The Cardano (ADA) mainnet went live back in 2018 along the same time as other key players like Tron (TRX) and EOS, but as time has shown, the excessive hype dies out over the years. What remains is the actual useful products and services that are actually adopted by crypto traders and investors. When Cardano (ADA) was first introduced by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, there was a lot of talk about the project being extensively peer-reviewed before doing any kind of product roll-outs.
And Cardano (ADA) rival Tron (TRX) was actually ridiculed and heavily scrutinized as its whitepaper appeared to have been plagiarized and borrowed extensively from previous P2P projects without proper citations or references. However, the year is now 2026 and Cardano’s ADA token has plummeted from over $0.80 a few years ago to barely around $0.30 at the time of writing. The dramatic price drop indicates a far deeper problem than simply underperforming and under-delivering on tall claims and promises that seemed quite achievable a few years back.
The main problem with cryptocurrencies is that their performance (at least in terms of price) is almost never directly tied to their revenue models. Crypto and digital assets platforms that facilitate the trade of digital currencies like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, among many others actually have a legitimate business model. But digital currencies such as XRP and ADA do not have any sound or fundamental business model tied to their price perforomance.
Meanwhile, the stocks of companies like Coinbase have the potential to increase in value because they are tied to the business performance of a large publicly listed company with a viable business model. Meanwhile, Tron (TRX, which never claimed to heavily focus on peer-reviewed academic rigor, has carved out a niche for itself. The Tron blockchain now benefits from significant network effects and many stablecoins are issued on its blockchain.
In comparison, Cardano (ADA) has pretty much failed to identify useful and meaningful projects to focus on, which is why it remains unclear as to why this cryptocurrency network is needed in the first place. While it is not an outright scam or fraud, like most crypto projects are according to recent statements from Elon Musk, Cardano still has no compelling use-cases. And Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson seems to be overly concerned by pointing out how innovative his project is, instead of actually delivering useful products and services.
Moreover, the recent launch of Midnight has raised concerns about another shift of focus in the same way that Daniel Larimer of EOS was criticized for switching up his focus way too much without properly following through on any particular initiative. If the Cardano community can actually work on legit use-cases and provide better products and services (perhaps more stablecoin focused Fintech apps), then this project may recover.