Seventh Heaven Or Square One? Cardano Loses Sixth Spot To USDC

We’ve got some bad news: Cardano has lost its luster. It really is all over. ADA – the erstwhile little altcoin the could – can’t.

We’re finished.

Like our formerly beloved investment, we’ve fallen from grace. If our office weren’t on the first floor, we might have fallen even harder than that.

Splat!

Or perhaps not.

As it stands right now, we’re so depressed that we probably couldn’t even get the window open.

Of course, that’s all nonsense.

Cardano is fine, we’re fine, and things are – despite what you might think – looking up. This is true even as Cardano has slipped over the last two months from a high of third to a low of seventh in the global rankings at CoinMarketCap.

By the time this article is published, of course, the above headline may even be incorrect or outdated. However, at the time of this writing, the top 10 cryptocurrencies are priced as follows (with each asset’s current market capitalization in parentheses):

  1. Bitcoin (BTC) – $47,226.23 ($887.24 billion)
  2. Ethereum (ETH) – $3787.87 ($448.72 billion)
  3. Binance Coin (BNB) – $527.97 ($87.85 billion)
  4. Tether (USDT) – $1.00 ($76.60 billion)
  5. Solana (SOL) – $154.11 ($47.29 billion)
  6. USD Coin (USDC) – $1.00 ($41.54 billion)
  7. Cardano (ADA) – $1.24 ($41.22 billion)
  8. Ripple (XRP) – $0.79 ($36.85 billion)
  9. Polkadot (DOT) – $26.39 ($26.06 billion)
  10. Dogecoin (DOGE) – $0.16 ($20.86 billion)

As you can see, the entire crypto market is down.

However, we’re not all that concerned with the “entire crypto market.”

Instead, our main concern – given the whole theme of our little blog, here – is Cardano and its direct competitors.

Now, to be clear, we’re not mindlessly biased or malicious touts.

Sure, we love Cardano and think you should probably go ahead and buy some ADA RFN IYKWGFY LOL, but we aren’t promoting the altcoin to get you to join our Cardano stake pools or to urge wider public buy-in so our coins will go up in value or anything like that.

We’re not silly enough to believe that any singular hobby blog or ADA pool can motivate the market enough to move the Cardano price in any direction.

Similarly, we aren’t like so many Ethereum hodlers, slamming every viable competitor that rears its beautiful head.

We welcome ADA competitors because we actually kind of believe in the basic tenets of the open, free market. We wouldn’t be very good crypto enthusiasts if we didn’t, after all.

Indeed, the very thing that makes crypto attractive in the first place – that crypto prices reflect real-world demand with no governmental manipulation altering the core of that free market credo – also makes Cardano competition welcome.

Even more than that, it makes it necessary and essential.

Cardano is on a mission to become part of our connected world and support a host of newfangled blockchain concepts, but it’s not the only crypto coin out there vying for that lofty status.

But there’s plenty of space for other coins to exist in parallel with ADA – for other coins which, every now and then, may even steal the limelight from ADA.

One such coin – Solana (SOL) – has been on our radar for quite some time now.

We’ve written about it in the past, and we’ve had to play financial counselor to innumerable acquaintances these last several months as the sky fell all around them. We’ve even seen a few friends dump all their ADA outright in order to buy as much Solana as possible, despite our pleas and protestations.

Fair enough.

But as we told you, so we told them: Cardano has weathered bears before, and Solana hasn’t. And right now, Solana is plummeting.

Here’s the timeline:

  • January 1, 2021 $1.80 (YTD baseline)
  • May 17, 2021 $55.91 (+3006.11%)
  • September 7, 2021 $191.04 (+241.70%)
  • November 5, 2021 $258.93 (+35.54%)
  • December 13, 2021 $154.11 (-40.48%)

Now, we haven’t included all this to give ADA hodlers some kind of warm, fuzzy feeling. We also haven’t included this to convey some species of useless schadenfreude to our fellow Cardano enthusiasts.

We’ve included the above simply because we want to use the hottest recent coin’s trials and tribulations to – probably for the umpteenth time – drive home the simple point that cryptocurrency is extremely volatile, there’s never any telling how high or low a coin will go, and that you probably shouldn’t freak out when your coin lags behind the competition here and there.

All of that is inevitable, but so is this: If you hold a legitimate cryptocurrency (you know, something other than, say, Dogecoin or Bitcoin SV), it’s ATH is never its final ATH.

No matter how high or low that coin goes, it will always – and we mean absolutely always – eventually end up higher than it’s ever been before.

If you’re a Cardano fan, $3.09 isn’t the high-water mark. And if you’re a Solana fan, neither is $258.93.

So relax.

And if you’ve absolutely got to do something, then buy more of everything ASAP.