The price of ADA, the native coin of the Cardano blockchain, was $1.60 today before settling at $1.69, down 11% from its week high, according to FTX exchange data. Prices fell after crypto trading platform eToro restricted access to holders of TRON and ADA in the U.S.
eToro will not allow new purchases of ADA or TRX after December 25 due to “business-related considerations in the evolving regulatory environment.” The platform will also stop supporting ADA and TRX stakes on December 31. The company says it will restrict the sale of ADA and TRX in early 2022. Users can keep their holdings or sell them.
The news is contributing to ADA’s value declining by over 9% in the last 24 hours, mainly because eToro accounts for about 1% of ADA’s trading volume. The market cap of TRX, which has a market capitalization of about $7 billion, is lower than that of ADA, which is $52 billion.
Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK and founder of Cardano, stated, “Ada is still on Etoro and non-US customers can trade freely.”
Although it is somewhat of a setback for Cardano, the token price was already on the decline; ADA had lost 24% of its value since last month.
Despite its boosted price in September after smart contracts were added to the network, Cardano has yet to fully embrace decentralized applications such as DeFi, gaming, and NFT protocols.
Cardano, founded in 2017, is named after Gerolamo Cardano, an Italian polymath of the 16th century. In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and a computer programmer.
ADA tokens make it possible for owners to participate in the network’s operations. Therefore, cryptocurrency holders have the right to vote on any proposed software changes.
There have already been some compelling use cases for the layered blockchain, which is intended to allow decentralized applications and smart contracts to be developed in a modular way.
