Can Cardano Reach $1?

Round numbers aren't magical, but they tend to concentrate attention, catalyze headlines, and, when the fundamentals line up, they can contribute to pulling new capital into an asset. With that in mind, Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) is currently priced near $0.52.

Could it hit $1, and, if so, when and why?

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What would get Cardano to $1 in the next 12 months?

From a price of $0.52, a move to $1 is roughly a doubling. That's ambitious but not outlandish in any way within the context of crypto, provided that a coin's fundamentals are improving and the broader market environment stays constructive. For what it's worth, Cardano rose by 60% during the past 12 months, so there's clear evidence that the coin is popular enough to make big price moves when its chain makes progress in developing its tech or enticing new capital.

The network's public roadmap has two near-term pillars. The first is finishing its era of updates called Voltaire, which is intended to improve its on-chain governance features. The second is advancing its throughput and scaling capabilities, as well as expanding and improving its Layer-2 (L2) partner-chain concept, so applications can tailor their throughput, features, and regulatory compliance tooling without abandoning the core Cardano stack.

Governance progress is somewhat valuable because credible, predictable decision-making about the chain's future development path reduces the platform risk for outside capital, especially capital in risk-averse financial institutions. While it hasn't regularly been a pain point for users, making the chain scale more smoothly is necessary to pave the way for future growth. And encouraging partner chains could also be valuable because, in theory, they can let specific decentralized apps (dApps) scale without congesting the base layer. What's missing are any features that would have a big "wow" factor for a specific audience, such that they would prefer to do business on Cardano.

It's fully possible that making headway on the roadmap will be sufficient to power Cardano to $1 during the next year or so, though it's far from guaranteed. But, investors also need to see some measurable traction before it's possible to have much confidence in the coin's price increasing a lot in the near term. Here, the picture is not as sunny.

Cardano's on-chain stablecoin footprint remains small, at about $35.7 million. That's far too small a capital base to incentivize developers to create new applications on the network. For the entire month of October, its decentralized finance (DeFi) applications brought in just $1.3 million in revenue -- which is far less than what its larger competitors Solana and Ethereum generate in just one day. And its number of active wallet addresses for the month was just 751,444, down from 1.1 million a year prior.

Therefore, the key investment question here isn't whether Cardano can technically support more usage, though it's a tempting issue to fixate on. It can, and it will probably be able to support even more throughput in the very near future. The bigger question is whether good governance, improving developer tools, and the chain's tiny pool of on-chain capital will be enough to persuade investor to buy the coin.

If the answer to that latter question is yes, then the price target of $1 gets within reach quite quickly. If it's a no, the timeline becomes a bit longer, perhaps as long as two or three years -- assuming it happens at all.

There's a brand new wildcard in play

There's one more piece of the puzzle here, and it's a wildcard.

Cardano recently moved to support x402, an open standard that enables AI agents and web services to pay per request using crypto. In plain English, this means that an AI bot could settle a tiny payment automatically using Cardano's infrastructure, with no accounts or manual setup needed.

This new capability could prove to be the game-changer that Cardano has sorely lacked relative to its competition. If there are soon credible x402 integrations beyond demos, such as AI agents actually paying for data with verifiable transaction flows, it would likely make the road to $1 a lot quicker, gaining investor attention and showcasing the chain's hard work making platform improvements.

The bottom line here is that, even without x402, reaching $1 within 12 months is plausible for Cardano -- if ambitious. If x402 hits it out of the park, it has good odds of making the $1 price point look inexpensive.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.