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Cardano's native token, ADA, rose 12% to $0.27, its highest level in five months. The move was decoupled from a stagnant market, where Bitcoin and Ethereum traded with little change.
The rally, the coin's strongest since May, began with the launch of a DeFi platform and accelerated sharply after a public reaction from the project's founder.
As the price moved higher, Charles Hoskinson quoted a 15-minute ADA/USDT chart. It showed the price jumping from around $0.244 to around $0.264. The Cardano founder added a single hashtag to his repost: #LeiosIsComing. It became the day's main teaser and quickly shifted the market's attention to the network's upcoming scalability upgrade.
The Linear Leios technology (specification CIP-164) is designed to dramatically increase the blockchain's throughput. The existing Ouroboros Praos chain will continue to provide security and block chronology. In parallel, larger endorser blocks are being introduced. Transactions in these blocks are verified by stake pools using BLS signatures and added to the ledger in batches.
Since June 2026, the technology has been tested on the Musashi Dojo network. Under stable conditions, it has demonstrated a sixfold increase in data processing speed, with an estimated potential improvement of 10–65 times.
What is behind the ADA price rise, apart from Hoskinson's tweets, and what could stand in its way
The initial boost for ADA came from the October 1 mainnet launch of RealFi, a platform for tokenizing real-world assets (RWA), and the integration of the USDr stablecoin into Lace, Liqwid and SundaeSwap. On the chart, this produced a strong bullish signal: a Golden Cross, in which the 50-day moving average crossed above the 200-day moving average, while the daily momentum index reached 68.69.
Despite short liquidations near $0.264, the rally is largely narrative-driven: trading volumes on Cardano's decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are not rising in proportion to the price. The long-term trend could also be hindered by the fact that Leios integration is scheduled for late 2026 as part of the Dijkstra hard fork.
The upgrade will require stake pool operators (SPOs) to register their keys manually. The network's throughput will increase gradually through system parameters, while the nearest price resistance remains at $0.28.
Arman Shirinyan
Dan Burgin
