What if you bought Cardano in 2018?
Crypto · Coin. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.7× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in Cardano at the start of 2018 would be worth about $714 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson, one of Ethereum's co-founders, and launched in 2017 with a distinctive pitch: a blockchain built on peer-reviewed academic research and formal methods, developed slowly and carefully by his company IOHK (later Input Output). Its ADA token, named after Ada Lovelace, was sold largely to Japanese buyers before launch. Riding the 2017 bubble, ADA soared to a market value in the tens of billions before it could run smart contracts at all, and then lost over 95 percent of its value by early 2020.
The 2021 bull market brought a second, even bigger run, with ADA approaching $3 as proof-of-stake chains became fashionable and the long-awaited Alonzo upgrade finally enabled smart contracts in September 2021. The ecosystem of applications built on it, however, remained small next to Ethereum and newer rivals such as Solana, and the price fell back sharply in 2022. Cardano retained a loyal community and active governance experiments, but most of its valuation has rested on anticipation of what it would eventually become.
The lesson: Paying for a roadmap is paying for promises; Cardano's price ran far ahead of its shipped functionality in both of its major booms.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $0.7 | $714 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $0.033 | $15,152 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $15,152. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Cardano is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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