Cardano Wrestles With Hack Fallout and a Founder’s Broadside as Leios Testnet Launches
Published on 07/10/2026 at 17:22 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
A regulatory milestone, a network upgrade, a security crisis, and a war of words with Ethereum are converging on Cardano, testing both the project’s technical narrative and its market resilience. While the token trades near multiyear lows, the next months could define its trajectory in several key arenas.
The most tangible catalyst for institutional sentiment arrives on August 9, 2026, when a six-month trading window for regulated CME futures closes. That milestone creates the formal prerequisite for potential spot-ETF applications in the United States, a prospect that has drawn close attention from whale investors even as the broader market remains subdued.
Those large holders have been quietly accumulating. Whales now control roughly 38 percent of ADA’s total supply, up from previous levels, despite the token trading at just $0.17 — a price that has wiped out more than half its value since the start of the year. The year-to-date decline stands at about 53 percent, and ADA remains more than 83 percent below its August 2025 all-time high of $1.01.
The price action, however, is flashing early technical signals that some analysts interpret as a potential turning point. After touching a fresh 52-week low of $0.14 in late June, the Relative Strength Index sank to an extremely oversold 12.78. That reading coincided with a bullish divergence between price and RSI, and the indicator has since recovered to 48.4. ADA currently sits roughly 8.4 percent below its 50-day moving average and about 36 percent below the 200-day line.
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The token’s daily price has eked out a gain of about 1 percent, with a weekly increase of 4.27 percent and a 30-day rise of 1.94 percent — modest, but a departure from the relentless selling that defined the previous months.
Behind the charts, the project is navigating a serious security incident. Last month, attackers exploited the SecondFi protocol, stealing approximately 16 million ADA from 374 user wallets. The fallout prompted EMURGO, Cardano’s founding commercial entity, to withdraw from the central decision-making body known as “Pentad” earlier this week. The firm said it is redirecting its resources toward damage control and will release a specialized export tool next week to help affected users secure their remaining holdings.
On a more constructive front, developers have launched the public testnet for Ouroboros Leios, an upgrade designed to dramatically boost the blockchain’s throughput. Dubbed “Musashi Dojo,” the test environment aims to increase data-transfer capacity by a factor of 60, according to founder Charles Hoskinson, who has been promoting the scaling solution as a way to make Cardano viable for high-frequency decentralized finance applications.
Hoskinson has also been on the offensive against Ethereum. He sharply criticized a recent research paper from Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter proposing native UTXOs — payment objects that exist temporarily rather than as permanent account entries — as a way to reduce on-chain storage demands by an estimated 99.8 percent. Hoskinson accused Ethereum of copying Cardano’s eUTXO model while refusing to acknowledge the origin. In a subsequent livestream, he went further, arguing that Ethereum is increasingly adopting technologies that Cardano has been developing since 2016, including reference inputs and hybrid UTXO-account systems.
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Notably, Wahrstätter’s proposal does not mention Cardano at all; it cites Bitcoin’s original UTXO structure combined with Ethereum’s account-based framework. Hoskinson also took aim at Ethereum’s staking mechanism, criticizing unnecessary fund lockups and slashing risks that he said have made liquid-staking solutions like Lido necessary. His own platform, he argued, lets users retain full control of their ADA while earning rewards through the Ouroboros consensus mechanism.
The feud has become a staple of Hoskinson’s recent public appearances, even as he faces calls from parts of his own community to step back. For ADA holders, the most decisive factor may not be who pioneered which idea, but whether Cardano’s technical advances — Leios, the upcoming ETF window, and the eventual recovery of network activity — can translate into renewed demand. Daily transactions on the blockchain recently slipped to around 17,400, underscoring the gap between infrastructure buildout and real-world usage.
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