Exchanges are the essential pillar of the cryptocurrency world. They bring together buyers and sellers of any given coin or token that is listed on them. For many cryptocurrencies, it’s only logical to have their product found on a Cardano Exchange, but there are somewhere this concept seems alien for now. This article is about one of those coins/tokens: Cardano (ADA).
Cardano was first traded on Binance on October 13th at approximately 10 pm GMT. It reached a high of 0.000068 BTC in 2 minutes after being listed, then continued its way downwards for three days before settling around 0.000040 BTC. The ADA token was later listed on Bittrex on September 27th at approximately 1 am GMT with a high of 0.000027 BTC after 2 minutes, reaching prices as low as 0.0000036 BTC 5 days later before finally stabilizing around 0.000030 BTC.
Apart from the usual FOMO that accompanies these listings, I see no reason why Cardano didn’t jump to good ol’ Bitcoin right away upon being listed on both exchanges and instead had to wait for three days on Binance and five days on Bittrex for any notable price action.
The way I see it, the problem here is not Cardano’s quality/uniqueness, but rather an education. From what I’ve seen and experienced working in markets for a long time, people are generally horrible at making quick decisions when it comes to new assets or projects they haven’t heard of before.
The problem is that once a complete market cycle has passed (and a downward trend was experienced), asset holders tend to panic sell because their investment lost so much value, which contributes to further price drops. The same thing happened with Ethereum after the DAO hack and with many other cryptocurrencies such as Dash or Ripple. And so did Cardano: although its fluctuating prices were not helped by the panic selling half-invested asset holders, but rather by multiple factors that I will detail below.
There are many investors in the market for whom experience is more important than education or researching new assets because they don’t have enough time or knowledge. These people sell when they see all their other assets lose value over an extended period. And it doesn’t matter if the project has a high quality/uniqueness ratio – it just matters how much money you put into that coin. So these investors did what every sensible person would do: sell.