When it comes to ADA, I'm sure many longtime crypto investors are familiar with it.
It reached a high of $3.10 in 2021, but now sits at around $0.19—nearly 94% below its all-time high.
This June, founder Charles Hoskinson even posted:
“I'm taking a break. TTYL.”
It means taking a break for a while and chatting again later.
Later, the phrase even became a running joke in the crypto community. 😂
Jokes aside, though, what's really going on with Cardano? Is it still worth investing in?
Today, let's take a look at its technology, ecosystem, token issuance, buybacks, and valuation.
1️⃣ What exactly is ADA for?
Like Solana and Sui, Cardano is a blockchain.
Put simply, a blockchain is like a city.
Developers can build exchanges, lending platforms, games, and all kinds of apps on it.
ADA is the native token used in this city, mainly for paying fees, staking on the network, and voting on governance.
Cardano's technical team has a strong background. It uses the Ouroboros proof-of-stake mechanism and places considerable emphasis on academic research and security verification.
But it has one distinctive trait: its technical development is rigorous, while implementation tends to be relatively slow.
Here's an analogy.
Some companies prefer to launch a product first and improve it as they go.
Cardano is more like a research institute: it researches and tests first, then rolls things out gradually.
Both approaches have pros and cons, but competition in the crypto market is fierce. Good technology doesn't guarantee that users will come.
2️⃣ If the technology is good, why is actual usage so low?
Let's look at the data from around November 2, 2026:
ADA price: about $0.19.
Circulating market cap: about $7 billion.
Cardano DeFi TVL: about $54 million.
Stablecoin supply: about $63 million.
24-hour DEX trading volume: about $1.2 million.
24-hour on-chain fees: about $1,400.
That $1,400 is in network fees, not the ecosystem's total revenue, and certainly not net profit.
But these figures do point to one issue:
Cardano's actual on-chain economic activity is still relatively small compared with its market cap.
Here's an example.
Suppose you spent billions building a commercial city. The buildings look impressive, the roads are well planned, and the security systems are comprehensive.
But few businesses have actually moved in, and not many customers come to shop each day.
Does this commercial city have any value?
Of course it does.
But to get more investors willing to pay a high price, it ultimately comes down to whether the number of businesses and customers keeps growing.
Cardano is facing a similar problem right now.
3️⃣ How does ADA compare with SOL and SUI?
Cardano currently has about $54 million in DeFi total value locked (TVL).
Sui has about $460 million.
Solana has about $5.5 billion.
In other words, Sui's DeFi TVL is more than eight times Cardano's, while Solana's is over 100 times larger.
Yet ADA's circulating market cap is nearly twice that of SUI.
Of course, TVL isn't the only way to measure the value of a blockchain. Cardano has a large amount of native staked assets that aren't counted in DeFi TVL.
But if you also look at stablecoins, DEX trading volume, and active users, Cardano's ecosystem really isn't very active yet.
The blockchain market today is very different from what it was a few years ago.
There are plenty of competitors, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Sui, and Avalanche.
Why would users have to come to Cardano?
Why wouldn't developers choose a blockchain with more funding and more users?
These questions matter more than simply promoting technical performance.
4️⃣ Is ADA being issued in more quantities? Isn't the total supply 45 billion?
A lot of people may misunderstand this point.
ADA's maximum supply is fixed at 45 billion. About 36.8 billion are currently in circulation, or roughly 82% of the maximum supply.
But having a maximum supply doesn't mean the circulating supply can't increase now.
Every roughly five days, Cardano settles rewards for a cycle, releasing some tokens from its ADA reserve to fund staking rewards and the treasury.
For example:
Suppose a project plans to issue 10 million tokens in total.
At first, only 8 million are on the market.
The remaining 2 million are released gradually according to the rules.
Although the total supply will never exceed 10 million, the number of tokens in circulation still gradually increases.
ADA works in a similar way.
According to official Cardano data, around October 16, 2026, approximately 6.059 billion ADA remained in the unreleased reserve.
About 9.56 million ADA were released from the reserve during that cycle, entering the process for distribution as rewards, treasury funds, and so on.
However, that doesn't mean all 9.56 million ADA immediately went to exchanges to be sold.
So ADA isn't being issued without limit, but its issued supply is indeed still increasing.
5️⃣ Is ADA actually deflationary? Are tokens burned or bought back?
This is a very important point when studying a token's economic model.
Let's make the conclusion clear first:
① It has a maximum supply of 45 billion.
② It has an ongoing release mechanism: the remaining reserve gradually enters the supply.
③ The rate of new issuance will decline as the reserve shrinks.
④ There is no regular, protocol-level fee-burning mechanism.
⑤ There is no confirmed, fixed, ongoing protocol buyback mechanism.
It's particularly easy to confuse “deflation” with “slowing inflation” here.
Here's an example.
A factory used to produce 1 million items a year.
Later, it produced only 800,000 a year, and then 600,000.
Production has fallen, but the total number of items is still increasing.
That's a slowdown in the growth of supply, not a decrease in the total quantity.
ADA works the same way.
As the reserve gets smaller, the total amount of ADA released each cycle will gradually decline.
But without an ongoing burn mechanism, you can't say ADA has become deflationary as a result of the protocol's operation.
Now, about buybacks.
Some projects use protocol revenue to buy their own tokens on the market, or even burn them outright.
ADA currently has no such regular mechanism.
The fees collected by Cardano mainly go into the network's reward distribution system, with some going to the treasury to support ecosystem development.
Fees going into the treasury doesn't mean they're burned; using treasury funds to support development doesn't mean tokens are being bought back on the market.
These are completely different things.
6️⃣ ADA staking earns rewards. Does that mean the project is making a lot of money?
That's not how you should interpret it either.
Many investors see that ADA can be staked for rewards and assume the project is making money and paying dividends to holders.
In reality, ADA staking rewards mainly come from two sources:
One source is network fees.
The other is ADA gradually released from the system's reserve.
For example, a newly opened shopping mall might use funds set aside in advance to offer incentives to businesses to move in.
As the mall gets busier, it may eventually be able to rely more on actual operating revenue to keep running.
ADA's reward mechanism is similar in some ways.
So staking rewards shouldn't all be treated as genuine operating profits.
What really matters is whether, as the reserve gradually shrinks in the future, network fees can grow enough to support long-term security and operational incentives.
7️⃣ What growth opportunities does Cardano still have?
Although ecosystem usage isn't especially high, Cardano hasn't stopped building.
It is still working on Leios scaling, the Dijkstra upgrade, and improvements to Plutus smart contracts.
These technologies aim to increase the network's processing capacity and improve the developer experience.
There is also Midnight, a privacy-focused network exploring use cases such as privacy protection and compliant data verification.
For example, a bank might need to verify whether a customer meets certain criteria without disclosing all of that customer's personal information.
Privacy-enhancing computing could be useful in such a case.
However, Midnight has its own token and economic model, so you can't simply attribute all of its future business revenue to ADA.
Technologies such as Leios also still need to be validated through future deployment and real-world usage data.
So Cardano isn't short on technical directions for development; what it really needs is to turn those technologies into real-world demand.
8️⃣ Is ADA cheap at just $0.19?
You can't judge by the unit price alone.
Based on the current circulating supply of about 36.8 billion:
If ADA reaches $0.50, its circulating market cap would be about $18.4 billion.
If ADA reaches $1, its circulating market cap would be about $36.8 billion.
If ADA reaches $2, its circulating market cap would be about $73.6 billion.
If ADA reaches $3, its circulating market cap would exceed $110 billion.
This doesn't even account for the circulating supply continuing to grow in the future.
Here's a simple example.
There are two companies: one has a stock priced at $100, and the other has a stock priced at $1.
Does that mean the $1 company is necessarily cheaper?
Of course not. You also need to consider the total number of shares, the company's revenue, and its profitability.
The same principle applies to tokens.
ADA falling from $3 to $0.19 only tells you that its price has dropped a lot. It doesn't mean its current valuation is necessarily cheap.
9️⃣ Finally, is ADA worth investing in now?
Cardano's strengths are quite clear.
The team has a strong technical track record, the mainnet has been running for years, the maximum supply is fixed, and it has built a relatively mature staking and governance system.
But the problems are just as clear.
Ecosystem usage is currently low, and the scale of stablecoin and DeFi activity is limited.
Despite ongoing technical development, Cardano has yet to build an on-chain app and liquidity network as powerful as Solana's.
And in terms of tokenomics, although the rate of new ADA issuance will gradually decline, there is neither a regular burn nor a fixed protocol-revenue buyback mechanism.
So you can't assume that the fixed total supply of 45 billion alone means ADA will inevitably rise in value because of scarcity.
If Cardano can attract more stablecoins, lending capital, and real users in the future, ADA certainly has a chance to regain market attention.
But if the technology keeps improving while real-world usage barely grows, even excellent technology will struggle to support a high valuation over the long term.
Ultimately, ADA's biggest issue right now isn't whether its technology is good. It's when years of technical investment will finally translate into enough user demand and on-chain economic activity.
For investors, rather than guessing when ADA will return to $1, it's better to watch whether on-chain capital, fees, and real users are growing consistently.
Do you think ADA still has a chance to return to the top tier of mainstream blockchains?
The views above are personal opinions and project research only, and do not constitute investment advice.