With the transition to the new Shelley era approaching, cardano (ADA) outperformed all other top 100 coins this week, gaining nearly 60% in the past seven days and joining bitcoin (BTC) as another top 10 coin with positive returns in the past 12 months.
As of press time on Thursday (11:15 UTC), ADA was up by almost 6% over the past 24 hours, trading at a price of USD 0.087. The price is also up by almost 80% in a month.
Following the latest gains, ADA has now joined BTC as the only two coins in the top 10 by market capitalization with positive returns in US dollar terms over the past 12 months, with ADA being up by 2.6%, versus a 12-month gain for bitcoin of 21%. In comparison, ethereum (ETH) is down by 2.7%, while other major coins dropped 16%-59%.
The massive rally for ADA also comes as a crucial upgrade of the Cardano blockchain, known as Shelley, is fast approaching.
Speaking in a live-streamed development update last week, Cardano Founder and CEO of Cardano development firm IOHK, Charles Hoskinson, said that the public testnet for the Shelley upgrade will be available for everyone to run from Tuesday, June 9, with the opportunity to earn real ADA tokens through staking.
Following the release of the testnet, the full Shelley upgrade should be ready to ship on June 30 as long as “everything works without a hitch,” Hoskinson said at the time.
Providing some further clues about the progress towards the release of the full upgrade, Cardano’s Head of Delivery, Christopher Greenwood, yesterday shared some of the feedback the team has received as the first group of “pioneers” were given access to a “friends & family” version of the testnet.
According to Greenwood, roughly 50 people and 81 staking pools are now running on the private testnet, with positive feedback received by the team on both reliability of nodes and the quality of the documentation.
