Cardano price fell about 1% to $0.174 as traders weighed a two-stage Dijkstra upgrade roadmap against a bearish chart structure and nearby liquidation risks.
Summary
- Cardano price traded near $0.174 after breaking below a rising channel on the 4-hour chart.
- Cardano’s Dijkstra upgrade will roll out in two phases, beginning with protocol version 12.
- The daily chart places immediate support at $0.1706, followed by the $0.1385 swing low.
- CoinGlass data shows major upside liquidation clusters between roughly $0.183 and $0.187.
Cardano price action today
According to data from crypto.news, Cardano (ADA) price was trading near $0.174 at the time of writing, down about 1% over the past 24 hours. ADA remained below the $0.18 level after retreating from an Aug. 7 peak above $0.21.
The 4-hour chart shows that ADA has broken below an ascending channel that guided its recovery from approximately $0.153 in late July. Cardano price initially climbed along the channel to $0.20 before the breakout failed and sellers regained control.
ADA has since formed a series of lower highs and lower lows, bringing it back toward the area where the late-July rally began. The latest decline also left the token about 17% below its August high.
4-hour momentum remains weak. The relative strength index stood at 35.06, close to the oversold threshold of 30, while its signal line was lower at 33.32. The reading shows sellers still control the short-term trend, although ADA is approaching a zone where selling pressure may begin to slow.
Analysts at AltCryptoGems said in an Aug. 17 X post that ADA’s decline followed a bearish break in market structure. The analyst also pointed to heavy capital rotation across the altcoin market, where rallies have been short-lived as traders move funds between individual tokens.
Dijkstra Era upgrade will arrive in two phases
Intersect’s official Dijkstra rollout plan divides Cardano’s next major protocol upgrade into two stages. The first phase targets code completion in the fourth quarter of 2026 and will introduce the Dijkstra ledger era through a hard fork to protocol version 12.
Phase one is set to activate Ouroboros Linear Leios, a scaling design intended to increase the number of transactions Cardano can handle while retaining the security guarantees of its existing base protocol.
Linear Leios will use the current ranking blocks alongside supplementary endorser blocks. Those additional blocks will reference transactions and receive certification from a stake-based committee before the transactions enter the ledger.
Intersect said the approach allows Cardano to process more transactions without requiring larger base blocks or shorter slot times. Throughput would be raised gradually through protocol parameter changes after activation.
The first phase also includes nested transactions, a PlutusV4 script context, account-address improvements, and changes to Cardano’s block structure. Nested transactions will allow a transaction to contain child transactions with their own witnesses and execution conditions, giving developers more options when building on-chain applications.
Structural support for Ouroboros Peras will also ship during the first phase, but the settlement feature will not become active immediately. Intersect plans to activate Peras through a second hard fork within the Dijkstra Era, with code completion targeted for the second quarter of 2027.
Peras will add a voting layer that allows committees of stake pool operators to vote on recent chain tips. Once a tip receives enough votes, the network can treat it as settled sooner than under Cardano’s standard Ouroboros Praos process.
The Q4 2026 and Q2 2027 targets refer to estimated code-completion dates rather than confirmed mainnet launches. Each phase must pass through the Preview and Pre-production test networks before reaching Cardano’s mainnet.
Mainnet activation will also require an on-chain governance action. Delegated representatives, stake pool operators, and the Constitutional Committee must vote on the proposal before either hard fork can proceed.
Cardano price tests the $0.1706 support level
ADA’s daily chart places the price close to the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement level at $0.1706. The level is measured from the June low of $0.1385 to the May high of $0.2886 and now represents the nearest major support on the chart.
Cardano price was slightly above its 20-day simple moving average at $0.1738 at the time captured by the chart. However, ADA remained below its 50-day average at $0.1843, its 100-day average at $0.1892 and its 200-day average at $0.2260.
The position below the three longer-term averages keeps the wider trend under pressure. The Awesome Oscillator remained marginally positive at 0.0020, but its shrinking red bars showed that the momentum generated by ADA’s early-August recovery was fading.
A daily close below $0.1706 would weaken the current support structure and expose the recent liquidity area near $0.166. Continued selling could then place the June swing low at $0.1385 back in focus.
ADA would first need to recover the 50-day average near $0.1843 to ease the immediate bearish pressure. A move above that level would bring the 100-day average around $0.1892 and the 61.8% Fibonacci level at $0.1958 into view.
The $0.1958 area also sits close to the former rising channel and the price zone where ADA’s August advance began to lose momentum. A sustained recovery above it would allow traders to consider the 50% retracement at $0.2135, although the current charts do not yet show confirmation of such a reversal.
ADA liquidation map points to volatility near $0.185
CoinGlass’ one-week ADA liquidation heatmap shows several leveraged position clusters above the current price. The brightest concentration appears around $0.186 to $0.187, with another large cluster close to $0.183.
Prices can move toward areas containing large volumes of leveraged positions because forced liquidations add market orders once those levels are reached. The data does not guarantee that ADA will rebound, but it identifies $0.183–$0.187 as a potentially volatile area if buyers push the token above $0.18.
Additional liquidation bands are visible around $0.188–$0.193, increasing the potential resistance above the first cluster. Those levels broadly overlap with ADA’s 50-day and 100-day moving averages, strengthening the importance of the wider $0.184–$0.196 zone.
Liquidity below the market appears more scattered. CoinGlass shows smaller concentrations near $0.170 and toward the bottom of the displayed range at approximately $0.166. A break below $0.1706 could therefore accelerate the decline as leveraged long positions face liquidation.
For US investors trading ADA around the clock, the Dijkstra roadmap provides a longer-term network catalyst but no fixed mainnet date. Near-term direction remains tied to whether ADA holds $0.1706 and recovers the moving averages and liquidation clusters between $0.183 and $0.196.
Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.