Cardano Under $1: Your Last Chance to Buy?

Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) is priced at around $0.35 today, nowhere near its 2021 all-time high, which was just over $3. However, given its recent surge in late 2024, where it skyrocketed in value over a very short period, it's natural for investors to wonder if the coin's currently low price will be available for much longer.

In other words, with a huge discount relative to its high water mark, is it the last chance to load up on Cardano while it's under $1? Let's examine exactly why someone might want to buy it in the first place and then go from there.

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A price is not an investment thesis

With Cardano, anchoring your investment decisions around a whole number like $1 is especially misleading. The existence of a past high does not create a floor (nor a ceiling) for the future. Nor do the factors that make the coin valuable have much to do with any specific price point. With that said, it could still be very much worth buying this asset right now if there are drivers that would increase its value.

So, what would force durable demand for Cardano over the next few years such that its price could be bid up? In short, not a lot.

Per its project roadmap, the next big era of updates to Cardano (which are as a group called Voltaire) aims to add on-chain governance features and a treasury. The treasury would be funded by a fraction of the network's transaction fees, and it'd open the door to stakeholders voting on proposals and then bankrolling future development without a central operator calling the shots. Similar governance mechanisms have been implemented by numerous other chains, though none were as large as Cardano.

Governance upgrades are good if they work, and the features planned for Voltaire could make Cardano a strong model for the possibilities of decentralized chain governance. Nonetheless, as unfortunate as it may be to say, focusing on improving its governance is unlikely to significantly bolster the already thin investment thesis for purchasing this coin. It probably won't affect the price much at all, and there isn't exactly anything else on the roadmap that would catalyze major bullish price action.

Cardano's decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) is about $173 million, and the base of stablecoins held on the chain totals about $37.8 million. That simply isn't the financial activity profile of a network with roaring, self-reinforcing usage that might attract outside capital to invest -- the sums it brings to the table are so small as to be nearly irrelevant for any actual use cases. And it isn't as though the network is the king of some niche other than DeFi. It isn't a leader in any single segment of the crypto market, and compared to some of its larger peers, it remains fairly poorly positioned in terms of attracting financial institutions and institutional investors.

What would need to happen for this coin to be worth buying right now?

Here's what would prompt me to at least consider whether it makes sense to buy Cardano in the near term.

Seeing the stablecoin supply rise meaningfully would be an early signal of the network's fortunes improving, because stablecoins often act like the fuel in the engine for on-chain commerce. That could, in turn, give way to the DeFi TVL on the network growing, ideally for reasons other than a temporary incentive program. Furthermore, chain fees and application revenue would need to be trending upward over time, because the persistent willingness of users to pay for decentralized application (dApp) services is the closest proxy to direct real demand for the coin, as they need to buy the coin to pay for anything.

But today, those things simply aren't happening. There isn't much reason to expect that they would happen anytime soon.

So no, this is not your last chance to buy Cardano, neither under the $1 level nor in general. If its situation starts to change as specified, it'll be time to reopen that question.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.