ADA, the native token of the Cardano blockchain, has been on a bull run that has seen the token rise by almost 100% in less than a month from $1.02 towards the end of the month of July to currently stand at $2, in the early hours of the Asian session.
ADA is now ranked the 4th most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of approximately $63 billion, taking the spot of USDT, Tether US stablecoin, with a market capitalization of $62.9 billion.
The platform launched its smart contract testnet in May 2021, which it announced would be divided into 3 stages; Alonzo Blue, representing the first stage, Alonzo White, the second stage and Alonzo Purple, the final stage.
As previously reported by Nairametrics, since the successful completion of the first two Alonzo stages, Blue and White, the final, Alonzo Purple has commenced as the first fully public Cardano testnet to support smart contracts. This final stage involves bringing onboard third-party partners, such as exchanges and wallet providers, to ensure integration of the new code with their systems. So far in this final stage of testnet, the developer team has started with the systematic onboarding of cryptocurrency exchanges.
ADA is not the only coin pushing to previously held milestones as the entire altcoin market has been having a significant level of rally in which many experts are saying that the bull run is back. Top altcoins like ETHER, XRP, BNB and Dogecoin, have all posted double-figure gains in the last week and month.
This movement has caused the cryptocurrency market capitalization to also rally, approaching the $2 trillion market capitalization mark according to coinmarketcap. The cryptocurrency market capitalization currently stands at approximately $1.9 trillion as of the time of writing this report, appreciating over 40% in the last 4 weeks.
Another reason for the rally could be the announcement of the smart contract mainnet launch. Although coinmarketcal states that the launch is in the first week of September or earlier, Charles Hoskinson is set to announce the official date of the smart contract launch today.
Bottomline
ADA has been doing astronomical volumes of transactions as the coin has traded 24.5 billion ADA in the last 7 days according to coinmarketcap. This puts the $ value at $48.3 billion and makes ADA the 5th highest in terms of transaction volume in the last 7 days, as of the time of writing this report.
The launch of smart contracts puts the platform in direct competition against the Ethereum blockchain which is plagued with high gas fees (transaction fees).
ADA has, however, retraced a little towards the start of the London session as it now trades at $1.96, as of the time of writing this report. For the day, ADA has gained approximately 10%.