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. Moreover, like Ethereum, ADA has an open-source format, meaning anybody can develop this currency further. As of May 4, 2025, one ADA token was worth 0.68 U.S. dollars.

Context

In the last few days, I have been hearing a lot of buzz around cryptocurrencies. Things like Block chain, Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Ethereum, Ripple etc are constantly coming in the news articles I read. So I wanted to understand more about it and this post helped me get started. Once the basics are done, the DS guy sleeping inside me (always lazy.!) woke up and started raising questions like

1. How many such cryptocurrencies are there and what are their prices and valuations?
2. Why is there a sudden surge in the interest in recent days? Is it due to the increase in the price in the last few days? etc.

For getting answers to all these questions (and if possible to predict the future prices ;)), I started getting the data from coinmarketcap about the cryptocurrencies.

Content

This dataset has the historical price information of some of the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The currencies included are

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Ripple
• Bitcoin cash
• Bitconnect
• Dash
• Ethereum Classic
• Iota
• Litecoin
• Monero
• Nem
• Neo
• Numeraire
• Stratis
• Waves

In case if you are interested in the prices of some other currencies, please post in comments section and I will try to add them in the next version. I am planning to revise it once in a week.

Dataset has one csv file for each currency. Price history is available on a daily basis from April 28, 2013 till Aug 07, 2017. The columns in the csv file are

• Date : date of observation
• Open : Opening price on the given day
• High : Highest price on the given day
• Low : Lowest price on the given day
• Close : Closing price on the given day
• Volume : Volume of transactions on the given day
• Market Cap : Market capitalization in USD

Acknowledgements

This data is taken from coinmarketcap and it is free to use the data.

Cover Image : Photo by Thomas Malama on Unsplash

Inspiration

Some of the questions which could be inferred from this dataset are:

1. How did the historical prices / market capitalizations of various currencies change over time?
2. Predicting the future price of the currencies
3. Which currencies are more volatile and which ones are more stable?
4. How does the price fluctuations of currencies correlate with each other?
5. Seasonal trend in the price fluctuations

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.

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.

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

The price of Cardano was especially volatile in May 2021 and peaked again in August 2021, although figures declined by more than half since then. The third-generation cryptocurrency gained heavily during those two months due to increasing popularity of NFTs - Cardano is an alternative to Ethereum, the most-used blockchain for NFTs and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Measured in a metric called volatility, the percentage shown here reflects how much the price of Cardano in U.S. dollars changed historically over a preceding 10-day window. Changes can be either up or down, with a higher volatility reflecting that an asset is more risky, as price movements are less easy to predict and can swing in any direction.

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.