For the better part of 2022, both Cardano and Ethereum — the latter behind the hype and might of its long-awaited and finally launched 2.0 hard fork — were vying for the top spot on GitHub’s list of active developers. Now, at the start of 2023, there’s finally a clear winner between the two. And, as you might have guessed, it’s Cardano.

Per @ProofOfGitHub, Cardano’s network took the top spot — by a respectable if not particularly wide margin — this past Friday:

GitHub Daily Development Activity:

#1: 792 Cardano
#2: 769 Polkadot / Kusama
#3: 613 Status
#4: 501 Filecoin
#5: 475 Internet Computer
#6: 435 Cosmos
#7: 423 IOTA
#8: 364 Uniswap
#9: 359 Hedera
#10: 344 Flow pic.twitter.com/jzqvXkbXap

— ProofofGitHub (@ProofofGitHub) January 21, 2023

AMB Crypto adds:

While the high levels of development activity are great for boosting investor confidence, it is more important to consider what that development is about. Another recent Cardano host points to a report which reveals that Cardano currently has more than 4,800 smart contracts. In addition, over 1,100 projects are under development on the network.

As proud crypto laymen ourselves, we think this is a really good point. Especially the bit about how “it is more important to consider what that development is about.” Or, in other words, what that development actually means.

Now, unless you’re a Cardano enthusiast far beyond the likes of which we’ve ever seen here at AdaStrong (hey, anything’s possible — almost), it’s basically impossible to know what each of these contracts and projects truly constitutes.

Fortunately, though, you really don’t have to.

(Plus; honestly, how do you even make sense of something like this? — Ed.)

But you should know some of it. At the very least, you should know the highlights.

To that end, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has floated an interesting idea right out of left field: buying CoinDesk.

Apparently, CoinDesk — one of the most popular and visited crypto blogs on the Internet — is for sale. And with a valuation of around $200 million, the price might just be right.

Interestingly, however, that price would be right only for Hoskinson himself. Not for Cardano developer IOHK, and not for the Cardano Foundation. Hoskinson. This would be all Hoskinson.

Bloomberg reports that while he’s made no commitment or official offer,

Hoskinson…heard [CoinDesk] is for sale for about $200 million, but said he hadn’t seen CoinDesk’s financials. ‘At $200 million, I believe it’s a bit overpriced,’ he said. ‘I could afford it if I really wanted to.’

That’s a bit of weird flex, but it also happens to be true. He could. This isn’t Elon Musk buying Twitter, after all.

Twitter-tier or not, if Hoskinson actually does purchase CoinDesk, it would still be a huge deal — especially for Cardano.

That said, there’s no indication that Hoskinson would turn CoinDesk into CardanoDesk. Instead, be would reportedly “revamp it into a mix of a news and community site.”

Presumably, CoinDesk would continue to cover the crypto market as a whole, albeit with a stronger emphasis on Web 3.0 and PoS cryptos — with, naturally, a bit of additional positive Cardano press (not that it needs it) a la Amazon and The Washington Post.

Honestly, it’s not a bad idea.

Of course, we’re just happy we hedl on and ADA’s sitting north of $0.35 again.

Well, the brand somehow survived this massive breach of trust and boasts 23 million active users and counting. Don’t ask us to explain it – we can’t.

For whatever reason, Robinhood is still considered not only a viable investment platform but is actually one of the biggest and most trusted such platforms going.

Convenience really must be king.

Anyway, as you’ll recall, the GameStop controversy was a clear driver in the 2021 crypto boom.

Countless erstwhile and nascent stock investors, disenfranchised by the seeming ability for any old investment app to just shut down trading whenever it wants to protect various hedge funds and establishment brokerages, went looking for something different.

They remembered hearing about this “cryptocurrency” thing and how it doesn’t have the same gatekeeping issues that the traditional stock market does.

Crypto, they heard, exists precisely to remove that meddlesome gatekeeping so trading can be organic, demand-based, and user-driven.

So a bunch of people finally got into crypto for the first time, and a bunch of those people bought Cardano. Because Robinhood stole from the poor and gave to the rich, it prompted a measurable resistance.

That’s the prevailing theory, at least.

Of course, since this is Clownworld™, we’ve finally come full circle:

Robinhood now supports Cardano trading.

You asked… @Cardano is now on Robinhood #ADA #CryptoListing https://t.co/30JpA2vPF5 pic.twitter.com/GlXXu3S1lL

— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 1, 2022

While this should be a boon for Cardano’s “mainstream” legitimacy (ironic as that sounds in context), many ADA holders are probably expecting the news to rapidly push the Cardano price close to its recent high of $0.60 or so.

That’s probably not going to happen. At least, not because of Robinhood.

The ADA price is going to go up in the near future, but this will be the result of the anticipated Vasil hard fork and enthusiasm thereof.

A new exchange listing Cardano – at this point in late 2022 – probably won’t ever have the effect on the asset that, say, the original Coinbase Cardano listing did. That was a big deal, and it was recognized as such immediately.

However, since then, ADA adoption by major exchanges and crypto storefronts has been fairly ubiquitous. A few Johnny-come-latelies won’t have much of an impact in driving up the price.

(Note: The exception to this new rule will be when PayPal, Venmo, and/or other P2P apps support full ADA trading. That would be huge, but it’s probably not happening any time soon.)

Some outlets were reporting this lack of movement on the heels of Robinhood’s listing as somehow newsworthy or surprising. If you want a needlessly analytical and brokerly explanation of all this, Cointelegraph is as good a blog as any.

But if you want the layman’s version:

Robinhood is irrelevant for crypto as a primary crypto platform.

Because it’s a stock trading platform first and foremost, Robinhood’s value to the crypto market lies in being an entry point for new crypto users.

The scenario is simple enough: People are already using the app to trade their stonks, and maybe they’re curious about crypto but were always intimidated by the “exchange” buy-in process. But now, they can buy crypto using the same app they’re used to.

That’s good, even if Robinhood itself comes with some very questionable baggage.

But once someone buys some Cardano (or any other crypto – truth be told, most newcomers will probably start with Bitcoin), it won’t be long until they figure out the necessity of moving that crypto to a private non-custodial wallet.

Robinhood’s crypto wallet functionality is custodial, which means the company holds all your keys. After the GameStop debacle, is that really something you want to risk?

Also, with Cardano specifically – and hodling best practices aside – the private wallet angle is part of what makes the coin so compelling.

Because you can stake Cardano to earn free ADA passively, it makes all the sense in the world to move your coinage to something like the Yoroi Wallet or Daedalus Wallet or even Atomic Wallet in order to have more control over your assets and your profits.

If you use Robinhood and don’t own any Cardano, you should definitely buy some ADA and get your feet wet.

But once you do that, you need to move your ADA off-platform into a Cardano wallet ASAP. As a general rule, you should only ever keep the crypto you’re actively trading on the exchanges.

You have been warned!

We’re familiar with the basic ins and outs of cryptocurrency models and the Cardano network, we invest in coins and stake them, and we generally otherwise keep our hands off.

Over the last 10 days or so, though, we’ve noticed that the ADA price – which trended up to nearly $0.60 just a couple of weeks ago to under $0.45 in the last 48 hours – has been a little more volatile than usual.

The reason for this, of course, is due to speculation and concerns surrounding the Vasil hard fork.

As is becoming usual, the most recent round of FUD has been spearheaded by a single developer on one social network or another, going full sky-is-falling mode over a bug they found.

It’s like that girl who moves down to Florida from some midwest desert, comes over to your house for a drink on the porch, and then loses her ever-loving mind when a harmless palmetto bug goes flapping by her face.

It’s just a bug, lady. It’s going to be okay.

Now, don’t get us wrong. Software bugs are an issue, especially when it comes to code in which utility and value are as entrenched as they are with cryptocurrency blockchains. These are big deals.

But are they as big as advertised when there are a dozen different conflicts of interest in every critic’s back pocket?

That’s a tougher thing to measure.

At any rate, here’s how Cointelegraph summarizes the way developer Adam Dean hyped the bug he found on the Vasil testnet:

“The developer claimed that the testnet is ‘catastrophically broken’ due to an undiscovered bug in Cardano’s Node v 1.35.2 that creates incompatible forks — which had managed to slip under the radar of the previous testing.

Following the bug, Cardano released its new client software, Cardano Node v1.35.3, on two separate testnets.

However, Dean noted that because the majority of operators upgraded to v1.35.2 to simulate the Vasil hard fork, v1.35.3 is also ‘incompatible and incapable of syncing’ with the original testnet, and the two testnets are ‘without a block history.’”

For his part, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has taken the time to explain the reality of the situation.

Whether or not his appeals to keep calm and hodl on have been able to impart some zen among the writhing masses remains to be seen, but he does make one particularly salient point:

“You can’t conflate a failed testnet with the mainnet because testnets are constructed and destroyed all the time in this industry. That’s their point. … They are in no way, in any way, harm [to] Cardano itself.”

The FUD aspect of this is thus:

Cardano has often been targeted by critics of the platform for a variety of perceived shortcomings. This has been the case since day one, and any top-10 cryptocurrency faces the same daily deluge of nonsense from advocates of rival ecosystems.

That makes it difficult to know exactly when someone’s actually spitting facts or just blowing smoke.

Cardano FUD is basically one of the foundational cottage industries for the network. There is nothing unusual about the latest Vasil drama if you’ve been paying attention at all over the last several years.

Still, these developments have caused yet another Cardano Vasil delay. Already pushed back from late July, it’s now anyone’s guess exactly how much longer we’ll all have to wait to usher in the new era.

It’s going to be several epochs, at least.

The most recent delay, of course, is the upcoming Cardano Vasil hardfork. The network upgrade was originally slated for a week from now, but that June 29 launch has been pushed back to the last week in July.

Input Output Global (formerly Input Output Hong Kong, or IOHK) announced the delay on its developer blog earlier this week:

“The IOG engineering team is extremely close to finalizing the core work, with just seven bugs still outstanding to complete the hard fork work, with none currently ranked as ‘severe’. After some consideration, we have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing. …

The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles. It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams, but also close coordination across the ecosystem.”

While the end of July is considered to be a reasonable timeframe to get Vasil rolled out, there’s no guarantee that there won’t be further delays.

There very well could be, especially since the following three prerequisites for going live – again, as outlined by IOHK and repeated here verbatim – are non-negotiable:

1. No critical issues outstanding on node (including ledger, CLI, consensus, etc.) or our internal audit function,
2. Benchmarking and performance-cost analysis is acceptable, and
3. Community (including exchanges and DApp projects) has been properly informed and has had sufficient time to prepare for the hard fork combinator event.

At the end of the post, the Cardano developer – perhaps a bit unnecessarily – explains why the delay was needed:

“We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some. However, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly.

As we have consistently communicated, and most in the community recognizes, no timelines can be absolute in software development. Quality and security must remain paramount. If more time is needed to get the core code right – and ensure all ecosystem players (SPOs, DApp projects, tools, exchanges, etc.) are fully comfortable – so be it. Giving the process longer is the only responsible thing to do.”

Now, obviously, IOG will get no complaints out of us for this move. IOG isn’t in the habit of vacillating, despite not Vasil-ating, as it were. (It’s early. Leave me alone.)

First off, we’re used to Cardano delays. And it’s not just Cardano. Any noteworthy and legitimate crypto development roadmap is peppered with delays as a matter of course.

We get that.

Put another way, we’re content to wait for Metroid Prime 4 (no doubt intended as a launch title for the Switch 2 VR) while many others were more excited – and then summarily quite a lot less excited – to play Cyberpunk 2077 on day one.

Of course, the vidya analogy is superficial because – outside of streamers and eSports pros – nobody’s counting on those software releases to make them actual money or to be the foundational basis for an entirely new economy.

With crypto, the stakes are higher.

Frankly, crypto development delays are only a problem if they take a piece of extant software and turn its future into a never-ending hypefest of vaporware.

It’s no cause for alarm if a developer frequently delays its various network upgrades. The real red flag is if the delays are endless and if the initiative languishes for months or even years on end.

If some hifalutin crypto concept gets kicked out the door before it’s ready – or if the team behind it was ambitious beyond its own capabilities – you’d be wise to dump the effort after a reasonable grace period.

By all means, these developers must prove themselves by sticking with the plan. Even if improvements trickle out, that’s fine – as long as they keep trickling out.

Otherwise, you run into this kind of nonsense from Cardano’s biggest “rival”:

“Solend, the largest lending market on Solana is about to have a crippling liquidation of $170m SOL that could crash the network. To prevent this, the decentralized protocol is proposing to seize the user’s funds via governance”

Seriously, this is real.

Here’s the scandal in question, as explained by u/Set1Less (all sics intact):

“There is a large liquidation watch on Solana’s Solend protocol, where a whale has deposited 5.7M SOL ($170M and borrowed 108M USDC and USDT borrowed. This alone accounts for a huge % of borrowing on Solana, and now this position is under a liquidation threat.

The whale is not closing their position. In most protocols like Compound, or AAVE, Maker etc, this will result in an onchain liquidation. Infact we have seen many such large liquidations on AAVE And Maker recently, and everything has worked as expected.

However such a large liquidation in an illiquid market and unstable network like Solana is likely to have vastly damaging consequences. Solana network has already gone down and halted half a dozen time.”

In response, the fine folks at Solend – being the champions of decentralization that they are – are proposing this as a solution:

“Grant emergency power to Solend Labs to temporarily take over the whale’s account so the liquidation can be executed OTC and avoid pushing Solana to its limits. This would be done via a smart contract upgrade. Emergency powers will be revoked once the whale’s account reaches a safe level.”

If theft is your solution to fix your financial network, you’ve messed up the bed worse than that celebrity woman from the trial.

As u/Set1Less sums up:

“When shit starts to implode, all the true colors of decentralization comes out.

These shitty protocol are run by fly by night cowboys who learnt basics of economics during the bull run. They put their users are risk by running terrible protocols that do not think about all the edge cases…because who cares about risks right?!

And during signs of distress, they resolve to seize user funds.”

Bad crypto concepts, bad code, and a lack of adequate forethought about potential outlier scenarios is a recipe for disaster. It’s why reputable blockchains like Cardano consistently delay new features and upgrades, and it’s why you can feel confident in the project.

It’s why ADA is still the best investment in crypto.

So, you know, buy the dip.

Bud?

Don’t do it. Don’t dump your crypto. Don’t listen to all the people you tried to help back then (and even now), all the people laughing their ill-informed asses off in their misplaced schadenfreude.

Honestly, they’re only riding you about your crypto losses to deflect from their own much more significant stock losses and the looming housing market collapse. So, set your phasers to “ignore.”

Because this crypto crash – whatever its cause (which, frankly, can no longer be solely attributed to Terra Labs’ epic dual crypto collapse, albeit LUNA and UST have a lot to do with how we got here) – is going to be a lot shorter and less painful than all the fiat disasters snowballing down the hill.

But all that said, maybe get a few extra cans of Campbell’s at Walmart this weekend. Just to be safe.

Now, if your terrified and projecting friends and family have gotten to you a bit, be sure to step back and recalibrate your perspective to what it was a month ago.

Remember, you’re not in this to make a quick buck – You’re in this for the long haul.

And if you’re a Cardano hodler, the coin’s previous all-time high (ATH) is unlikely to be its all-time all-time high (ATATH). It may take a little while to get back north of $3.00 per ADA coin, but we will get there. And then we’ll get to $5.00, and then to $10.00, and so on.

Early retirement is more impending than doom.

Unless, you know, you did something truly stupid and took out a second mortgage on your house to buy ADA at $2.50 or some similarly ill-advised nonsensical thing.

Remember, crypto investing – like all investing – is a gamble. And all smart gamblers share the same singular mantra:

“Don’t risk more than you can afford to lose.”

It’s that simple.

Every time you buy some cryptocurrency, you have to be okay with that haul going to zero. If you’re not, you shouldn’t play the game.

So, by our reckoning, most of you probably aren’t losing too much sleep over the current crypto crash.

And that’s the smart approach.

That said, we won’t act like such dips aren’t concerning. As far as annual crypto crashes go, this one’s a whopper.

But it’s not the biggest by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it’s only all over the news to distract you from things that matter a whole lot more, like all those hundreds of high-yield industrial farms burning down all across America by some cosmic coincidence. Or that tenuous situation in the Ukraine. Or the blatantly inorganic and outrageous price of gasoline pretty much everywhere.

Remember, even at its absolute height, crypto is an absolute baby when it comes to the financial world. And not just because it’s only been around since 2009 or so.

No, crypto – when Bitcoin was booming at $65,000 per or thereabouts – had a total market capitalization of around $2 trillion. Perhaps a little more. And BTC made up just under half of that.

That sure sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

Well, here’s what the market cap for physical fiat currency is right now, globally, in USD: $40 trillion.

But that’s just government script that’s changing hands. You know, stuff in debit accounts and savings accounts.

Factor in things like funds tied up in precious metals, credit lines, real estate, businesses, stonks, and suchlike, and the number is – by most credible estimates – somewhere in the region of a quadrillion bucks.

If you want to see that in numbers, it looks like this:

$1,000,000,000,000,000

That means that at crypto’s highest market capitalization to date (achieved around April 2021), cryptocurrency accounted for a mere 0.2% of all global tradeable wealth.

The people busting your chops about your crypto losses are losing orders of magnitude more than you – with the added bonus that their losses have meaningful long-term ramifications. Your losses, meanwhile, will be recouped before the next US President takes office.

And that’s if you just sit still.

However, if you’re not sitting still – if you’re buying the dip right now – you might very well be positioning yourself for a brighter future than ever. This current crypto downturn might set a new basement, but it’s a basement that’s always climbing higher and higher.

When’s the last time the US dollar appreciated in value?

So, will Bitcoin drop below $18,000 or so? It might, but it’s already recovering from when it touched $21,000 a day ago. Similarly, might ADA ever plummet to $0.12 again? It could, but that won’t mean you were dumb for buying in today at $0.50.

Honestly, right now – this very minute – is what you’ve been waiting for for heaven knows how long. This is the crash where you swore you’d buy in.

Just remember to keep it reasonable, remember to buy lots of ADA, and remember to delegate your ADA to a Cardano stake pool as soon as you do.

And despite its major growth to a $3.09 ATH in the second half of 2021, Cardano has still largely been influenced by Bitcoin. Every coin has.

Even as the Cardano network – and other third-gen PoS networks (i.e. Solana) – have far more utility than BTC and cost far less to use than, say, Ethereum and ETH-based coins, ADA still isn’t the crypto standard.

It’s part of it to be sure, but only a small part.

Cardano simply isn’t the tide that raises all boats (yet), but – barring a LUNA-like collapse – it’s not going to crash appreciably harder than anything else in its range, either.

It’ll usually go up and down with the other coins in its range.

That being said, over the last few weeks, Cardano has been steadily outpacing all the other big players on the crypto leaderboard – including Bitcoin!

While we’re naturally delighted by this, we’ve also been a little burned by how quickly the ADA price has climbed in comparison to other assets of interest.

It feels like we’ve been checking our exchange app every 15 minutes for the last week and change to pounce when the price of Cardano drops back down to $0.55.

And, of course, we keep getting hosed.

Right now, ADA is trading at $0.66 per, and our “losses” keep mounting.

Yes, we want Cardano to skyrocket sooner than later (that retirement isn’t going to fund itself!), but is it too much to ask to see a 15% dip in the next 24-48 hours before the inevitable liftoff?

At any rate, here’s how ADA has been performing over the last 10 days (i.e. since May 30) compared to the other top 20 non-stablecoins:

1. Bitcoin (BTC) – $30,397.33 > $30,499.36 = +0.36%
2. Ethereum (ETH) – $1891.51 > $1811.78 = -4.22%
3. Binance Coin (BNB) – $320.14 > $292.60 = -8.60%
4. Cardano (ADA) – $0.5193 > $0.6585 = +26.81%
5. Ripple (XRP) – $0.4029 > $0.4024 = -0.12%
6. Solana (SOL) – $45.65 > $39.82 = -12.77%
7. Dogecoin (DOGE) – $0.08481 > $0.08024 = -5.39%
8. Polkadot (DOT) – $10.39 > $9.13 = -12.13%
9. Tron (TRX) – $0.08299 > $0.08091 = -2.51%
10. Avalanche (AVAX) – $27.73 > $24.61 = -11.25%
11. Shiba Inu (SHIB) – $0.00001169 > $0.00001074 = -8.13%
12. UNUS SED LEO (LEO) – $5.1505 > $5.28 = +2.51%
13. Polygon (MATIC) – $0.6268 > $0.6157 = -1.77%
14. Cronos (CRO) – $0.182 > $0.178 = -2.20%
15. Litecoin (LTC) – $65.48 > $62.39 = -4.72%
16. Chainlink (LINK) – $7.0102 > $8.60 = 22.68%
17. FTX Token (FTT) – $28.48 > $28.20 = -0.98%
18. Uniswap (UNI) – $5.3525 > $5.19 = -3.04%
19. NEAR Protocol (NEAR) – $5.6782 > $5.22 = -8.07%
20. Stellar (XLM) – $0.1371 > $0.1422 = +3.72%

Of course, in the short term, what goes up must come down. So here’s hoping for only the briefest of dips.

After that, we’re just going to delegate the ADA stash, set it, and forget it for another year or so.

That’s a good thing for investors and the crypto community in general, of course, but it’s also a curious artifact of a market dominated as much by hype as by functional technological utility.

In fact, it can be argued that the dramatic majority of the cryptocurrency market is actually dominated far more by form over function.

And really, that’s not particularly shocking or notable. At least, not for anyone who’s been paying attention.

Since we launched ADA Strong – along with our ADAST stake pool – we’ve tried to approach Cardano (and crypto in general) from the perspective of the layman.

Now, we’re slightly better informed than the standard crypto layman, to be sure. But while we might entertain ourselves with some deep dives into the coins du jour on our own time, we’ve always considered it a crucial strategic move to approach ADA – and discussions surrounding ADA and the wider crypto space – in the most basic and broad terms possible.

Plus, we’re definitely not “experts.” There’s no way to hide that fact, and there’s no reason to obfuscate the reality.

Sure, we know a thing or two about Cardano and crypto, and that’s been enough to be a positive boon to our investment portfolios. And without a doubt, our level of expertise (or lack thereof, depending on your own level of expertise) is the best-case scenario for 80 percent or more of crypto investors and traders.

Most people haven’t got the necessary backgrounds in data science to understand the technicalities of the code or the true efficacy of one blockchain or smart contract concept over another. And since it’s not necessary to understand all that, only the truly curious will seek to sort through and grasp the minutiae.

Everyone else is going to go to a site like CoinMarketCap, Crypto.com, or their exchange of choice, check the prices of various coins and their recent trends, and make their buying and selling decisions accordingly.

Technical breakdowns filled with stock market jargon and the new English lexicon designed around cryptocurrency – beyond the classic “hodl” meme – won’t do any good for most folks.

Actually, we’d argue that this kind of approach – this weird sort of authoritative semantic gymnastics most outlets employ – could well do more harm than good when it comes to mass adoption.

See, most people neither know nor care how the Visa network actually works. Nobody is particularly interested in how a Mastercard debit card transaction communicates with their bank in order to process the funds for that tank of gas or that can of Coke. And nobody on the planet understands what’s going on with the US dollar.

It’s enough that it all works. That’s all that’s expected.

Crypto – should it ever come close to approaching its full potential – is going to have to function that way. The fine print and whitepapers and mealy-mouth mumbo-jumbo is going to have to be secondary to the coins themselves. The high-minding analytics will have to be targeted at the tiny extremes at the edge of the crypto investor curve.

As long as a common Google search for a given coin returns results that most people can’t understand, crypto won’t blow up like it should. At the very least, it won’t blow up as fast as it should.

Truly, this is more about psychology than it is mathematics or economics or any other hard science. Cryptocurrency has already proven itself to those embracing the latter disciplines.

It’s the psychological angle that needs addressing. We even have a few ideas of our own for the next Cardano Catalyst event when it comes to marketing ADA for maximum reach and adoption.

Consider: While events like the Cardano Summit are fun and exciting for nerds in the know, they don’t really do much for the crypto everyman. The everyman simply assumes that all kinds of partnerships and initiatives are going on behind the scenes anyway.

Yes, all the background stuff matters. Absolutely, the 90 percent of the iceberg under the surface is the meat and potatoes of any good platform. We’re not discounting that.

But it’s all just taken for granted by the majority, and that’s always going to be the case. So, in lieu of focusing on that stuff at the mainstream level, many platforms would be better off hyping that surface 10 percent.

Now, we’re not suggesting that Cardano needs a mascot or anything like that (Sir Charles is doing enough in that regard, besides). But as an example, think about something as simple as more being more.

Case in point, Bitcoin has a very real problem these days when it comes to messaging.

A single Bitcoin is worth tens of thousands of dollars, right? When a new crypto user gets off the fence and decides to jump in, most people would obviously recommend that said beginner begins by buying some BTC.

(Except us. Naturally, we recommend getting lots and lots of Cardano right out of the gate.)

But the problem is that anyone with $100 or $500 or $1000 to spend on crypto is only going to get a tiny fraction of Bitcoin with that money. No “normal” person wants to turn hundreds of something into hundredths of something.

Even though the key metric is the percentage delta and not some unbound comparison of unrelated total units, that’s just the way it is on the psychological side.

We can’t tell you how many times we’ve almost talked a friend or acquaintance into buying some BTC only to hear them lament in the end:

“What’s the point, though? I can’t even get a whole Bitcoin with that.”

This matters to people.

It’s also why we recommend that the Cardano Foundation get ahead of this by marketing Cardano in smaller branded denominations in addition to the single ADA coin standard.

When ADA pops off and is trading at $50 per, it might be easier to sell a newcomer 25 Shellies or 100 Gogies than a measly half an ADA. Of course, there’s a limit at the other end, too. Nobody’s going to be all that interested in buying 50,000 Hoskinsons.

And that’s just one example.

Anyway, you get the idea.

All that aside, right now – in this moment – we’ve actually got bigger fish to fry.

Over the weekend, the Cardano price was hovering around $0.45 per ADA coin, and while we moved some cash into our exchange account, we didn’t actually pull the trigger. Then this happened.

So while we’re obviously glad that Cardano was the biggest gainer over the last couple of days, we’re not actually all that thrilled about it. Our timing was off, and a few grand now goes a lot less of a long way than it would’ve just two or three days ago.

To be clear, we weren’t holding out for some nebulous hard nadir, some basement that could go no lower. That kind of thing is impossible to predict. We were happy to buy ADA at $0.45 – we just didn’t. We were complacent that we could get back to it later. And then this or that came up, and boom: $0.62.

Fortunately, the Cardano price today is down a good 10% or so from its 24-hour high, with ADA trading at $0.56 per coin at the time of this writing.

As such, as soon as we hit “publish” on this rambling missive, we’re going to fire up Coinbase Pro and get to getting while the getting’s good.

And if ADA drops a few cents lower after the fact, we won’t worry too much. After all, in a year or two, we won’t care if we bought ADA at $0.48 or $0.55 or $0.65. At least, not if we get enough of the stuff.

So that’s where we’re at. We missed the boat, but – when it comes to crypto – there’s always more than one, and none of them is all the way out to sea just yet.

Except for Terra. That stuff has fallen right off the edge of the flat earth.

It is truly ironic that Terra will never make it to Luna.

As for Cardano?

To the moon!

Of course, it can be tempting to wait for an even lower Cardano price before pulling the trigger on doubling down. The problem with that, though, is that it’s impossible to know exactly where the Cardano value will bottom out this cycle.

On the other hand, it’s similarly impossible to know when ADA will start its inevitable run back up.

That’s why – as we always recommend – it’s important not to worry about getting in on the absolute ground floor. A better strategy is to simply ask yourself the following question:

Which part(s) of my anatomy would I literally chew off to the nub to buy ADA at $0.50 this time next year?

Okay, maybe not literally, but you get the idea.

Our guess – given the current growth estimates and growth timeframes floating around for Cardano – is that the ADA price isn’t going to drop too much lower. Additionally, we don’t think the ADA price is likely to be this low for too much longer.

In other words, go ahead and get in.

Buy Cardano now, stake your Cardano as soon as possible, and don’t worry too much about the coin falling in value by a few cents in the next week or two. It might, and it might not. It’s all functionally irrelevant to your overall investment.

Now, even though we’re big on ADA at ADA Strong, we’re not only invested in Cardano, and we don’t think you should put all your eggs in one basket, either.

Cardano is our favorite cryptocurrency to be sure, but it’s not the only one we like or that we think has a solid future.

Other popular assets worth your time and consideration are Solana (which is trending just behind Cardano of late), Tron (which weathered the recent crypto crash better than just about any other asset), Avalanche, Polygon, and Polkadot.

We also like Ethereum given its current price of just around $2000, which should skyrocket once the platform shifts from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (albeit perhaps after some dips due to general misgivings, market trepidation, and the growing pains of fundamental change). And, of course, Bitcoin’s never a bad idea.

On a final note, if you know where to actually buy the stuff, it might be wise to stock up on some Ripple as the long-in-the-tooth SEC lawsuit seems headed for a settlement and a quick relisting for the XRP asset.

Oh, and don’t forget Uniswap. Get some of that, too.

Honestly, there’s a lot of value across the board right now. With all the crypto prices down bigly – and given the fact that we’re likely at the bottom of the dip (or near enough to it that any more movement won’t matter all that much) – you may not have a better investment opportunity in the crypto space than you have right now.

Of course, in the case of Cardano (and, for that matter, most other crypto coins), that all depends on where you’re getting your information.

Also, this is kind of interesting. We wish we had the time.

Our pending closure of the ADAST 2 pool seems to be going well.

Epoch 337 – the last Cardano epoch for which ADAST 2 will be active (at least for the time being) – is about four hours away from completion, and we’re already seeing better performance out of ADAST 1 as holders have moved their Cardano into our main pool.

And because some delegators won’t actually be seeing rewards (as they came over too late to earn free ADA from Epoch 337), we expect those numbers to be even better going forward.

For those of you who still haven’t moved your ADA out of ADAST 2 (there are currently about a million ADA coins earning rewards in ADAST 2 for Epoch 337), please make sure you transfer those to ADAST 1 (or to another reputable Cardano stake pool) as soon as the current epoch ends.

Now, with that out of the way, second things second:

ADA is currently trading at $0.66 per coin, and the ADA value is down some 16% or so over the last seven days.

This is a bigger drop than we were anticipating when we last bought the dip, but all it really means is that it’s time to buy the dip again.

If you scour the Cardano news wire, you might be tempted to bail amid the Great Crypto Crash of 2022, but to what end?

You’d be taking a loss for no reason (the ADA price will go back up and move past its ATH sooner than later), and unless you’re going to pocket the cash, you’d only be reinvesting that money on lesser-known coins that might blow up in the future. Maybe.

Big picture: All the big coins have crashed just as hard – and in many cases, harder – than Cardano over the last few weeks.

In the following list, we’ve put together the top 50 cryptocurrencies, ranked first to 50th in terms of total market cap (per CoinMarketCap), along with their seven-day value trends.

1. Bitcoin ↓18.3%
2. Ethereum ↓16.4%
3. BNB (Binance Coin) ↓17.0%
4. XRP (Ripple) ↓16.1%
5. Solana ↓20.2%
6. Cardano ↓15.6%
7. Dogecoin ↓13.1%
8. Avalanche ↓22.0%
9. Polkadot ↓22.0%
10. Terra ↓64.1%
11. Shiba Inu ↓19.3%
12. Tron ↑11.5%
13. Polygon ↓14.9%
14. NEAR Protocol ↓15.2%
15. Cronos ↓20.0%
16. Litecoin ↓19.2%
17. UNUS SED LEO ↓3.86%
18. FTX Token ↓13.4%
19. Bitcoin Cash ↓17.8%
20. Uniswap ↓8.9%
21. Chainlink ↓20.7%
22. Algorand ↓9.5%
23. Cosmos ↓21.3%
24. Stellar ↓14.1%
25. Ethereum Classic ↓10.5%
26. Monero ↓18.2%
27. ApeCoin ↓35.7%
28. VeChain ↓14.8%
29. Internet Computer ↓14.5%
30. Hedera ↓17.5%
31. Filecoin ↓19.5%
32. The Sandbox ↓17.3%
33. Decentraland ↓22.9%
34. Tezos ↓15.0%
35. Theta Network ↓20.1%
36. PancakeSwap ↓20.8%
37. EOS ↓15.7%
38. THORChain ↓20.8%
39. Axie Infinity ↓11.0%
40. Aave ↓22.1%
41. Fantom ↓26.2%
42. Flow ↓12.5%
43. Helium ↓18.9%
44. Klaytn ↓26.6%
45. Zcash ↓20.5%
46. BitTorrent-New ↓13.5%
47. Waves ↑1.1%
48. Huobi Token ↓11.6%
49. Convex Finance ↓7.4%
50. Bitcoin SV ↓12.6%

As you can see, only two of the top 50 cryptos – Tron (TRX) and Waves (WAVES) have actually gained in value over the last week, and only Tron is up substantially.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should trade all your ADA for TRX, even if it’s one of these bad boys (which you can’t get anywhere near MSRP anyway – if you can get them at all – thanks to all this phony-baloney “supply chain” nonsense).

Taking the above list and sorting it by value loss – from least to most – you can see that Cardano is doing pretty well:

1. Tron ↑11.5%
2. Waves ↑1.1%
3. UNUS SED LEO ↓3.9%
4. Convex Finance ↓7.4%
5. Uniswap ↓8.9%
6. Algorand ↓9.5%
7. Ethereum Classic ↓10.5%
8. Axie Infinity ↓11.0%
9. Huobi Token ↓11.6%
10. Flow ↓12.5%
11. Bitcoin SV ↓12.6%
12. Dogecoin ↓13.1%
13. FTX Token ↓13.4%
14. BitTorrent-New ↓13.5%
15. Stellar ↓14.1%
16. Internet Computer ↓14.5%
17. VeChain ↓14.8%
18. Polygon ↓14.9%
19. Tezos ↓15.0%
20. NEAR Protocol ↓15.2%
21. Cardano ↓15.6%
22. EOS ↓15.7%
23. XRP (Ripple) ↓16.1%
24. Ethereum ↓16.4%
25. BNB (Binance Coin) ↓17.0%
26. The Sandbox ↓17.3%
27. Hedera ↓17.5%
28. Bitcoin Cash ↓17.8%
29. Monero ↓18.2%
30. Bitcoin ↓18.3%
31. Helium ↓18.9%
32. Litecoin ↓19.2%
33. Shiba Inu ↓19.3%
34. Filecoin ↓19.5%
35. Cronos ↓20.0%
36. Theta Network ↓20.1%
37. Solana ↓20.2%
38. Zcash ↓20.5%
39. Chainlink ↓20.7%
40. PancakeSwap ↓20.8%
41. THORChain ↓20.8%
42. Cosmos ↓21.3%
43. Avalanche ↓22.0%
44. Polkadot ↓22.0%
45. Aave ↓22.1%
46. Decentraland ↓22.9%
47. Fantom ↓26.2%
48. Klaytn ↓26.6%
49. ApeCoin ↓35.7%
50. Terra ↓64.1%

Of the top 50 crypto coins, Cardano is basically in the second tier of performers when it comes to maintaining its value through the current crash.

Again, if you want to sell your ADA to cash out, you can (but probably shouldn’t, even if you bought in at next to nothing several years ago). But if you want to sell ADA to buy other cryptos, there just aren’t that many that have an appreciably better outlook. In fact, there really aren’t any with a better outlook at all.

The ADA metaverse is coming, and your ticket to get in is unlikely to get much cheaper.

Or much more profitable.

We haven’t updated in a while, so first things first:

If you haven’t bought any ADA in a while (or if you haven’t ever bought any ADA at all), do that now. Open a new tab, head over to Coinbase or Bittrex or Kraken or wherever, and buy as much ADA as you can.

With the current Cardano price sitting at $0.84 per ADA coin, it’s a good time to dump your entire life savings into the stuff. And we’re only kind of kidding about that.

Anyway, moving on:

One of the great strengths of the Cardano network – and, sometimes, one of its biggest frustrations (but certainly not one of its weaknesses – if there even really are any) – is that it’s an entirely community-driven platform.

True decentralization demands this.

Of course, what that means is that the Cardano roadmap – while generally reliable in broad terms – is always “tentative.”

This, obviously, can lead to feature delays, and it has done so many times to date.

While Cardano has always moved toward its goals and has a perfect track record of hitting its milestones eventually, there’s no question that delays can sour holders and enthusiasts on the platform.

That’s actually true for every cryptocurrency. Heck, that’s actually true for everything.

For example, after 20 months of not being able to buy an Xbox Series X, we’re not sure we care about snatching one up at all anymore. Ditto for the equally scarce PS5.

On the other hand, any temporary dip in ADA interest gives way to a dip in the Cardano price, which in turn gives way to a rise in our stack when we inevitably buy the dip.

And then, through delegation, that rise gives rise to even more ADA.

And that gives rise to today’s important Cardano news:

Last year, when the first meaningful ADA stake pool halving was announced (reducing the Cardano pool saturation limit from 64 million ADA to 32 million ADA), we launched a second pool called ADAST2.

Because the way ADA staking works, any pool that’s hosting more pledged Cardano than the established saturation threshold will experience diminishing returns.

That is, if an ADA pool gets too big and too prominent, delegators to said pools will receive fewer Cardano rewards for their staked Cardano coins. This is a great way to prevent stake pool centralization, which is one of the bigger destabilization risks for Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies in general.

Naturally, though, this phenomenon of diminishing returns goes the other way, too.

If the stake pool to which you’ve delegated your Cardano has substantially fewer pledged ADA coins than the network saturation limit, it won’t be chosen as a slot leader nearly as often, it won’t process as many Cardano blocks, and it won’t earn as many rewards to be disbursed to members.

So, if you delegate your ADA (and you better!), you need to make sure you pledge your stack to a stake pool with historically better-than-average-but-not-too-high participation numbers.

In most cases, you can still just set it and forget it, because most pools don’t hit that 64 million ADA coin saturation limit all that often (if ever).

Plus, every time you move your ADA to a new pool, you lose out on an epoch or two of rewards. Depending on the amount of ADA you’re pledging, that might not be as irrelevant as you’d think.

But sometimes, you really have no choice and absolutely must move your coins.

And right now is one of those times.

TL;DR: We’re shutting down the ADAST2 stake pool as of the end of Epoch 337.

If you have any Cardano staked in ADAST2, you’re encouraged to move it to ADAST1 ASAP. While you won’t lose access to your Cardano if you leave it in ADAST2 past the closure date (it simply reverts to non-staked Cardano in your ADA wallet), you will lose out on potential rewards you’d earn in ADAST1 or another active stake pool.

So that’s today’s ADA news, which is – incidentally – about the same as every day’s ADA news:

Buy ADA, delegate ADA, rinse, repeat.