The Cardano price tumbled on Monday as sentiment in cryptocurrencies worsened. The ADA token declined to $2.3140, even as the platform’s developers unveiled their smart contracts features. The network has a market capitalization of more than $77 billion, which is substantially below its peak of more than $90 billion.
Cardano smart contracts
Cardano is a fast-growing blockchain project whose goal is to help companies in sectors like education, finance, and technology solve some of their biggest challenges. For example, through its network, education companies can decentralize certificate issuance while retailers can fight counterfeits.
The Cardano price has been in a strong bullish trend recently as investors waited for the Alonzo hard fork to continue. This fork was part of the Goguen phase of Cardano’s network. Its most important feature was smart contracts, which developers use to build decentralized applications like DeFi and non-fungible tokens (NFT).
In a post during the weekend, Input and Output, the developers behind Cardano said that the upgrade was complete and that developers could start building applications. The developers said:
“There will be bumps in the road. Early user experiences might not be perfect. Some early DApps will have issues. We’ll see some great development teams and some poor ones. This is a permissionless, decentralized blockchain, so this is inevitable.”
The launch of smart contracts will help solve some of the biggest mysteries about Cardano. For example, in July, Mike Novogratz, a Cardano critic, asked his Twitter followers for information on projects built on Cardano. There were none.
Another risk for Cardano is that the smart contracts industry is currently saturated. For example, DeFi projects built on Ethereum have a total value locked of more than $84 billion. Ethereum is also used to build some of the biggest decentralized games and NFTs in the world.
At the same time, many developers are already using Ethereum-killers like Solana, Avalanche, and Polkadot. Therefore, it is right to point that Cardano is currently facing its biggest test to date.
Cardano price prediction
The four-hour chart shows that the ADA price has been under intense pressure in the past few days. Indeed, the coin has declined by more than 20% from its all-time high. Along the way, it has dropped below the 25-period and 50-period exponential moving averages (EMA) and the 23.6% retracement level.
It has also dropped below the neckline of the double-top pattern at $2.50 and moved lower than the Ichimoku cloud. Therefore, the path of the least resistance for ADA is in the downside, with the next key support being at the 50% retracement level of $2.
If you’re interested in investing in Cardano, check out our guide on how to buy Cardano online.