Cardano
Cardano Returns vs S&P
-70.30%
Versus S&P
•
37 minutes ago
-70.30%
Versus S&P
•
37 minutes ago
6m High
6m Low
Cardano
$1.72
$0.46
S&P 500
4,796.56
3,900.79
Cardano
S&P 500

Does not follow the stock market
Sources: ADA, SPX
Earning a reputation as a faster, more environmentally friendly alternative to Ethereum (and run by an Ethereum co-founder).
The price of Cardano’s native crypto, ADA, started 2021 at $0.177 and ended the year at $1.377. If you'd purchased $1,000 worth of ADA at the beginning of 2021, it would've been worth $7,780 by the end of the year.
Recent launch of ADALend, Cardano’s decentralized app (dApp), which could create more demand via lending pools—making Cardano a key player in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
Compelling do-gooder mission: Cardano says it “exists to redistribute power from unaccountable structures to the margins” and be a positive force for social change and individual empowerment.
Reasons to Invest

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Highlights
Good For
Value investors looking for a potentially undervalued Ethereum alternative
Time Horizon
Medium to long term
Diversification
Environmentally Friendly
Cardano is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain platform that utilizes the native cryptocurrency, ADA (named after the English mathematician and first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace). Cardano was built by a team of engineers led by former Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Its number one purpose was to create a robust, ambitious, and eco-friendly blockchain with similar capabilities as Ethereum. However, many are still waiting for Cardano’s wow factor to truly realize itself. Cardano has the capability for smart contracts, which makes it ideal for DeFi transactions, decentralized apps (dApps) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). But Cardano’s timing has been a little off, and it hasn’t quite caught on yet as a popular option.
Cardano has experienced returns over 4,600% since 2017, but not without volatility.
+243.0%
Avg Annual Returns
Past 10 years
Ways to Invest
Want to keep it traditional?
Buy individual shares of Coinbase (COIN), the largest exchange for Bitcoin and other altcoins (including Cardano). Coinbase went public back in April 2021.
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Risk Score
6M Growth
Cardano
ADA/USD
Bitcoin
BTC/USD
Risk Analysis
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Risk Analysis
As of 05/28/2022
Compared to
Cardano
S&P 500
As a utility token, the value of ADA can fluctuate in price based on public sentiment and news that gets released about Cardano’s ongoing projects and partnerships. The value of ADA isn’t necessarily linked to Cardano’s potential, but rather how much people are willing to invest in Cardano’s future. Cardano itself may be profitable—and ADA’s price may or may not reflect that. To stay abreast of Cardano’s progress you should monitor other news sources and follow the Cardano Foundation to see what the team is up to.
Performance During a Recession
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Performance During a Recession
Again, there’s little history to inform how Cardano performs during a recession. But let’s look back in time to the years 2020 and 2021 while the world was grappling with the global economic crisis from the coronavirus pandemic. Cardano had its most exciting upturn between March 2020 and September 2021, when it rose from around $0.24 to its all-time high of $3.10.
Drawbacks
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While ADA saw some promising growth in 2021, whether it has moonshot potential and staying power remains to be seen.
Some speculate that Ethereum, the OG smart contract blockchain, will beat out the competition thanks to its strong community.
Cardano’s potential has mostly gone unrealized when it comes to real-world applications. Like a kid not living up to their full potential in school, Cardano could experience major success—or just a slow fade.
Drawbacks

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How You’re Taxed
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How You’re Taxed
Capital Gains
Income Tax
According to the IRS, crypto is a digital asset. Therefore, capital gains rules apply when buying and selling it. Most people pay 15% or 20% capital gains tax when an asset is held for over a year (it’s based on your income threshold and filing status). When you hold crypto for less than one year before selling it for a profit, you’ll get taxed at your regular income tax rate. The IRS doesn’t consider buying a small amount of crypto on a centralized exchange like Coinbase a taxable event. However, when you start trading cryptos for other cryptos or cashing out crypto for fiat money (such as U.S. dollars), there are additional tax considerations.
Utility Tokens
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Utility Tokens
Cardano’s currency, ADA, is technically a utility token, even though it can also store value and be used as a form of exchange too. Utility tokens get their value from the project they support, because one day they will presumably be used to access services and transact on that project’s specific blockchain. People buy ADA because they believe in Cardano—not because ADA itself has a ton of built-in value like Bitcoin, for example, which is intentionally scarce and will stop minting at 21 million to prevent inflation.
In the News

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Did You Know?
Cardano’s first all-time high of $2.31 in May 2021 was correlated to a tweet from billionaire Elon Musk saying Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin due to the environmental cost of the electricity used to mine it.
You could consider Cardano the perfectionistic teacher’s pet of the crypto world: Even though it’s not moving as fast as other blockchains like Ethereum and Solana, the team prides itself on a using academic research, peer-review, and formal verification in an attempt to get it right on the first try. However, some say that’s why Cardano hasn’t yet picked up a first-mover advantage and won’t gain enough popularity to win wide scale adoption.
Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, was one of the Ethereum co-founders, along with Vitalik Buterin. Another founder, Gavin Wood, also split off of Ethereum and went on to found Polkadot.