull market cycle in early 2021, ADA continued to climb, and it hit $2.46 in mid-May 2021. A brief correction occurred between May and July before prices shot up even further. This time, ADA reached a new all-time high of $3.10 in early September 2021.