How much is Cardano (ADA) worth?

What is Cardano?

Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain that runs smart contracts. Its coin is ADA, and ADA is what the price at the top of this page measures. Holders use it to pay transaction fees, to stake with the pools that produce blocks, and to vote on how the network is run. Staking doesn’t lock the coins away: delegated ADA stays in the holder’s wallet and can be spent at any time.

The project is known for a slow, research-led approach. Its core protocol, Ouroboros, was set out in peer-reviewed academic papers before it went into production. It picks who makes each block according to how much ADA is staked with each pool, and features have been added in planned stages. Smart contracts, for example, arrived in September 2021, four years after launch. Under the hood, Cardano tracks coins with an extended version of the model Bitcoin uses, in which each payment spends earlier outputs and creates new ones.

Who started it, and when?

Charles Hoskinson, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, started Cardano after leaving that project. The Cardano network went live in September 2017. Three organisations have shared the work since: the engineering firm Input Output, the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo.

The coin takes its name from Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician often called the first computer programmer. Its smallest unit, a millionth of an ADA, is called a lovelace.

How many ADA can exist?

The limit is 45 billion ADA. Most of that was distributed at launch. The rest sits in a reserve that pays out staking rewards a little at a time, so the amount in circulation creeps toward the cap without ever passing it. The present count is 37.56B ADA.

A fixed ceiling puts Cardano closer to Bitcoin’s model than to coins with open-ended issuance, although 45 billion is a far bigger number than 21 million. You can see how close Bitcoin is to its own limit on our page about how many bitcoin are left.

Why is one ADA so much cheaper than one bitcoin?

Because Cardano’s cap is more than two thousand times larger than Bitcoin’s. Spread a network’s value across that many coins and each one carries a small price, currently $0.2226.

A low unit price says nothing about size on its own. Market cap, which multiplies the price by the circulating supply, is the figure used to rank coins against each other, and Cardano’s place on that list is 17. Our coins table shows the full ranking, updated live.