Cardano: Vasil’s delay is not exactly ADA’s gain, but it is…

Cardano [ADA] recently flipped XRP to become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market cap on 29 July. As expected, this flippening coincided with ADA registering strong on-chain and social metrics on Santiment. However, at press time, this was no longer the case. Now, what could be the reason behind this unfortunate fall?

Connecting the dots 

Cardano’s native token ADA, at press time, was ranked 8th on CoinMarketCap after dropping a place. In fact, ADA seemed to note a correction of 3% as it traded around the $0.51-mark. In another development, the much-anticipated Vasil Hard Fork got delayed by several weeks.

Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong’s (IOHK) Technical Manager Kevin Hammond shared the development in question. He stated,

“From where we are, there could be a few more weeks before we go to the actual Vasil hard fork… It’s incredibly important [that] all the users have to be ready to progress through the hard fork to make sure [it’s a] smooth process both for them, and more importantly, for the end users of the Cardano blockchain.”

In fact, even Charles Hoskinson was quick to opine on the same, adding,

“Sometimes you just have to let people build beautiful things regardless of how long it takes.”

Now, here’s the million-dollar question – Did this delay have any repercussions on the said network? 100% yes.

On-chain indicators show…

Two prominent indicators saw a MASSIVE fall, at press time. Namely, social volume and active addresses on Santiment. The social volume, for instance, declined from 441 on 29 July to trading in single digits at press time.

Source: Santiment

Around the same time, active addresses on the Cardano chain saw a steep fall, as seen in the graph above. The weak volumes, especially over the last 24 hours, pointed towards low accumulation at recent levels. Also, Cardano’s supply held by whales metric revealed

Having said that, Cardano did see some sunshine. IOHK revealed that it successfully rolled out node 1.35.0, a major milestone ahead of its mainnet Vasil upgrade.

With ADA’s price going downhill, however, only time will tell whether any of these developments is likely to have any impact on the crypto.