ADA
Cardano · Proof-of-stake L1 (Ouroboros Praos, eUTXO)
Key facts
- Circulating 37.57B, 83%
- Locked or unvested 7.43B, 17%
- Max 45.00B
Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.
Assessment
Cardano has a credible monetary frame: a 45B cap, no minting authority, and a reserve that decays geometrically, so issued supply grows ~2% a year, decaying, with no vesting overhang. The value engine is close to empty: fees of about $1M a year route mostly to the treasury and back into the reserve, and on-chain activity shrank (DeFi TVL down 79% in dollars, fees down 40% in ADA). Soundness is held back by the Nov 21, 2025 chain partition, an exploited consensus bug resolved only by an emergency node release, and by a single production client until Amaru produces blocks. Distribution is middling: 13% of issued ADA went to the three founding entities at no cost, and IOG and Emurgo do not disclose their balances. Institutional access regressed when Grayscale withdrew its spot ETF filing in August 2026.
How value reaches holders
Staking yield of ~2.2% (469.7M ADA paid to pools and delegators in the year to Oct 23, 2026 on 21.4B staked) is almost entirely release from the pre-created reserve, not fees. Each epoch the protocol moves 0.3% of the reserve (6.05B ADA left) plus all fees into a reward pot; 20% (tau) goes to the on-chain treasury, about 33% reaches pools and delegators after the pledge and saturation formula, and the rest returns to the reserve. Fees were only 3.52M ADA (~$1.04M) over the trailing year, so about $0.35M of fees reached stakers. No burn exists. The treasury (1.39B ADA) is spent by DRep vote: 457M ADA was withdrawn between Feb 13 and Oct 16, 2026 under a 500M ADA net change limit
Score anatomy
Demand
9 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoptionWhy would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?
Fees enter the epoch reward pot: 20% goes to the treasury, about a third is credited to pools and delegators, and ~47% returns to the reserve (pledge factor and unstaked share)
Policy-set material share (25%+), or plumbing at 25-50%medium confidenceHow this is scored
3.52M ADA of fees in the 365 days to Oct 23, 2026, about $1.04M (DefiLlama $1.02M), down 79% in dollars and 40% in ADA year on year
$0.5-5M/yr, or undisclosedhigh confidenceHow this is scored
Gas on Cardano; Cardano DeFi TVL is $61.5M and stablecoins $69M (DefiLlama, Oct 23, 2026), with no measurable payment, savings or third-party collateral use
Pays its own network's fees (gas never counts higher, whatever the size of the economy)high confidenceHow this is scored
Cardano DeFi TVL $0.06B (-78% YoY) and fees -79% in dollars, -40% in ADA, with $0.07B stablecoins: negligible for its size
Marginal or fading: negligible use for its size, usage down 60%+ year on year, or a lost forkmedium confidenceHow this is scored
Two routes, the stronger counts
Soundness
22 / 40Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?
45B hard cap; new ADA comes only from the 6.05B reserve at 0.3% per epoch: 759M (2.0%) issued over the last year, ~1.8% over the next 12 months and decaying; rho changes only by DRep and committee vote
Under 1%/yr net without a hard cap, a hard cap with halvings issuing 1-3%/yr, or zero issuance where binding on-chain token governance could vote to mint morehigh confidenceHow this is scored
No vesting: 37.57B of 38.95B issued ADA (96.4%) is liquid; the on-chain treasury holds 1.39B (3.6%), spent only by DRep vote under a 500M ADA limit to Jul 2027
Small tails only, or 85%+ of supply liquidhigh confidenceHow this is scored
The 2015-17 voucher sale (~94% Japanese buyers, ~$0.0024/ADA) sold 83% of genesis; IOHK, Emurgo and the Foundation got 5.19B free, 13.3% of issued ADA; no VC round
Insiders received 10-25%, or one organization directs 3-10%high confidenceHow this is scored
On Nov 21, 2025 a crafted delegation transaction exploited a 2022 deserialization bug and split mainnet for ~14.5 hours; one production node (Haskell) runs the chain
A halt, rollback or exploited consensus bug in the last 24 months, attack cost under $10M, or a foundation-selected validator set or small multisig can halt or upgrade with no meaningful exit windowhigh confidenceHow this is scored
Durability
8 / 15Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?
$8.2B market cap (band 4), $457.6M/day median volume (band 4), no flags.
Major: $1-10B market cap and $50M/day+How this is scored
9.1 years since Sep 29, 2017 with two drawdowns over 90%, but the Nov 2025 partition ended with stake pools upgrading to orphan the fork most pools had followed
3-5 years, or a rollback, coordinated chain-wide halt or restart, or a $50M+ exploit in the last 5 yearsmedium confidenceHow this is scored
No US spot ETF: Grayscale withdrew its ADA ETF registration on Aug 7, 2026; a US futures ETF holds ~$1.1M and CME ADA futures trade since Feb 9, 2026
OTC trust, non-US product, or a pending US filinghigh confidenceHow this is scored
What would move it up
To reach T3 Mixed, 3 gates are still open:
- Score 39needs 40(open)
- Value engine 1needs 2(open)
- Adoption 1needs 2(open)
- Supply 4gate 1(met)
Tier outlook · next trigger Nov 30, 2026
Two-way ↗low likelihood
- Amaru (Rust node) producing mainnet blocks, targeted Nov 2026, and reaching 10%+ of stake: the precondition for security above 1 once Nov 2027 passes without a new incident
- Dijkstra hard fork (nested transactions, Linear Leios) targeted end 2026: any repeat of a version-split incident
- Trailing-year fees falling below $0.5M (revenue 0 caps routing at 1) or recovering above $5M
- A US spot ADA ETF filing or launch after Grayscale's Aug 7, 2026 withdrawal
- Rho or tau parameter changes and treasury withdrawals against the 500M ADA limit (epochs 613 to 713)
Research report
Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 80%Cardano runs on a capped supply: 45 billion ADA is fixed in the protocol, about 38.95 billion has been issued, and the remaining reserve of 6.05 billion is released at 0.3% per five-day epoch, which added roughly 2% to issued supply over the past year and shrinks every year. No account can create ADA, and the cap could only change through a hard fork that node operators adopt. The economic engine behind that frame is thin. Transaction fees came to about $1 million over the past year, down sharply in both dollar and ADA terms; 20% of each epoch's reward pot goes to an on-chain treasury governed by delegated representatives, about a third reaches stake pools and delegators, and the remainder returns to the reserve, so staking income is almost entirely reserve release rather than fees. On security, a crafted transaction exploited a node bug on November 21, 2025 and split the network into two chains for about 14.5 hours until operators upgraded, and a single node implementation still produces every block while the Rust client Amaru works toward block production. The founding entities received about 13% of issued ADA at launch, and the Cardano Foundation discloses 561 million ADA. There is no US spot ADA fund after Grayscale withdrew its registration in August 2026.
Structure (17 facts)
- Chain
- Cardano L1, Ouroboros Praos proof of stake, extended UTXO with Plutus scripts; Conway era with on-chain governance (DReps, stake pools, 7-seat Constitutional Committee); protocol version 11 since the van Rossem intra-era hard fork (Jul 18, 2026)
- Market
- price ~$0.216, market cap ~$8.11B, ~$261M/day volume (CoinGecko, Oct 23, 2026); ATH $3.09 (Sep 1, 2021), now -93%; -66% over one year, 1y low ~$0.144
- Supply
- maxLovelaceSupply 45B fixed in the Shelley genesis; ledger at epoch 663 (Oct 23, 2026): UTxO 36.814B, reward accounts 0.746B, treasury 1.386B, deposits ~5.3M, reserve 6.049B, so issued supply (45B minus reserve) is 38.951B
- Emission
- each 5-day epoch the reward pot receives rho x reserve x eta (rho = 0.003, about 18-19M ADA now) plus all fees; tau = 20% goes to the treasury; the rest is paid to pools by stake and pledge (k = 500, a0 = 0.3) and undistributed rewards return to the reserve. Net reserve decline was 759.3M ADA over the 73 epochs to Oct 23, 2026 (1.99% of issued supply at the start), shrinking ~11%/yr with the reserve; constitution guardrails bound rho to 0.001-0.005 and tau to 0.1-0.3
- Mint authority
- none: no account or committee can create ADA; the 45B cap is a genesis constant that only a hard fork (governance action ratified by DReps, stake pools and the committee, then adopted by node operators) could change; rho and tau are protocol parameters changeable by DRep plus committee vote
- Distribution
- Sep 2015 to Jan 2017 voucher sale through Attain Corporation: 25.927B ADA for ~108,845 BTC (~$62M net, ~$0.0024/ADA), 14,402 paid invoices, 94.45% of BTC from Japan, KYC required; development pool of 20% of sold ADA (5.185B: IOHK 2.463B, Emurgo 2.074B, Cardano Foundation 0.648B) at no cost; genesis 31.112B; remaining 13.888B formed the reserve paid out as staking rewards. Insider share 11.5% of max, 13.3% of issued supply. No VC or private round
- Provenance
- 318M ADA of unredeemed vouchers (~0.7% of max) was swept from Byron redemption addresses at the Dec 2020 Allegra fork and later moved by a Move Instantaneous Rewards transfer (Oct 2021); 2025 misappropriation allegations prompted an IOG-commissioned McDermott Will and Schulte plus BDO forensic report (Sep 2025) stating 99.7% of sold ADA was redeemed
- Insider holdings
- Cardano Foundation: 561.4M ADA at Dec 31, 2025 (from 599.1M a year earlier; ADA 51.6% of CHF 287.5M assets, attested by Grant Thornton); IOG and Emurgo balances undisclosed
- Treasury
- 1.386B ADA (Oct 23, 2026), down from 1.618B a year earlier; Net Change Limit of 500M ADA for epochs 613-713 (Feb 13, 2026 to ~Jul 3, 2027), 457.4M ADA enacted across 30 withdrawals by Oct 16, 2026, incl. 120M ADA for AlphaGrowth's Cardano PRIME; IOG's 2026 ask ~$46.8M vs $97.5M in 2025
- Value accrual
- no burn; fees join the reward pot (20% treasury, ~33% to pools and delegators, ~47% back to the reserve); staking yield ~2.2% on 21.39B active stake (57% of circulating), funded overwhelmingly by reserve release
- Revenue
- fees 3,515,036 ADA over the 73 epochs to Oct 23, 2026 (~$1.04M at daily prices; DefiLlama $1.02M) vs 5.83M ADA (~$4.78M) the prior year; ~31.5K transactions/day (11.5M over the year, -33%)
- Security
- 2,815 pools with stake, 157 pools hold half of active stake; largest operator Coinbase (Bison Trails relays and metadata, 43 zero-pledge pools) ~12.1% of active stake, Staked (Kraken) 18 private 100%-margin pools ~5.4%, Upbit ~3.1%, Everstake ~3.1%; majority of active stake ~10.7B ADA (~$2.3B). One production client (IntersectMBO cardano-node, Haskell); Amaru (Rust, PRAGMA) is relay-capable with mainnet block production targeted for Nov 2026; Dingo (Go) in development
- Incidents
- Nov 21, 2025 ~08:00 UTC: a malformed delegation transaction with an oversized hash (deserialization bug from 2022) was accepted by newer nodes and rejected by older ones, splitting mainnet into a 'poisoned' and a 'healthy' chain; node 10.5.2/10.5.3 released within hours, stake pools and exchanges upgraded, all nodes on the healthy chain by ~22:17 UTC (14.5 hours); transactions only on the poisoned fork had to be resubmitted; FBI notified
- Usage
- DeFi TVL $61.5M (Oct 23, 2026) vs $291M a year earlier; stablecoins $69.3M; no measurable third-party collateral, payment or savings use
- Institutional access
- no US spot ADA ETF: Grayscale Cardano Trust ETF S-1 (filed Aug 29, 2025) withdrawn by Form RW on Aug 7, 2026 (Polkadot and Hedera filings withdrawn the same day); Volatility Shares Cardano ETF (futures) net assets $1.13M (May 31, 2026); CME ADA futures since Feb 9, 2026; European ETPs (21Shares, Valour)
- Roadmap
- Dijkstra hard fork phase 1 (nested transactions, Linear Leios) targeted end 2026; Peras intra-era fork Q2 2027; Amaru block production Nov 2026
- Unlocks
- none scheduled; reserve release is protocol-coded, treasury spending needs DRep votes
Sources (16)
- api.koios.rest/api/v1/totals
- api.koios.rest/api/v1/epoch_params
- api.koios.rest/api/v1/epoch_info
- api.llama.fi/summary/fees/cardano
- api.llama.fi/v2/historicalChainTvl/Cardano
- cardano.org/genesis
- intersectmbo.org/news/cardano-mainnet-incident-facts-at-a-glance
- intersectmbo.org/news/incident-report-network-partition-analy…
- cardanofoundation.org/blog/2025-activity-financial-report
- cryptoslate.com/cardano-has-42-6-million-ada-left-under-its-c…
- sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2083106/000119312526340377/ada_rw…
- sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1884021/000119312526325735/cardan…
- en.coin-turk.com/cardano-dijkstra-hard-fork-on-schedule-amaru…
- lidonation.com/en/posts/major-upgrades-coming-to-cardano-the-…
- cointelegraph.com/news/hoskinson-audit-deeply-hurt-600-m-card…
- coingecko.com/en/coins/cardano
Compare with
How the ranking works and how ADA compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:
GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=ADA