Cardano all-time high and real returns ADA

Cardano's highest recorded price was $3.090 on 1 September 2021, from CoinGecko's record of intraday trades. Restated with US CPI to Oct 2026, that is $3.773 in today's dollars. In pounds it was £2.294 at the time, or £2.931 after UK inflation.

On month-end closes, which is what our tables use, the peak was $2.767 in Aug 2021, worth $3.388 today. The latest price is 92.6% below the real high.

Our monthly history for Cardano starts in April 2018. Since then it is down 26.8% in dollars and down 45.2% after US inflation, so it has not kept up with inflation over that stretch. Measured in pounds after UK CPI the figure is down 44.2%. Against the US M2 money supply it is down 56.0%.

After the Apr 2018 peak of $0.3415 it fell 91.1% by Mar 2020, and closed above the old high again after 2 years 9 months. In real terms it took 2 years 10 months. After the Aug 2021 peak of $2.767 it fell 94.8% by Jun 2026, and has not closed above that high since. In real terms it has not recovered.

These use month-end closes, so intraday highs and lows were more extreme.

Cardano was trading at $0.2355 when we last checked, at 00:14 BST on 14 Oct 2026, which is up 0.4% on 24 hours earlier. Crypto never closes, so we fetch a fresh price from CoinGecko every five minutes, and the figure here can be a few minutes old by the time you read it. At that price all the Cardano in circulation is worth about $8.8bn, and $447.0m changed hands over the past day. Over the last month the price has moved +15.7% and over the last year −67.7%.

No, or at least not on the 14-day RSI, which reads 47.6 at the moment. We'd only start calling Cardano overbought above 70 and it hasn't been there since 22 Sept 2026, while the last time it went the other way and dropped below 30 was 30 Jun 2026. RSI looks back over 14 sessions and asks how much of the movement was up and how much was down, so a reading in the 30s or 40s mostly tells us the past few weeks have been fairly even. Cardano spent 6 sessions at 70 or above in the past year, which is one reason we don't treat a high reading as a cue to sell: in a strong run it can stay there for weeks.

Going back to 13 Oct 2025, Cardano's best day was 21 Aug 2026, when it rose 15.2%, and its worst was 5 Feb 2026, a fall of 14.3%. We measure each day from one daily close to the next in US dollars, so a spike that reversed within the same day won't show up here. Across those 366 days it moved 5% or more on 65 of them and finished higher 42% of the time, which gives you a feel for how bumpy holding it has been.

Over the past 12 months Cardano is down 67.7%, and since the start of the year it is down 29.2%. We put it next to Bitcoin because that is the obvious alternative for most people weighing up Cardano, and it moved −27.8% over the same 12 months, a gap of 40.0 points in Bitcoin's favour.

About 67.7%, so it would need to rise 209.7% to get back there. The highest close in the past year was $0.7295 on 13 Oct 2025 and the lowest was $0.1435 on 25 Jun 2026, which puts today's price 16% of the way up that range. We work this out from daily closing prices rather than the intraday highs and lows an exchange reports, so our high can be a little lower than the one you'll see quoted elsewhere.

Cardano is 92.4% below its all-time high of $3.09, which it set on 1 September 2021, and its all-time low is $0.0193, from March 2020. Getting back to the high from today's price of $0.2355 would take a rise of about 1,212%. These figures come from CoinGecko and refresh every five minutes.

Cardano is in the Mild discount zone with a Bargain Score of 59. Two or more of the looser buy-side conditions are met (Price 92% below ATH, greed high and longs crowded), which puts it on the discount side of the scale without the full set of signals behind it. Rather than a recommendation, the label is a reading of where Cardano's price and the wider market sit against the model's rules at this moment, and because the Fear & Greed value and the daily RSI both update at midnight UTC, just after midnight is when it is most likely to change. The 3-dot meter beside it shows where that zone sits on the five-step scale, from one dot for Expensive to five for Deep discount.

Cardano has had two earlier falls of 50% or more in our price history: after its $0.7754 peak in March 2024 it fell 60% and took 8 months to close above that level again, in November 2024; after its $1.23 peak in December 2024 it fell 88% and has not closed above that level since. Those are the only data points we have for this coin, which is too few to say anything reliable about the next recovery, since market conditions, supply and competition are different each cycle and some coins never regain a previous high.

The model starts from Cardano's full range, its all-time high of $3.09 divided by its all-time low of $0.0193, which is roughly 160-fold. It shrinks that multiple with a decay factor, on the assumption that each cycle is smaller than the last, and applies it from the low. For Cardano that reduced repeat would not reach the old high, so the targets are anchored just above it instead, at $3.24, $3.55 and $4.02, which puts the low scenario 1,278% above today's price. They describe what a reduced repeat of the past would look like and say nothing about whether that will happen. Cryptoassets are high risk, and you should be prepared to lose all the money you put into them.

Because the score and the zone measure different things. The score blends price distress, sentiment, positioning, resilience and supply into one number, while the zone checks whether specific conditions line up, such as Fear & Greed crossing a threshold or the RSI reaching oversold or overbought levels. With Fear & Greed at 57 (Greed) and Cardano's RSI at 47, not enough of the buy-side conditions are met to move Cardano further up the scale.