Could a $10,000 Investment in Cardano Turn Into $1 Million by 2035?

Key Points

• Cardano is considering a new plan to add Bitcoin to its treasury.

• The idea is to stimulate its decentralized finance ecosystem.

• The chain's prospects for growth are still a bit dim at the moment.

Turning a modest stake into a life-changing fortune is every crypto investor's favorite daydream, and it's a daydream for a reason. Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) has long been marketed as a research-driven "third-generation" blockchain that might one day join the industry's elite. For anyone holding $10,000 worth of ADA today, the question is whether a decade is enough time for that bet to blossom into $1 million.

But hope is not a strategy. Cardano's current fundamentals, its slow pace of execution, and the scale of its competition all stand between today's price and a 100x return. Let's investigate the odds here, and determine what would need to change for those odds to improve.

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Cardano's 100x dream meets basic math

For a $10,000 position to become $1 million, Cardano's price must rise 100-fold, from roughly $0.60 to about $60.

That implies a market cap of roughly $2.1 trillion, which would put it neck-and-neck with the value of Bitcoin, whose own market cap is near $2.2 trillion today. Simply put, Cardano would need to leapfrog every other Layer-1 chain and match the entire value of the market's monarch. That is a breathtaking hurdle for a network that currently ranks outside the top 10 by total chain fees and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity.

But just how far behind is it?

Cardano's total value locked (TVL) in DeFi sits around $251 million, or barely 3% of archrival Solana, which boasts nearly $8.6 billion in TVL. Cardano also hosts only about $31 million in on-chain stablecoins, a vital lubricant for lending platforms and payment apps on any chain. With such thin liquidity, ambitious builders gravitate elsewhere, starving Cardano of the network effects that power exponential growth.

Image source: Getty Images.

To make matters thornier, the project's "peer-review first, iterate later" ethos, while appealing in an academic sense, means upgrades arrive slowly.

While that rigor appeals to computer science purists, it leaves Cardano reacting very late to trends like real world asset tokenization, artificial-intelligence agents, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, rather than defining them.

Investors looking for a fast follower, much less a first mover, will not find one here.

Could new tactics change Cardano's trajectory?

Enter the recent headline-grabbing plan to convert 5% to 10% of Cardano's $1.2 billion treasury, or roughly $100 million worth of ADA, into Bitcoin and Cardano-native stablecoins.

Proponents argue the swap could generate yield, fund Cardano buybacks, and improve liquidity for its DeFi protocols. Critics counter that parking treasury assets in someone else's token is an admission that Cardano lacks the native demand to put its own coin to productive work -- and that argument is largely correct given the chain's current context of minimal DeFi activity.

Even if the move ends up being implemented and stabilizes prices at the margin, it does nothing to address Cardano's scarcity of high-traffic applications.

The chain still needs a thriving stablecoin ecosystem, consumer-friendly wallets, and deep integration with the regulated financial sector if it hopes to claim a slice of the trillion-dollar real-world-asset tokenization pie, nevermind other areas where institutional investors might be interested in allocating capital to its chain. Right now, its share of that segment is effectively zero, while bigger rivals are sprinting ahead.

Assuming Cardano could quadruple its DeFi TVL annually -- which would be a heroic pace that it almost certainly cannot do even for one year -- it would still trail today's leaders in 2030. It would not justify a multitrillion-dollar valuation. So it would not be able to grow by 100x.

The more realistic route would be a tightly focused pivot, wherein it specialized in one breakout niche and became indispensable there. Barring such a strategic victory, which is currently nowhere even close to being envisioned, the probability of a 100x price move by 2035 remains vanishingly small.

Therefore, investors hoping for millionaire status from a $10,000 Cardano stake are betting on an improbable combination of perfect execution, surging adoption, and very favorable macro conditions. Keep dreaming, because becoming a millionaire from investing in this coin will not happen.

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