ADA Price Falls Despite Cardano’s SundaeSwap DEX launch

The highly anticipated launch of the first decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Cardano saw elated community members but failed to trigger a price rally owing to the larger market corrections. 

SundaeSwap Launches on Cardano

Four months after the Alonzo upgrade, the first Cardano-based decentralized app (dApp), SundaeSwap, launched its mainnet on January 20 after a series of private and public testing.

The smart contract platform was finally able to pioneer its first fully functional beta version of DEX where HODLers will be able to trade, stake, and lend coins as well as vote on the platform’s governance protocol with its utility token – SUNDAE.

The SUNDAE token holds a unique feature that allows its price to be determined by the community rather than by SundaeSwap Labs and DEX’s developers. At the time of the launch, 7% of the community supply of the token was locked by the DAO into a smart contract called The Taste Test. 

Along with the DEX launch IOHK, Cardano’s parent company also revealed an updated proposal to scale Plutus script memory units.

The new Plutus fee estimator is set to use real-world information from Plutus transactions, allowing developers to view the cost of the Smart Contract execution to maximize script efficiency and minimize cost. 

However, everything went well for the blockchain, and minutes after the launch, users on the project’s Discord server complained about failed transactions and network congestion.

Congestion on the #Cardano network right now is SO BAD, that this dude even had problems swapping coins on .@SundaeSwap 2 days BEFORE they went live.
Never forget that we're fighting against an army of bots, FUDers and paid trolls. 🤖🤡 pic.twitter.com/5UoSGVQcJs

— Icarus (@ColdHandsCrypto) January 20, 2022

That, however, wasn’t the only thing that made ADA lovers sad, Cardano’s price fall from $1.6 to $1.2 in just a day was a rather worrisome trend for ADA HODLers. 

ADA Price Takes a U-turn

Over the last 24 hours, ADA’s price fell by over 15% as Cardano traded at $1.21 at the time of writing. The recent dip was largely market-centric as Bitcoin fell to the $38K mark amid larger market sell-offs. 

ADA’s price was in a long drawn downtrend since September 2021 after making an ATH of $3 on September 4. While price attempted a nice breakout on January 12, gaining close to 40% in the following week the recent bearish market has yet again pulled ADA down to the lower long-term support level of $1.2.

At the time of writing, ADA’s yearly ROI vs USD was +295.07% however its short-term and mid short term ROIs noted negative values.