The cryptocurrency market continues to plummet, hoping to hit bottom and rebound with further recovery. Over the past 24 hours, the market lost 4% in capitalization and fell to $1.9 billion. The top 10 cryptocurrencies show a declining trend. Despite this, the main altcoin market stars Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) show a moderate uptrend. However, given the overall market situation, there is still a long road to go for a full recovery of the prices.
The Cardano project is trying to revamp its reputation after the Alonzo hard fork failed to launch. As a result, 99% of smart contracts were in timelock status and could not be used. According to Adapools, the first 200 smart contracts on the ADA mainnet are to be activated shortly. Unofficially, the ADA has more than 2,300 smart contracts ready to launch. The Cardano CEO pointed out that the recent update became a huge step for the altcoin and the DeFi sector so the developers decided not to rush. In the long run, ADA could compete with ETH in using the ecosystem to develop decentralized finance projects. Notably, some large projects have already been launched in Cardano's ecosystem, for example, Liqwid, a protocol for interest rate curves, and SingularityNET, a platform that allows the creation, sharing, and monetization of AI services.
Despite the encouraging news about the Alonzo hard fork first successes, the ADA price is still located at the local low level – $2,09. Over the past 24 hours, the price has lost 5% and daily trading volumes dropped to $4,7 billion. Meanwhile, the on-chain activity of the coin has been rising as well as the gap between a number of unique wallet addresses and the price, which is an extremely optimistic signal for ADA. On the daily chart the main technical indicators are gradually reversing to recovery: MACD is out of the red zone, but it is moving down, which indicates the weakness of the bulls and the strength of the bearish momentum. Stochastic and RSI are moving up to 40, which is a good sign of increasing long positions.
Compared to Cardano, Solana has a much worse situation. The developers admitted that the network shutdown was caused by a DDoS attack. A massive increase in transaction load, which "flooded" the transaction processing queue, triggered a system breakdown. The developers will release a more detailed report on the recent attack. They have completed the hard fork of the last block and restarted all protocols, which means the problem is fixed. Nevertheless, the price of the coin continues to fall despite the normal reaction to such a failure. Over the past 24 hours, SOL has fallen by 9% and as of 16:00, it is trading at $129. The 4-hour chart shows a bearish triangle, a breakout of which may give the price more space to grow even above $140. However, the technical indicators point to the beginning of a recovery and consolidation period. Given the weak trading volumes and a strong drop in on-chain activity, SOL is unlikely to fully benefit from the shy bullish momentum. At the same time, SOL has become the most profitable cryptocurrency over the past month, and therefore the process of profit-taking puts additional pressure on the price.
ADA and SOL have a promising future and are gradually recovering from a difficult period. The development of ecosystems and related areas like DeFi will be important as it may impact the price of the coins and allow them to record new highs. Considering all the above, it may be an ideal moment for entry into the ADA and SOL market.