Analysts expect ADA price to blast off to $3 ahead of Cardano’s Alonzo hard fork

• Automated market maker Cardaswap will get bridged to the Cardano blockchain after successful completion of the Alonzo hard fork.
• The hard fork combinator event scheduled for September 12 is a major milestone as Cardano ushers in a transformative era of “smart contracts capability.”
• ADA has surged 31% in the past two weeks, analysts set the next target at $3.
• 81% of participants on Polymarket bet in favour of Cardano’s smart contract launch by October 1, 2021.

As non-fungible token creators consider minting NFTs on Ethereum “unfeasible” due to high transaction costs, Cardano offers a viable and low relative cost alternative on its mainnet. 

ADA rally continues as Alonzo Hard Fork event draws close

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the blockchain development company behind Cardano, shared an update on August 26 outlining the final implementation in the launch of Daedalus, the full node wallet for native cryptocurrency ADA. 

The development team is counting down to the Alonzo Hard Fork scheduled for September 12. The network is now prepared for a public Alonzo testnet hard fork. IOHK shared details of the upgrade on Twitter. 

❗🍴 Today, we have just submitted an upgrade proposal to the #Cardano testnet to hardfork the chain into the #Alonzo era and enable smart contract capability. This will take effect within the next few hours. 1/5@CardanoStiftung @Cardano

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) August 27, 2021

Cardano price rallied over 30% in two weeks, and the announcement is driving the rally higher. ADA hit an all-time high of $2.95 last week, and analysts expect the altcoin to hit a target of $3. 

Benjamin Cowen, a cryptocurrency analyst and YouTuber, recently shared his analysis in a strategy session on the video network. Cowen highlights the correlation between Cardano and Bitcoin. If Bitcoin stays above 20-week Simple Moving Average (SMA), Cowen expects Cardano to continue its price rally.  

Cowen remarks,

Is ADA likely to hit $3.00? The answer to that question likely is just if Bitcoin stays above the 20-week (moving average), it lies with that answer. If Bitcoin is able to stay above the 20-week for just… a day or two, definitely the next few weeks it seems very likely that ADA is going to blast through the $3.00 milestone.

The Cardano community now has renewed confidence in its smart contract launch on the mainnet following the updated announcement and the price rally. It is evident from a bet on the launch of smart contracts on the Cardano network. In an open-betting pool on Polymarket, a global information markets platform, 81% of the participants are in favor of Cardano’s mainnet launch. 

Up from 64% eight weeks ago, now 81% participants are confident that smart contracts will arrive on Cardano’s mainnet by October 1, 2021. 

Analysts at FXStreet consider that Cardano price is likely to rebound strongly and target a new all-time high of $3.40. 

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