The coin has jumped to nearly 10 times its original value but there’s a dark cloud looming for its performance in 2022.
It’s been a great year for Cardano as the coin finished up 2021 with a 940 per cent increase than how it started.
The coin, currently ranked at number seven on the cryptocurrency leaderboard, was trading at a piddling US$0.18 when the year began.
Now, almost 12 months later, Cardano — also known as ADA on trading platforms — is worth US$1.34.
That’s a whopping 940 per cent rise.
In the past day alone, the crypto has jumped by an impressive five per cent while other cryptocurrencies including bitcoin languished.
This year, Cardano also hit its highest of US$3.10 on September 2.
If you’d invested in the blockchain when it first came out in 2017, you’d be staring down the barrel of a 6122 per cent return on investment.
What is Cardano?
One of the original founders behind Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency, is also behind Cardano.
Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson created Cardano in 2015 and launched it in 2017.
The coin is known as ADA on the crypto market, which is an homage to Augusta “Ada” King, or Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British countess largely regarded as the first computer programmer.
She was also the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron.
Accordingly, Cardano has had a number of updates to its system which are all named after 19th century writers from the Romanticism movement including Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire.
Cardano is a proof-of-stake platform that runs on the Ouroboros consensus protocol.
The platform has tried to position itself as an alternative to Ethereum, according to Investopedia.
Despite the incredible year cardano has had, 2022 might not be as phenomenal for the coin.
From January 1, 2022, Cardano ADA will no longer be listed on eToro for customers in the US.
Wallets will effectively be in withdraw-mode only in the first quarter of 2022.
eToro said it delisted Cardano ADA because of regulatory concerns about the crypto which came as a surprise given the currency has not typically on regulators‘ radars.
Months earlier, Cardano‘s founder Hoskinson announced the company was working with blockchain analytics provider Confirm to ensure the currency complied with financial laws, such as anti-money laundering regulations.
What other cryptocurrencies have performed well?
Cardano might have gone up by 940 per cent so far this year, but some other cryptocurrencies have had even bigger annual gains.
Shiba Inu has increased in value by a whopping 50,000 per cent since it started out the year.
Gala is up by more than 41,000 per cent, Ceek is up by 27,000 per cent, Axiom has had a 16,000 percentage increase and Solana is at around 15,000 per cent more than it started out in 2021.
However, an expert has warned that those gains won’t be repeated into the new year.
Greg Rubin, head of trading at Aussie firm Global Prime, previously told news.com.au “People are looking for the next Shiba but it’s actually something you should stay away from.
“They only hear about it [its gains] afterwards, unfortunately by then the move has already happened, unlikely to be replicated.”
Mr Rubin thinks cryptocurrency has one more bull run left before it hits low levels and will remain that way for years until the next wave of hype.
“Looking at the scale of probabilities, it seems the most likely end to the bull run that kicked off in 2020 will be next year,” he explained.
He thinks it could be as soon as the first quarter of 2022.
“What we usually see is a blow off top and then the markets tend to drop quite quickly, and then the markets tend to go sideways for a number of months or years,” Mr Rubin warned.
Like the 2017 crypto crash, he predicts that most of the coins won’t survive and will never reach the same levels again once the price drops drastically.
“A lot of the altcoins are going to go crazy before the end is nigh,” he added.
