Recently, while researching ADA, I found that this project is indeed undervalued by the market. Many people know Bitcoin and Ethereum, but very few truly understand what ADA (Cardano’s ADA token) means and the value behind it. Today, I’d like to share my observations on ADA with you.

ADA is the native token of the Cardano blockchain, created in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, former co-founders of Ethereum. As for what ADA means, simply put: it is the core asset of the Cardano public chain platform, similar to how Bitcoin is to the Bitcoin network. After the mainnet went live in 2018, Cardano officially became a third-generation blockchain platform, aiming to address the pain points of the previous two generations.

Why create ADA and Cardano? In fact, it’s mainly because the problems before it were simply unacceptable. Bitcoin’s network congestion and very high transaction fees are one issue. Ethereum has improved a lot, but interoperability across different platforms is still difficult, and community forks have led to ecosystem fragmentation. Cardano addresses these issues with the Ouroboros algorithm—essentially a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism—which is more energy-efficient than Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW). It also achieves a transaction processing speed of 250 transactions per second, far exceeding Bitcoin’s 7 and Ethereum’s 30.

From a technical perspective, ADA does have many highlights. It adopts a dual-layer independent structure to enhance security while improving efficiency. Behind it, three teams—IOHK, EMURGO, and Foundation—collaborate and divide responsibilities, and their strength shouldn’t be underestimated. Moreover, ADA was launched relatively early, accumulating a group of loyal users who have gone through bear markets, showing strong resilience. Its market cap has also consistently stayed within the top ten, and liquidity is quite good.

That said, I also have to be honest: ADA currently has clear shortcomings. Its ecosystem development is still very early-stage and far less mature than Ethereum’s. In addition, ADA does not support EVM, which limits the speed of ecosystem expansion. Project development progress has been somewhat slow. DeFi plans weren’t launched until 2022, and after the launch, problems kept coming up—errors on the Sundae Swap platform, and transaction vulnerabilities appearing one after another.

Looking at the latest data, Cardano’s TVL is only $165 million, ranking 18th among all public chains. Both the number of protocols and active users are far lower than those of other public chains. But strangely enough, ADA’s market cap can still remain in the top ten, even not falling behind Dogecoin, Avalanche, Solana, and Polkadot. This suggests that the market still has confidence in ADA’s long-term potential.

In terms of its development roadmap, Cardano has five clear stages: Byron handles mainnet construction and community development; Shelley delivers decentralization; Goguen advances smart contracts and the ecosystem; Basho improves scalability and interoperability; and Voltaire ultimately hands governance power to the community. This roadmap is quite detailed—at least it shows the team is seriously working on this.

If you want to get involved with ADA, there are mainly three ways. First is staking ADA to earn passive income, which can be done through the Daedalus wallet or Ledger, Exodus, and others. Second is spot trading, which is suitable for medium- to long-term investors—buy directly and wait for the price to rise. Third is contract trading, which is suitable for short-term traders who want to use leverage.

To be honest, what ADA represents is a third-generation public chain project with ideals and technology, but with execution that still needs strengthening. Its prospects depend on whether the ecosystem can truly take off. If development progress issues can be resolved and the ecosystem’s shortcomings can be addressed, ADA indeed has a chance to become the next mainstream public chain. But if the ecosystem keeps stagnating and is overtaken by other public chains, then that’s only a matter of time. Right now, the ADA price is around $0.24, and its circulating market cap is $8.77 billion. Whether it’s worth buying still depends on your own investment strategy.