Number of Cardano millionaires rises by 173% after ADA price hit new highs

Cardano (ADA) addresses with a balance greater than $1 million have surged by 173% during the latest ADA price rally.

Specifically, the ADA/USD exchange rate surged by almost 200% after bottoming out at $1.007 on July 20. The pair reached its record high of $3.02 in the previous session, a move that followed up with a 6.42% price correction to $2.73 at time of writing.

Meanwhile, the same period saw the total number of Cardano wallets that hold at least $1 million worth of ADA tokens surge from 3,625 to 9,830, per the information provided by data analytics platforms CoinMetrics and Messari.

ADA addresses with balance greater than $1M. Source: Messari, CryptoQuant

Additionally, against Cardano’s 1,455% year-to-date (YTD) gains, the total number of ADA millionaires surged from 504 to 9,830—a 1,850% jump. That coincided with erratic spikes in Google Trends searches for the keywords “Cardano,” signaling a  retail interest.

Furthermore, the number of Cardano wallets holding more than $10 million worth of ADA tokens climbed from 504 on July 20 to almost 1,000. As of Jan. 1, 2021, there were only 86 wallets with balances above $10M.

Hodling makes Cardano investors rich 

Cardano’s rise in 2021 also led to a spike in the sum of its unspent transaction outputs, or UTXO.

In detail, UTXOs represent cryptocurrencies that remained unspent in their crypto wallets after deposit. Therefore, if a blockchain network detects a rise in UTXO, it indicates that most wallets are holding the cryptocurrency instead of transferring it to other addresses, i.e., a weaker selling sentiment.

CoinMetrics data fetched by Messari showed that Cardano’s UTXO count surged from 816,600 on January 1 to 2.85 million at the time of writing. That illustrated an incredible rise in Cardano investors’ “holding” sentiment, something that might have worked as a backstop to ADA’s 1,455% YTD rally.

ADA UTXO count. Source: CoinMetrics, Messari

The decision to hold instead of selling ADA tokens found its cues in Cardano’s potential to unseat its top blockchain rival Ethereum as the latter experienced network congestion and higher transaction fees problems at the beginning of this year.

For instance, ADA/USD surged 579% in the first quarter on optimism around its Mary upgrade, a protocol update that made Cardano a multi-asset blockchain. In doing so, the blockchain became compatible with host projects involved in the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens space.

The update, which went live on March 1, followed up with another hard fork called Shelley in July. The new mainnet introduced Cardano’s proposed Proof-of-Stake (PoS) layer, allowing users to contribute to the transaction validation process either directly (by operating a stake pool) or indirectly (via delegation) in exchange for staking rewards.

Cardano daily price chart. Source: TradingView.com

But despite solid fundamentals, ADA/USD surged merely 19.21% during the second quarter, partly due to China’s crackdown on its regional cryptocurrency industry and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s anti-Bitcoin tweets.

Related: Cardano chalks a bearish wedge as ADA price soars by over 100% in Q3

Nonetheless, the Cardano UTXO count kept surging during the second quarter’s turbulence in the crypto market. It topped out at 2.93 million on July 26, when ADA was changing hands for $1.25.

Smart contracts

The third quarter has witnessed Cardano finalizing its plans to become a smart contracts platform similar to Ethereum via a so-called Alonzo upgrade. As a result, speculative bids for ADA, alongside investors’ hodling sentiment, have surged.

Ethereum TVL 114 billion, daily NFT over 100 million, daily transactions 1.2 million, 166 million addresses total. Plus first mover advantage and near universal acceptance of ETH and ETH standard tokens on exchanges and in defi.

Cardano has a lot of work to do post launch!

— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) August 24, 2021

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