Market Reshuffle: Cardano (ADA) Becomes the Third-largest Cryptocurrency

Cardano (ADA) is one of the cryptocurrencies that has seen massive increase in price since the start of 2021. On Friday, Cardano reached another yearly high of US$1.29, which pushed up the market valuation above that of Binance Coin (BNB) into 3rd place.

Cardano Is Growing

Amidst the recent dip in the crypto market, Cardano was the only cryptocurrency in the top ten with a positive 24 hours (change of +4.46%) and weekly price (change of +30.51%).

Moving to the derivative market, Cardano also sees an increase in the open interest in futures. According to the market information on ByBt, there was about 585.73 million ADA (or US$703.48 million) in ADA futures open interest at press time. This represents about a 10.1 percent increase on the 24-hour change. BitMEX and Binance exchange dominates the open interest in ADA futures, as both derivative platforms see hundreds of millions of ADA. 

What’s New Cardano?

Many people are attributing the increase today to the recent announcement of the upcoming major protocol change, the “Mary Upgrade.” As per the Cardano core development team (IOKH), the upgrade is expected to go live on the Cardano mainnet by March 1.

According to IOHK, the update will be activated by a Hardfork Combinator, allowing the system to transition without requiring a chain split on Cardano.

The Cardano team is saying that “Mary opens up a world of possibilities to developers looking to migrate to or build user-defined native tokens on Cardano completely. This feature will transform the decentralized blockchain into a multi-asset blockchain”.