Cardano is a proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain co-founded by Charles Hoskinson, one of the original founders of Ethereum, and ADA is its native cryptocurrency. ADA has spent most of its history among the larger cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation, and its price has been among the more volatile of the large caps, with sharp rallies followed by long retracements. This page tracks the live ADA price and explains what moves it.
Cardano’s current price is $0.2129, with a market cap of $8.00B and rank #18 among all cryptocurrencies. Over the last 24 hours ADA has moved 0.0%, and −3.7% over seven days, on a trading volume of $213.3M.
ADA’s all-time high is $3.09, set on 2nd September 2021.
Key takeaways
- The maximum supply of ADA is fixed at 45 billion. New ADA enters circulation from a reserve that pays staking rewards and funds the on-chain treasury.
- Cardano’s development is split into named eras. The Chang (September 2024) and Plomin (January 2025) hard forks handed governance to ADA holders, and the van Rossem hard fork in July 2026 was the first upgrade ratified entirely through that on-chain system.
- ADA’s price is set by supply and demand on exchanges. Network upgrades, regulation, ETF filings, the wider crypto market and sentiment around the project all shift that balance.
What is Cardano?
Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood left the Ethereum project and founded IOHK (now Input Output) in 2015 to build Cardano. The mainnet launched in September 2017, together with the ADA cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin, and unlike Ethereum’s original design, Cardano was built on proof-of-stake from the start rather than proof-of-work mining, so it uses far less energy to secure the network.
Three organisations have driven Cardano’s development: Input Output (where Hoskinson is CEO), which does most of the engineering and research; EMURGO, which focuses on commercial and enterprise adoption; and the Cardano Foundation, which supports developers, users and community projects under the slogan “blockchain for good”. Since 2023 a fourth body, the member-based organisation Intersect, has coordinated much of the community’s governance and development work.
The project has a reputation for academic research and peer-reviewed protocol design. Supporters see that as a strength; critics say it has made Cardano slower to ship features than rival smart contract chains.
How ADA is used
ADA pays transaction fees on Cardano and secures the network through Ouroboros, Cardano’s proof-of-stake consensus protocol. Holders delegate their ADA to stake pools run by operators (Cardano’s equivalent of validators). The more stake a pool attracts, the more often it is chosen to produce blocks, and rewards are shared between the operator and its delegators.
Delegation on Cardano is a setting on your wallet’s stake key, not a transfer. Delegated ADA is not locked and can be spent at any time, and delegators do not lose their coins if a pool misbehaves (there is no slashing). Rewards are paid every epoch, a fixed period of five days. Since the Plomin hard fork, ADA also carries voting power: holders can vote on governance actions directly or delegate their votes to a delegated representative (DRep).
The wider Cardano ecosystem
Around the main chain sit several related projects. Hydra is a layer-2 protocol that processes transactions off the main chain in “heads”; during a Doom gaming tournament organised by Input Output that began on 3 December 2024, Hydra heads processed more than one million transactions per second in total. Midnight is a privacy-focused partner chain whose NIGHT token launched on Cardano in December 2025. Project Catalyst is Cardano’s community funding programme, where ADA holders vote on grants for development and community projects.
Cardano price chart
The chart at the top of this page plots ADA’s price in US dollars over the last 30 days.
What moves the Cardano price
There is no official ADA price. The figure on any tracker is the last price at which buyers and sellers agreed to trade, usually averaged across several large exchanges. The factors below work by changing how many people want to buy or sell ADA, and how much of it is available.
Supply and staking
ADA’s maximum supply is capped at 45 billion, and most of it is already in circulation (see the supply section below). New coins come only from the reserve, at a rate set by the protocol, so supply cannot rise quickly in response to demand. Changes in demand therefore show up mainly in the price.
A large share of ADA is delegated to stake pools. Because delegated ADA is not locked, staking does not take coins off the market the way lock-up periods do on some other chains: delegators can sell at any moment. That makes staking less of a brake on selling during sharp falls than it might appear.
Network upgrades and the roadmap
Cardano moves forward through hard forks that mark the start of new eras: native tokens with Mary in March 2021, smart contracts with Alonzo in September 2021, performance improvements with Vasil in September 2022, and on-chain governance with Chang and Plomin. Each upgrade has drawn attention, and trading, around its launch date.
The next large item on the roadmap is Ouroboros Leios, a change to the consensus protocol designed to raise the network’s transaction throughput. Leios has been in public testing on the Musashi Dojo testnet since 23 June 2026. Delays and successful launches of this kind of upgrade have both moved sentiment around ADA in the past, although an upgrade on its own does not guarantee any price outcome.
Governance and the treasury
Since the Plomin hard fork on 29 January 2025, ADA holders decide protocol changes, parameter updates and treasury withdrawals. The Cardano Constitution, ratified on 18 February 2025 with about 84% of active voting stake in favour and enacted on 23 February 2025, sets the rules for those decisions. In July 2026 the van Rossem hard fork became the first upgrade proposed, debated and ratified entirely through this system.
Treasury spending matters for the price in two ways. Funding development and marketing can attract new users, while large withdrawals that are later sold on the market add supply. Votes that split the community, or that large holders dislike, can also lead some holders to sell.
Adoption and on-chain activity
Critics have long called Cardano a “ghost chain”, arguing that its use in decentralised finance, stablecoins and applications is small compared with its market value. Supporters point to its uptime record, its governance system and its focus on long-term, real-world use. Whichever view you take, fees paid by users are only one part of the picture: most staking rewards still come from the reserve rather than from transaction fees, so growth in real usage is one of the things the market watches. You can follow applications on the network on our Cardano DeFi page and in our wider DeFi data hub.
Competition also matters. Many other smart contract chains compete for the same developers, users and capital, and in bull markets money often rotates quickly between them. ADA has repeatedly lagged during periods when attention moved to newer networks.
Regulation and US policy
In June 2023 the US Securities and Exchange Commission listed ADA among the tokens it considered securities in its lawsuits against crypto exchanges, including Coinbase. The SEC dismissed the Coinbase case with prejudice on 27 February 2025, as part of a wider change in its approach to crypto. It has not, however, formally ruled on whether ADA is a security or a commodity.
On 2 March 2025 President Trump posted on Truth Social that a US crypto reserve would include XRP, SOL and ADA, and ADA rose by more than 60% within a day. The executive order signed on 6 March 2025 then created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate US Digital Asset Stockpile, made up of assets the government had already forfeited, rather than new purchases. Much of the March rally faded in the following weeks.
ETFs and futures
NYSE Arca applied to list a spot Cardano fund from Grayscale in February 2025, and Grayscale filed its registration statement for the Grayscale Cardano Trust ETF (ticker GADA) on 29 August 2025. CME Group launched regulated Cardano futures, in standard (100,000 ADA) and micro (10,000 ADA) contracts, on 9 February 2026. Under the generic listing standards the SEC adopted in September 2025, a crypto asset with six months of futures trading on a regulated market can qualify for a faster spot ETF review, a threshold ADA reached in August 2026. Spot ETFs for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP have shown that fund flows can become a regular demand signal once such products trade.
Bitcoin, the wider market and sentiment
ADA tends to move with Bitcoin and with risk assets in general. Interest rates, liquidity, the US dollar and broad market crashes affect it as much as Cardano-specific news, and in sell-offs altcoins such as ADA have usually fallen further than Bitcoin.
Sentiment around the project itself also plays a part. Charles Hoskinson is an outspoken figure on social media, and his comments regularly draw both supporters and critics. Borrowed money adds to the swings: when prices move fast, liquidations of borrowed positions in futures markets can push ADA further in the same direction.
Cardano history: eras and upgrades
Cardano’s roadmap is divided into five eras named after historical figures. Some ran in parallel, and parts of them overlap:
- Byron: the launch of the Cardano blockchain and the ADA cryptocurrency in a federated network run by the founding entities.
- Shelley: decentralised block production, with stake pools and ADA delegation, activated on 29 July 2020.
- Goguen: native tokens (Mary, 1 March 2021) and smart contracts written in Plutus (Alonzo, 12 September 2021).
- Basho: scaling and performance, including the Vasil upgrade on 22 September 2022, the Valentine upgrade on 14 February 2023, Hydra and the work on Ouroboros Leios.
- Voltaire: on-chain governance, delivered by the Chang hard fork on 1 September 2024 and the Plomin hard fork on 29 January 2025, with the Cardano Constitution enacted on 23 February 2025.
Cardano price history: key milestones
ADA first traded in late 2017 at a few cents and rose to more than $1 in early January 2018, near the peak of that year’s bull market. It then lost almost all of those gains, the first of several large rallies and retracements. These are the dated events most often cited as turning points:
- September 2017: the Cardano mainnet launches and ADA starts trading.
- 29 July 2020: the Shelley hard fork introduces staking and delegation.
- 1 March 2021: the Mary hard fork adds native tokens.
- 2 September 2021: ADA reaches its all-time high of about $3.09, ahead of the Alonzo hard fork.
- 12 September 2021: Alonzo brings smart contracts to Cardano.
- 22 September 2022: the Vasil hard fork, during the 2022 bear market.
- June 2023: the SEC names ADA as a security in lawsuits against crypto exchanges.
- 1 September 2024: the Chang hard fork starts the Voltaire governance era.
- November and December 2024: ADA rallies with the wider market after the US election, reaching about $1.33 on Binance in December.
- 29 January 2025: the Plomin hard fork completes on-chain governance.
- 27 February 2025: the SEC dismisses its case against Coinbase.
- 2 March 2025: ADA jumps after it is named in a post about a US crypto reserve.
- 9 February 2026: CME Cardano futures start trading.
- 18 July 2026: the van Rossem hard fork moves the mainnet to protocol version 11.
Yearly price performance
The table below shows ADA’s yearly open, high, low and close against Tether (USDT) on Binance, using calendar-year candles in UTC. Other exchanges and USD price indices show slightly different figures, and intraday highs and lows can include short-lived wicks.
| Year | Open | High | Low | Close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $0.845 | $1.175 | $0.274 | $0.334 |
| 2024 | $0.594 | $1.326 | $0.276 | $0.845 |
| 2023 | $0.246 | $0.680 | $0.220 | $0.594 |
| 2022 | $1.308 | $1.638 | $0.239 | $0.246 |
| 2021 | $0.181 | $3.101 | $0.168 | $1.308 |
The biggest run so far came between the March 2020 crash and September 2021, when ADA rose from around two cents to its all-time high. The rally after the November 2024 US election took it back above $1, but the peak stayed well below the 2021 high, and 2025 ended with ADA down by about 60% over the year.
Cardano supply
ADA’s maximum supply is 45 billion, a cap written into the protocol. When Cardano launched, about 31.1 billion ADA was distributed: roughly 25.9 billion to buyers in the public sale and about 5.2 billion to the three founding entities (IOHK, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation). The remaining 13.9 billion, about 31% of the maximum supply, was set aside as a reserve.
The reserve pays for the network’s security. Every epoch (five days), 0.3% of the ADA left in the reserve is released into a reward pot, together with the transaction fees collected in that epoch. 20% of the pot goes to the on-chain treasury, which ADA holders control through governance, and the rest is paid as staking rewards to stake pool operators and delegators.
Because each release is a fixed share of what is left, the amount of new ADA falls every epoch and the reserve shrinks more and more slowly. Most of the maximum supply is already in circulation, so yearly supply growth is small and keeps declining. Both the 0.3% rate and the 20% treasury share are protocol parameters, which means ADA holders could change them through a governance vote.
How to buy Cardano
ADA is listed on most large crypto exchanges and brokers. The usual steps are:
- Choose an exchange or broker that is licensed or registered in your country.
- Open an account and complete identity verification.
- Deposit funds by bank transfer, card or another supported method.
- Buy ADA, then decide whether to keep it on the exchange or move it to a Cardano wallet you control.
If you move ADA to your own wallet, you can delegate it to a stake pool and earn staking rewards while keeping control of your coins; our guide to validators explains how staking secures proof-of-stake networks. ADA is an altcoin, and like most altcoins it can lose a large part of its value in a short time, so only invest what you can afford to lose. When you want to cash out, our guide on how to sell cryptocurrency covers converting coins back to fiat.
To compare ADA with other coins, see our cryptocurrency price tracker, or go to the Bitcoin price and Ethereum price pages. For another proof-of-stake smart contract network, see the Solana price page.
FAQs
Who sets the price of Cardano?
Nobody sets it. ADA's price comes from trades between buyers and sellers on exchanges around the world. Price trackers usually show a volume-weighted average across several large exchanges, which is why the figure can differ slightly from one site to another.
How many ADA will ever exist?
45 billion. New ADA is released from a reserve as staking rewards and treasury funding, at 0.3% of the remaining reserve per five-day epoch, so issuance falls over time. Holders can change those parameters through on-chain governance, but not the 45 billion cap.
What was ADA's highest price?
ADA's all-time high is about $3.09, reached on 2 September 2021, ten days before the Alonzo hard fork brought smart contracts to Cardano. The card at the top of this page shows the current all-time high from our data feed.
Is staked ADA locked?
No. Delegating ADA to a stake pool does not move or lock your coins, and there is no slashing. You can spend or sell delegated ADA at any time. Rewards are paid every five-day epoch, with a delay of a few epochs after you first delegate.
Is there a spot Cardano ETF?
Applications have been filed, including Grayscale's Cardano Trust ETF (ticker GADA), and CME Cardano futures have traded since 9 February 2026, which helps ADA qualify for the SEC's faster review under its generic listing standards. Check the current status with your broker before investing, as approvals and launches are decided by regulators and exchanges.
Is Cardano better than Ethereum?
They make different trade-offs. Ethereum has far more users, applications and value locked in DeFi. Cardano was built on proof-of-stake from launch, uses a different transaction model and puts more weight on formal research and on-chain governance. Which one suits you depends on what you want to use it for, and many investors hold both.
References
- Cardano Hard Forks, Network Upgrade History – cardano.org
- About Input Output
- EMURGO
- Cardano Foundation
- From Convention to ratification: the Cardano Constitution – Input Output
- Hydra Doom Tournament Finale Shines at CPLAY, Marking Cardano’s Milestone of 1M TPS – Newswire
- Midnight Network
- Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile – The White House
- Coinbase Case Dropped by U.S. SEC as Agency Reverses Crypto Stance – CoinDesk
- CME Group to Expand Crypto Derivatives Suite with Launch of Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar Futures – CME Group
