Cardano price prediction as chain fees craters to just $38k

Cardano price has moved sideways in the past few months as the crypto winter has continued. It was trading at $0.25 on Wednesday, inside the narrow range it has remained inside since February this year. It has crashed from a record high of $3, with its market cap falling from over $90 billion to $9 billion. 

Cardano chain fees have cratered

Despite its large market capitalization and hawkish talk by Charles Hoskinson, Cardano is still a ghost chain. A ghost chain is defined as a layer-1 or layer-2 chain that has nothing going on in its ecosystem.

In Cardano’s case, its ecosystem has largely stalled despite some notable developments by Hoskinson and the team. For example, the team introduced Pyth Network as an oracle in December last year. Chainlink, the biggest oracle network, has not joined.

Third-party data by DeFi LLama and Dune shows that the network growth has stalled, with most developers keeping off. For example, the total value locked (TVL) in its chains has dropped to just $135 million from last year’s high of $680 million. 

Notably, the biggest protocols in the network are platforms that most people rarely use. Some of them are Minswap, Liqwid, and Dano Finance. For a layer-1 network to be seen as a success, it is important for it to have more dApps that people use.

In addition to decentralized finance, Cardano does not have any market share in the real-world asset (RWA) tokenization industry. No company has launched tokenized stocks or other assets on Cardano, meaning that it has lost share in one of the biggest industries.

Cardano has a small market share in the stablecoin industry, with the market cap falling to $48 million from $50 million a week ago. This is a small amount considering that the industry has over $310 billion in assets.

All this explains why Cardano is not making money, with its chain fees being less than $40k this month. At its peak, it was making over $1.7 million in fees.

Cardano chain fees | Source: DeFi Llama

Will the new initiatives work?

Cardano has launched several initiatives to boost its growth. The most significant one was the Midnight launch. Midnight is a Cardano sidechain that focuses primarily on privacy. 

Still, despite the hype, Midnight has not received an influx of developers so far. DeFi Llama does not list any projects that have launched on the network.

Cardano is also working on the Leios upgrade, which will be launched in June this year. This upgrade aims to make it a faster network by introducing parallel processing of transactions.

Cardano is also implementing Pentad, which aims to introduce tier-1 stablecoins, analytics platforms, and more oracles. While these initiatives are important, chances are that they will not lead to Cardano’s growth.

Cardano price technical analysis

ADA price chart | Source: TradingView

The three-day chart shows that the ADA price has crashed in the past few months. It has fallen from a high of $1.3245 in December 2024 to $0.2470. 

The coin has plunged below all moving averages and important support levels. For example, it slumped below the key support at $0.2700, its lowest level in August 2024.

The coin has also formed a bearish pennant pattern, which is made up of a vertical line and a symmetrical triangle. This pattern means that the token will likely have a strong bearish breakout in the near term.