Much like the Ethereum Merge, the successful Cardano Vasil hard fork upgrade has not yet sparked significant gains in the days since it went live.
Both upgrades appear to have led to ‘buy the rumor, sell the news’ sentiment among investors, with gains seen in the days leading up to the events and selling pressure in the days following.
Cardano (ADA) is down 3% in the last 24hrs and nearly 7% since its 7-day peak in the hours before the Vasil hard fork went live at 9.44pm UTC on September 22.
Cardano Reaches Price Inflection Point
ADA has now reached an inflection point that could see if pump up to more than $0.50 if the bulls can take control of the market – a more than 10% rally.
The fork was designed to make the blockchain more developer friendly and to encourage more projects to build there.
Vasil will bring more functionality, scalability and speed to the network and bullish analysts say it could push the price back over $1 and beyond.
Cardano recently passed 50 million transactions and handles an average of 50,000 per day and continues to champion sustainability and long-term growth, underpinning more than 1,000 projects.
MSN has described it as “the most important blockchain project in Africa right now”, given its continued development on the continent.
Cardano has partnerships with a number of African projects and governments to use their technology to help unbanked people access better financial services and develop agriculture.
Cardano Founder Expects TVL Boost
One continued criticism of Cardano is that its total value locked (TVL) lags way behind the biggest blockchains.
TVL is a formula that calculates the total value of all crypto assets locked in a DeFi protocol and is a key indicator in the value of both the blockchain itself and the projects built on it.
According to DeFi Llama, Cardano is 27th on their list with just $80 million in TVL – many times smaller than the biggest projects such as Ethereum ($31.5 billion), Tron ($5.39 bn) and the Binance Smart Chain ($5.3 bn).
However, in an interview with Cheeky Crypto ahead of the Vasil hard fork, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said he is now expecting a major boost to TVL after the upgrade.
He said: “I think there’ll be kind of a big spike within three to six months post-Vasil because there’s a lot of people building who are waiting to deploy [new applications].”
Vasil will also introduce Plutus V2, Cardano’s smart contract language, which will help create faster and more complex dApps on the blockchain.
Indeed, Cardano-based NFT project Artano has claimed they have seen a 93% decrease in transaction size and 75% decrease in overall cost while testing Plutus V2.
