Cardano's ADA is Either #6 or 7 By Market Capitalization — Depending on Who Counts

Cardano’s ADA recently overtook Litecoin (LTC) in market capitalization. Now it may have passed Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) as well, depending on how the metric is calculated.

BCH, BSV, ADA & LTC. Source: CoinMarketCap.

How many ADAs out there?

At the time of this writing, CoinMarketCap, or CMC, shows ADA in seventh spot, while Nomics has it at sixth —- just ahead of BSV. The controversy stems from the circulating supply —- CMC reports 25,927,070,538, while Nomics has the figure at 31,112,484,646. This represents a five billion ADA discrepancy. Blockchair, a blockchain search and analytics engine, agrees with Nomics.

Nomics CTO Nick Gauthier pointed out that the difference comes from the fact that his company includes ADAs allocated to the Cardano Foundation, IOHK, and Emurgo in the circulating supply, while, apparently CMC does not. According to a cached copy of the Cardano Foundation website, the three entities were given 648,176,761, 2,463,071,701 and 2,074,165,644 ADA tokens respectively. These numbers add up to 5,185,414,106 —- precisely the difference between the amount reported by various data providers. Based on the current ADA price, these tokens are worth about $590 million.

Do company tokens count?

The question still arises of whether these tokens should be included in the circulating supply. This should probably depend on the lockup mechanisms, if any, for the tokens remaining with those organizations. Presumably, some of the tokens have been spent and thus have become part of the circulating supply. The updated version of the site does not have any information on token distribution.

Cointelegraph reached out to IOHK for clarification, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

The ADA spring bull run. Source: Nomics.

Spring ADA bull run

Regardless of the circulating supply issue, ADA has been on a remarkable bull run that ensued after Black Thursday. On March 11. At that time, the price of ADA was $0.024; as of this writing, it is $0.114. The difference represents a 475% appreciation. It is still far below its all-time high of $1.16, set in January 2018.

IOHK, the Cardano development company, has reached a number of key milestones and public announcements during this time. The biggest news was the launch of the Shelley mainnet. Around the same time, a decentralized identity solution, Atala PRISM, was unveiled. There was also news about ADA holders being able to stake their coins while in Coinbase custody, and speculation on the likelihood of it being listed on the exchange by the end of 2020.

This momentum also comes on the heels of the Cardano Virtual Summit. According to Charles Hoskison was bigger than Consensus, having been a host to more than 10,000 guests.