The price of the native token of smart contract platform Cardano, $ADA, has surged more than 10% so far this year, at a time in which whales on the cryptocurrency’s network have restarted accumulating.

According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, addresses holding between 1 million and 100 million $ADA (worth around $270,000 and $27 million at the time of writing) could be a main validator to watch for a potential price breakout.

These whales are believed to have the ability to significantly impact the price of the cryptocurrency through their activity and after dumping over 560 million $ADA over the final two months of 2022 have restarted accumulating this year, adding 217 million tokens to their stash so far.

📈 #Cardano is enjoying a mini surge at this hour, and addresses holding between 1M to 100M $ADA may be a main validator to watch for a price breakout. After dumping 568.4M coins the final 2 months of 2022, they have added back 217.2M $ADA to start 2023. https://t.co/4aVmr641Lh pic.twitter.com/6mSVYKYfpY

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) January 6, 2023

It is worth noting that the actions of a class of individual holders should not be taken as a definitive indicator of market direction, as the price of any asset is ultimately determined by supply and demand dynamics.

As CryptoGlobe reported, the cryptocurrency community has set a bullish price target for $ADA this month, presumably taking into account the network’s growing adoption. The average of nearly 3,400 cryptocurrency community members points to the smart contract platform’s price trading at $0.495 by the end of January, representing an 83% rise from $ADA’s current $0.27 level.

It’s important to point out that the cryptocurrency community’s predictions may not come to life at all. According to the platform, the community’s historical accuracy is of little over 41%, with recent data showing it was at around 60% in September and October 2022 to hit 6.8% in December.

According to an analysis by on-chain analytics firm Santiment Cardano may be “severely undervalued” Its analysis has shown that both shark and whale addresses (holdings between 100,000 and 10 million tokens) have been actively accumulating ADA over the past six weeks.

In its latest Asset Report, CryptoCompare revealed that following the collapse of FTX there was a rising trend in users moving their assets off of centralized cryptocurrency platforms and moving them to decentralized solutions and self-custody.

The move, CryptoCompare wrote, led to a spike in average daily active users on the smart contract platform. In total, Cardano’s daily active users rose 15.6% to 75,800 last month, the highest number recorded since May.

Similarly, monthly transactions on the Cardano network also rose 5.34% to 2.32 million last month, marking the largest transaction volume since April.

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