Although Cardano may have seen an 8% price fall over the past 7 trading days, bringing the current price down to around $0.0817, the cryptocurrency is still up by a total of 81% over the past 90 trading days. Cardano currently sits in 10th position in the cryptocurrency rankings by market cap, but Cardano could be taken to new heights as the Shelley upgrade draws closer.
Image Source: CoinMarketCap
An Upgrade To the Entire Network
The entire goal of Cardano’s Shelley phase of development is to bring complete 100% decentralization to the Cardano network. They plan to do this by handing over control to the community through the use of staking pools.
Project Shelley will be a very important development to Cardano, as decentralization is one of the pillars that drives cryptocurrency adoption. If a cryptocurrency is believed to be controlled by a central authority, this typically drives away investors.
It seems that the Shelley upgrade is drawing close, as the development team announced a major milestone last month, stating that the specifications for Shelley have been created. The specifications will allow the development team to verify that the final code that is written is in line with what the researchers had originally envisioned.
With the help Ouroboros, the PoS consensus protocol will be upgraded in Shelley, allowing users to delegate their coins to staking pools when their nodes are offline. This will allow users to transfer their rights of protocol participation to the pool operator. This will generate an on-chain delegation certificate to confirm that the operator has been granted permission to use the funds. However, the funds will remain safe, as the pool operator cannot touch the monetary value of the funds.
The launch date of Shelley has not yet been revealed, although it is expected at some time during 2019. When it does launch, the new upgraded features provided to the blockchain will certainly take this project to new heights.
Let us take a look at the ADA/USD market and highlight some potential areas of support and resistance moving forward.
Cadano Price Analysis
ADA/USD – MEDIUM TERM – DAILY CHART
What Has Been Going On?
Taking a look at the ADA/USD chart above, we can see that during May 2019, ADA managed to rebound at the .618 Fibonacci Retracement level (drawn in green), priced at $0.060 and continued to climb further higher. Cardano continued to rise until reaching resistance at the 1.618 Fibonacci Extension level (drawn in blue), priced at $0.0939. Price action was unable to overcome the resistance in this area, and has since dropped lower.
What Is the Current Trend?
The current short-term trend is presently neutral until price action can break above the resistance at $0.0939. If the Cardano market was to drop beneath the $0.060 level, we could consider the short-term trend as bearish.
Over the medium term, after an 81% price increase throughout the past 90 trading days, it is easy to consider the Cardano market as bullish.
Where Can We Go From Here?
If the bullish pressure picks up and pushes price action higher, the first level of significant resistance above the market is located at the April 2019 and May 2019 highs at $0.093. If the buyers can continue above here, further resistance above is expected at $0.1.
Beyond $0.1, higher resistance can then be expected at $0.107, and then at $0.1120. The resistance at $0.1120 is provided by a long-term bearish .5 Fibonacci Retracement level (drawn in red), measured from the July 2018 high to the December 2018 low.
If the buyers continue above $0.1120, further resistance then lies at the short-term 1.272 and 1.414 Fibonacci Extension levels (drawn in purple), priced at $0.1177 and $0.1268, respectively. This is then followed up with more resistance at the bearish .618 Fibonacci Retracement level (drawn in red), priced at $0.1321.
Where Is the Support Beneath the Market?
Alternatively, if the sellers push the market lower, we can expect immediate support beneath the market to be located at $0.08, $0.0754, and $0.07. Beneath $0.07, further support lies at the short-term .618 Fibonacci Retracement level (drawn in green), priced at $0.60.
If the sellers continue beneath the May 2019 low, we can expect more support toward the downside to be located at $0.0542 and $0.04353.
Conclusion
The Shelley upgrade has been very much anticipated within the Cardano community. The upgrade will bring a heap of technical improvements, but most notably it will make the Cardano network fully decentralized, allowing users to stake their participating power within staking pools. Although there is no date set toward the release of Shelley, we can expect price action to turn positive and create fresh highs as the excitement builds.
