Cardano Price at Risk as Nansen CEO Makes a Bold Prediction

Cardano price has been in a steep freefall this month and is now hovering at its lowest level since November last year. ADA plunged by over 55% from the year-to-date high, lagging behind similar coins. Now, Nansen’s CEO has made a bold bearish prediction about Cardano.

Nansen CEO Predicts Cardano Price Crash

In a statement, Alex Svanevik, the founder of Nansen, predicted that Cardano will fall out of the top 20 biggest cryptocurrencies in 2026. He argued that it was a ghost chain that nobody uses and that top cryptocurrencies like Hyperliquid, Monad, and Zcash will flip it.

Cardano has a market capitalization of $16 billion, down from the all-time high of over $90 billion during the initial crypto bull run in 2021. It has remained inside the top 20 since then, meaning that a drop from this ranking will be a big deal.

Third-Party Data Paints Bleak Picture For Cardano

Svanevik’s argument about Cardano is accurate, based on third-party data, which indicates that its ecosystem is largely inactive. Data compiled by DeFi Llama shows that the total value locked (TVL) in Cardano’s DeFi platform has declined by 27% over the last 30 days, currently standing at $215 million.

In contrast, as of press time, Solana had a TVL of over $20 billion, while Base, Plasma, Arbitrum, and Hyperliquid had over $4.4 billion in TVL.

Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem comprises just 61 dApps, while Arbitrum has 1,000, BNB Chain has 1,060, and Ethereum has 1,664.

More data strongly suggests that Cardano is a ghost chain. For example, its stablecoin market cap has increased to $38 million, a relatively small amount in an industry with over $300 billion in assets. For example, a newer chain like Plasma has over $1.9 billion in stablecoin assets. Hyperliquid L1 has $4.6 billion in stablecoin supply, while Katana has over $104 million.

Meanwhile, the number of Cardano addresses has been in a strong downward trajectory in the past few weeks. Data shows that there are now fewer than 22,000 active addresses, a tiny amount for a cryptocurrency worth over $16 billion. Solana has 2.3 million, while BNB Smart Chain has over 2.6 million addresses in its ecosystem.

More data shows that Cardano has a limited market share in the non-fungible token (NFT) industry. According to CryptoSlam, Cardano’s NFT ecosystem handled over $2.3 million in NFT transactions in the last 30 days, much lower than Ethereum’s $147 million and Base’s $30 million.

Data compiled by RWA shows that Cardano has zero assets in the Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization industry, which has over $35 billion in assets.

Charles Hoskinson is Betting on Midnight and Leios

Cardano’s Hoskinson believes that some of the top initiatives will help to supercharge the network. For example, he believes that Midnight its upcoming sidechain will bring developers and assets to the network. Midnight will be launched in December.

He also expects that the upcoming Leios upgrade will attract more developers to Cardano directly. Leios will lead to more throughput by introducing parallel processing. It will also have more security enhancements.

Cardano Price Technical Analysis

The daily timeframe chart shows that ADA price was at risk of further downside. It formed a death cross pattern in October as the 50-day and 200-day moving averages crossed each other.

Cardano price has also formed an inverse cup-and-handle pattern whose depth is about 50%. Measuring 50% from the cup’s lower side gives it a target of $0.27.

Based on the current circulating supply, a drop to that level would bring its market capitalization to about $9.9 billion. That would bring its ranking from 10th today to 14th.

The bearish Cardano price forecast will become invalid if it moves above the important resistance level at $0.6160, the 50-day moving average.