Cardano clears first Chang threshold, but ADA’s price struggles continue

• ADA has been trading at almost 90% below its record high posted on September 2021.
• More than 74% of blocks have been created on a Chang-ready node version.

Cardano’s [ADA] ongoing Chang hard fork has been a welcome development in the blockchain’s evolution towards implementing decentralized governance.

However, the Chang upgrade has not profoundly influenced ADA’s price action.

Chang upgrade approaching

In earlier communications, Cardano informed that the Chang hard fork would be executed in two phases, Chang #1 and Chang #2, each bringing specific governance elements.

The first phase, which lays the foundations for decentralized governance for ADA holders, was initiated last month.

The critical thresholds for Chang #1 are upgrading 70% of the stake pool operators (SPOs) and attaining 85% of exchange liquidity on the Chang mainnet candidate.

In terms of stake pool readiness, Cardano has met the threshold of SPOs who have installed the Node v9.1.0 release.

The latest explorer data shows that 74.02% of all blocks in the last 8 hours were minted by SPOs on v9.1.0 – the mainnet candidate for the hard fork.

Meanwhile, exchange liquidity readiness lagged at 20.16% at press time. So far, six exchanges, including WhiteBIT, Bitfinex, and BitMart, are ready to support the Chang hard fork.

Sixteen others were working to ensure their systems were compatible with the latest node version to support post-upgrade transactions and operations.

The second phase of Chang, which involves implementing final governance features, is expected later this year, but no official timeline has been specified yet.

Network activity and ecosystem growth

Last week, blockchain analytics firm Santiment reported that Cardano ranked third in notable development activity across 30 days till the 5th of August.

In terms of user engagement, a hardly noticeable increase in Cardano network activity has been reflected by a slowdown in new users.

AMBCrypto’s look at IntoTheBlock data showed that the number of Cardano addresses with an active ADA balance has been relatively unchanged at 4.45 million for over a year.

Source: IntoTheBlock

Still, the network’s transaction count and active user base have been fairly stable in the last three months.

IntoTheBlock also noted that Cardano settled around $7.2 billion daily in on-chain volume, translating to a Network Value to Transactions (NVT) ratio of just 2.62.

The low NVT ratio indicated that ADA was undervalued compared to its usage on the network.

ADA/USDT price action

ADA saw a four-month downtrend starting mid-March, dropping from $0.82 to $0.39 by the end of June. The losses deepened after the token price broke below the critical support level of $0.32 earlier this month.

Bulls sought to reclaim $0.40 before challenging the $0.45 resistance level, where ADA was rejected in mid-July.

Source: TradingView

Read Cardano’s [ADA] Price Prediction 2024 – 2025

The ADA/USDT pair was trading at $0.34, below its 100-and 200-day simple moving averages (SMA) at the time of writing.

The current price action paints a mixed but subdued picture, as speculators keenly watch key levels to get a read on the next price movement.