Since the beginning of the year, posts on social media about Cardano have risen and during this period, the price of its ADA token has more than doubled, surpassing Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to become the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
A deeper dive into Twitter data did not identify a single driver of the bullish market activity of ADA, but The Tie data revealed that Cardano mentions have recently hit an all-time high, with the price following the growth.
Joshua Frank, founder of The Tie, said in private comments to Cointelegraph that speculation about a “interoperability bridge between Cardano and IOTA” that started the rounds on January 2 seems to have corresponded with the upward market trend and a reasonably significant rise in tweets.
This refers to a recent debate on the discord of Iota in which project co-founder Dominik Schiener was asked whether the Iota Foundation was interested in developing a “bridge to Cardano.” In response, Schiener said, “Yeh 100%. Once we’re ready I’ll reach out to Charles again.”
According to Frank: “24 hours after the idea started being discussed Cardano saw a 63% increase in tweet volume and price surged 27% vs. USD and 25% vs. BTC, suggesting that this was an uncorrelated move.”
On January 1, ADA was trading at $0.173, with a 24-hour trading rate of $1 billion, before any well-known mention of a bridge between Cardano and Iota. The price and value have risen by more than 200 percent over the last two weeks, with the current daily volume of trade averaging $3 billion and ADA trading around $0.358.
A reduction in circulating supply due to a significant number of ADA holders participating in the network is one potential cause of the upward market pressure.
Staking Incentives data shows that 70% of the overall supply of ADA is being staked on the network. For each epoch (5 days), investors who invest receive 4.28 percent APY and payouts are immediately distributed at the protocol level.
