Swiss cryptocurrency Cardano (ADA) witnessed a price surge of nearly 100 percent in seven days in early February 2021, amid high interest from investors. One reason for this interest is the digital coin's close relation to Ethereum (ETH), as mathematician Charles Hoskinson co-founded both virtual currencies. Also, like Ethereum, ADA has an open-source format, meaning anybody can develop this currency further. As of March 25, 2025, one ADA token was worth 0.75 U.S. dollars.

The market cap of Cardano (ADA) nearly doubled in nine days in February 2021, amidst a growing buying activity from investors during this time. Cardano stood out due to its close relation to Ethereum, as well as a detailed transaction history in its ledger - potentially making this digital coin more secure than others. Compared to both the Bitcoin market capitalization, as well as the Ethereum market cap, Cardano was not as popular.

The dominance of Cardano increased more than four-fold in 2021, although figures in November 2021 were lower than at the end of August. Within the crypto world, this so-called "dominance" ratio is one of the oldest and most investigated metrics available. It measures the coin's market cap relative to the overall crypto market - for instance, it shows how strong Bitcoin is compared to all the other cryptocurrencies that are not BTC, called "altcoins". In the case of Cardano, the dominance somewhat reveals the coin's growing popularity as an alternative to Ethereum, it being a popular blockchain for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications.

By November 2021, over 33 billion Cardano tokens were issued and in active circulation - getting closer to the coin's maximum supply. Similar to Bitcoin but unlike Ethereum, the ADA token has a fixed supply limit with only 45 billion cryptocurrencies being able to ever exist in the coin's lifetime. Whilst this does not necessarily mean the Cardano price will go up, a limited supply could help to fuel demand whilst the tokens are still generally available.

Cardano trading volume reached a peak on February 27, 2021, after weeks of build-up towards the integration of the Mary hard fork on the crypto's mainnet. Mary was a network update - which was in beta since early February 2021 but was rolled out on March 1, 2021 - that gave the Cardano blockchain smart contract functionality like Ethereum has. Simply put, the upgrade turned Cardano and its native ADA coin into a direct competitor to Ethereum - which made the platforms for those who were looking for an alternative to the Ether coin.

Cardano network fees paid to miners whenever a payment transaction is initiated on the blockchain stayed roughly the same for months - although the coin value did change. These transaction fees - commonly denoted as gas - changed especially since the summer 2021, when the price of the ADA coin was changing. This coincided with the growing importance of Decentralized Finance or DeFi, and more blockchains being used for the development of new financial applications.

Cryptocurrency historical datasets from January 2012 (if available) to October 2021 were obtained and integrated from various sources and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) including Yahoo Finance, Cryptodownload, CoinMarketCap, various Kaggle datasets, and multiple APIs. While these datasets used various formats of time (e.g., minutes, hours, days), in order to integrate the datasets days format was used for in this research study. The integrated cryptocurrency historical datasets for 80 cryptocurrencies including but not limited to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB), Cardano (ADA), Tether (USDT), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), USD Coin (USDC), Dogecoin (DOGE), Tron (TRX), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), EOS (EOS), Cosmos (ATOM), Stellar (XLM), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Uniswap (UNI), Terra (LUNA), SHIBA INU (SHIB), and 60 more cryptocurrencies were uploaded in this online Mendeley data repository. Although the primary attribute of including the mentioned cryptocurrencies was the Market Capitalization, a subject matter expert i.e., a professional trader has also guided the initial selection of the cryptocurrencies by analyzing various indicators such as Relative Strength Index (RSI), Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD), MYC Signals, Bollinger Bands, Fibonacci Retracement, Stochastic Oscillator and Ichimoku Cloud. The primary features of this dataset that were used as the decision-making criteria of the CLUS-MCDA II approach are Timestamps, Open, High, Low, Closed, Volume (Currency), % Change (7 days and 24 hours), Market Cap and Weighted Price values. The available excel and CSV files in this data set are just part of the integrated data and other databases, datasets and API References that was used in this study are as follows: [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/ [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/ [3] https://cryptodatadownload.com/ [4] https://kaggle.com/philmohun/cryptocurrency-financial-data [5] https://kaggle.com/deepshah16/meme-cryptocurrency-historical-data [6] https://kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/cryptocurrencypricehistory [7] https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/price?fsym=BTC&tsyms=USD [8] https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/ [9] https://p.nomics.com/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-api [10] https://www.coinapi.io/ [11] https://www.coingecko.com/en/api [12] https://cryptowat.ch/ [13] https://www.alphavantage.co/ This dataset is part of the CLUS-MCDA (Cluster analysis for improving Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis) and CLUS-MCDAII Project: https://aimaghsoodi.github.io/CLUSMCDA-R-Package/ https://github.com/Aimaghsoodi/CLUS-MCDA-II https://github.com/azadkavian/CLUS-MCDA

Cardano (ADA), a cryptocurrency similar to Ethereum, saw increasing activity on the blockchain in February 2021 as investor interest grew. The digital coin also ranked among the most traded virtual currencies on the market during this time. One reason for this interest is the digital coin's close relation to Ethereum (ETH): The two coins both have an open-source format and share the same co-founder.

Cryptocurrencies owned in the U.S. in 2023 were seemingly mainstream, with portfolios often consisting of Bitcoin (BTC), and Ethereum (ETH). To a certain degree, it might not be surprising to the three most-talked about virtual currencies of 2021 top this particular ranking. Differences, however, do show when one compares this list against the ownership of 14 different cryptocurrencies in the United Kingdom. The order of the top owned digital coins are the same - albeit at a lower rate, except for Dogecoin (DOGE) and, interestingly, Ethereum (ETH). Indeed, respondents from Great Britain held relatively more coins - such as Ripple (XRP), Polkadot (DOT) and Cardano (ADA) - that were closely related to Ethereum. U.S. respondents were relatively more interested in Stellar (XLM) or the Basic Attention Token (BAT) than their British counterparts.

The interest rate for lending the Tether (USDT) stablecoin on DeFi platforms Aave and Compound was twice as high as the rates for DAI. The interest rate for depositing USDT on Aave, for example, was 3.35 percent - effectively meaning that the decentralized Aave platform pays out this percentage when it holds the Tether cryptocurrency much like a bank account pays out interest rate after a customer deposits money there. These lending platforms make up some of the most important DeFi services available. It is important to note that crypto lending - depositing your own cryptocurrencies for interest - is different from crypto borrowing - withdrawing crypto from a platform like a loan. Also, crypto lending should not be confused with crypto staking although it does have a lot in common with yield farming.

Validations at stake: What makes staking different from lending?

The staking of cryptocurrencies has to do with the creation of certain crypto through a process called "Proof-of-Stake" or PoS. What happens is that the owner of a particular coin, for instance Cardano (ADA), can opt to participate in a "staking pool", essentially saying he or she wants to help create new ADA coins by committing some of the ones he or she already owns. Whenever new coins are created, an automated system picks someone out of all the people who staked coins to be the validator of this new batch of coins. The reward for validating is additional cryptocurrency. This process is different from Bitcoin's energy consuming processes called "Proof-of-Work" or PoW, and has been described as a relatively easy point of entry point of entry for those who do not have a lot of cryptocurrency - although some have remarked it has the bearings of a lottery rather a bank account type of services like what crypto lending platforms provide.

Yield farming: strategically lending crypto

There is, however, a third way to possibly gain passive income with cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the interest rates shown in this graphic are closely associated with a phenomenon called yield farming. Much like crypto lending, yield farming means one hands over his or her own crypto assets to a DeFi platform in the hopes of gaining interest. Yield farming, however, is much more strategic as it involves moving crypto not to one DeFi platform but through multiple in search of the highest gains. Compound (COMP) and Aave (AAVE) are two very popular DeFi protocols for this, and have helped the DeFi market to grow in 2020 especially.