Cardano Is Outpacing Bitcoin And XRP – Here’s What’s Driving ADA Higher

• Cardano rallied over 11% on Monday, hitting its highest level in three months and the biggest gain among major cryptocurrencies.
• Over the past 3 months, Bitcoin was up around 37%, XRP gained 3%, Solana was up 49%, but Cardano was up over 50%.
• RealFi launched on Cardano's mainnet last week, introducing USDrf and the staked sUSDrf.

Cardano (ADA) rallied over 11% on Monday, its highest level in three months and the largest gain among major tokens, outperforming Bitcoin (BTC) and XRP (XRP) among others, though it trailed Solana (SOL).

ADA traded around $0.27 at the time of writing, its highest level since early July, according to Koyfin data. The token has rallied about 74% from its July low of $0.1554.

ADA’s price was up as much as 51% since early July before paring gains to about 46%, according to Koyfin data. That put it ahead of Bitcoin at around 37% and XRP at around 33%. Only Solana did better, up some 49% in the same period. Cardano’s market cap was about $10.2 billion, lower than its peers.

Other large caps moved, but not substantially. Cardano rose about 11% over the past 24 hours, more than eight times XRP's 1.3% gain and about 11 times Bitcoin's 1% rise as Solana edged lower, down by 0.4%.

At the time of writing, Cardano was the top-trending ticker among cryptocurrencies on Stocktwits. Retail sentiment around ADA moved to ‘bullish’ from the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it shifted to ‘high’ from ‘low’ over the past day.

Cardano DeFi TVL Climbs

Two things changed on the network in the days before the move. Total value locked (TVL) in Cardano's decentralized finance (DeFi) applications rose 8.72% over 24 hours to $70.78 million, according to DefiLlama. 

Cardano’s decentralized exchange (DeX) volume was $4.36 million, and active addresses numbered 15,985. Net inflows were zero.

RealFi Launch Adds A Fresh Ecosystem Catalyst

The capital arrived days after a new product launched. RealFi began operating on Cardano's mainnet on Thursday, launching alongside ecosystem partners including SundaeSwap, Lace and Liqwid. The protocol runs on two tokens.

RealFi's documentation described USDrf as "a reserve-backed digital dollar built for capital stability, operational liquidity, and everyday transactions," and sUSDrf as "the staked efficiency layer," through which participants who stake USDrf "gain exposure to yield generated from a diversified portfolio of real-world assets." The company framed the pair as "a clear separation of capital preservation and return generation."

What it was pitching against was the rest of the sector. "Most stablecoins leave capital sitting still," the documentation says, describing RealFi as infrastructure that lets eligible participants "deploy capital into real-world economic activity rather than speculative crypto trading."

That was the difference that mattered for users reading the yield. The returns are meant to come from borrowers in credit markets repaying loans, not from token emissions. RealFi's user-facing product, which it calls Voyager Season, went live at the same time. 

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, who also co-founded Ethereum (ETH) but stepped down from the project in 2014, said in July that he had invested several million dollars in RealFi.

ADA has been down over 18% so far this year and lost over 67% in the last 12 months.

Read also: Bitcoin Is Back Near September Highs – And Shorts Are Stacked Just Above Market

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