#Cardano
🚀 Cardano on the Brink: Midnight Launch as a Rescue from a 71% Drop?
Cardano ($ADA ) is currently being pressured by two polar opposites: record short positions and the long-awaited launch of the Midnight network. Will this week be a capitulation point or the beginning of a powerful "short squeeze"?
📉 Alarming numbers:
• Bearish Peak: The number of short positions (shorts) on Binance has reached its highest since June 2023.
• Holder losses: The average ADA wallet has a -43% return over the past year.
• Price pressure: The token has fallen 71% since September and is trading around $0.26, which is 91% below its all-time high.
• Activity deficit: Despite a market cap of $9.7 billion, the network's TVL is only $13.9 million, and daily fees are barely above $1,600.
🌑 Midnight: A New Hope or a Standalone Game?
Midnight, a private Cardano sidechain that has been in the works for over 8 years, launches this week.
• Giant partners: Google Cloud, Telegram, MoneyGram, and Vodafone (Pairpoint) act as node operators.
• Compliance-first: Unlike older anonymous coins, Midnight uses ZK-proofs (Plonk and Halo 2) to allow businesses to be private but remain within the law.
• Token economy: Midnight uses a two-token model — $NIGHT and DUST. The market currently favors NIGHT (+17.5% in the month), while ADA continues to stagnate.
💡 What does this mean for $ADA ?
Charles Hoskinson is confident that Midnight will “catapult” the Cardano ecosystem, increasing the number of users and TVL by 10 times within 6-12 months.
For traders, the situation looks like a classic bear trap: if the Midnight launch attracts real capital, the market overloaded with shorts could explode into a rapid rise due to the forced closure of sellers' positions.
