Cardano Endures 14-Hour Fork, Bolstering Confidence in ADA Price Recovery

Cardano’s (ADA) price pushed higher on Wednesday as market sentiment strengthened following the network’s successful recovery and self-repair from a rare 14-hour chain split.

Notably, the disruption occurred on November 21, after a deliberately crafted, malformed transaction exploited a long-standing serialization bug.

According to a report by Pi Lanningham, CTO of SundaeSwap Labs, the flaw caused newer and older Cardano node versions to disagree on whether the transaction was valid. This divergence produced two parallel chains, with one containing the faulty transaction and one rejecting it.

Lanningham described the event as a “recoverable consensus violation”, a serious but ultimately reversible failure mode. While block production never halted, the network effectively ran in a fragmented state for hours. Wallets, explorers, and exchanges displayed mismatched data as different infrastructure providers followed different versions of the chain.

Roughly 3.3% of transactions landed only on the faulty branch, though the majority were recovered during the network’s reconvergence. Emergency patches were released within hours, and as operators upgraded, the healthier chain overtook the faulty one, repairing the ledger without centralized orchestration.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson celebrated the recovery, calling it a historic achievement.

“Cardano never stopped. Both chains operated at the same time and came back together in a totally decentralized way. The first time in history any PoS has done that.” He stated.

Moreover, despite the temporary confusion and brief suspension of ADA deposits on some exchanges, the event is increasingly viewed as a validation of Cardano’s core design.

Bitfinex publicly praised the protocol’s ability to self-correct, while developers highlighted that strong memory-safe languages like Haskell prevented the bug from spiraling into a more catastrophic exploit.

That narrative has fueled a notable shift in investor sentiment. Cardano now ranks among the most bullish assets in the top 10, according to CoinMarketCap data, a sharp contrast to the uncertainty immediately following the fork.

The recovery has also sparked renewed optimism among analysts. Trader Wolf of Crypto noted that ADA’s price action is mirroring the 2020 deviation pattern, suggesting that market makers may have orchestrated a liquidity grab ahead of a larger breakout, with a potential upside toward $10 if the fractal holds.

Meanwhile, analyst “Altcoin Piooners” highlighted a multi-year descending wedge forming on higher timeframes. He observed that ADA is retesting a six-year downtrend line, volume is shrinking at resistance, and RSI has broken its long-term downtrend, all classic signs of pre-breakout accumulation.

The analyst projected that ADA could first rise into the $0.85 to $1.00 range, extend toward $1.80 to $2.20 mid-cycle, and, in a full bull market scenario, reach $4.50 to $5.00 or higher, telling his followers to “buy the boredom” territory.”