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 August 20, 2025, one ADA token was worth 0.84 U.S. dollars.

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.

By November 2021, over ** 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 ** 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

Solana's Sharpe ratio in ************* was higher than that of the S&P500, reaching a value that was considered to be significant. This particular ratio gives investors an idea on how their investments perform on the long run, and is calculated by substracting risk-free rate from the expected return of a particular asset. The higher the Sharpe ratio, the more the extra risk is actually paying off - as returns are above-average. In the case of Cardano, the ratio was mostly above values of ***** which are considered to be "excellent". A value of zero means the asset in consideration is risk-free, which may be both good - as you are not losing out on money - or bad - as the extra risk taken may not be worth the effort.