Cardano ADA Token Price Rises as Hard Fork Hits Testnet

The price of Cardano’s ADA token shot up following the hard fork of the blockchain platform’s testnet on Wednesday.

ADA hit $3.09 Wednesday morning and was at $2.94 as of Noon eastern time, according to CoinGecko data — up about 4% in the last day and 124% from 30 days ago. The coin is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at about $94 billion, behind only bitcoin and Ether, and ahead of Binance Coin.

Cardano’s Alonzo hard fork will bring its smart contract capability Plutus to the network and provides the foundation for more decentralized applications to be built on the platform. 

The upgrade onto the company’s mainnet is still on track for Sept. 12, according to a tweet by Input Output, the blockchain infrastructure research and engineering company behind Cardano.

The blockchain platform launched a public testnet in early-August to allow 500 community members to work with smart contracts on the network before the upgrade, Nigel Hemsley, Cardano’s head of delivery, previously said. The hard fork on the testnet occurred Wednesday.

“We’ll be running our own tests and inviting others to test as well, with the main goal being to test for stability, security testing that the foundational code to write smart contracts is working properly and all the other miscellaneous things that need to be done to ensure that we can confidently hard for to the mainnet,” Cardano stated in a Sept. 1 YouTube video.

With the testnet hardfork, about 140 exchanges switched to a live production environment to prepare for the mainnet launch, the video notes.

David Tawil, president of ProChain Capital, previously told Blockworks that this hard fork was “critical” for Cardano. He added that if there is a major uptick in adoption, investors would be justified to give Cardano a valuation that is similar or equal to Ethereum as the functionality will be the same or better.

Cardano saw inflows of $10.1 million last week, according to a CoinShares report. It was the largest total on record for Cardano, bringing its market share to 0.15%.

Meanwhile bitcoin had outflows for the eighth consecutive week, according to the report. Altcoins, including Ethereum, now represent 32% of total crypto assets under management, CoinShares data shows, which is close to the record of 35% set in mid-May.

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