Trump was named in the US crypto strategic reserve. How did Cardano build a bull market illusion through narrative?

Author:Nancy , PANews

Through the ups and downs of the crypto market, the old public chain Cardano can always bring its own BUFF blessing and make cheats all the way. In this cycle, Cardano veterans are renovated and anchored to the Bitcoin L2 narrative. Recently, they have frequently flooded the screen with multiple identities such as US crypto reserve assets, ETF application targets, and popular choices for institutional configurations, which has a lot of presence.

Ecological indicators are crushed, policy BUFF is full of the accused

related account

On March 2, Trump issued a statement announcing that his executive order for digital assets directed the presidential working group to promote strategic reserves of cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL and ADA. However, this news was not entirely unexpected. At the end of January this year, Ripple CEO Garlinghouse confirmed the possibility of using XRP as a strategic U.S. reserve asset and emphasized that the diversification of reserves should be ensured. Now it seems that this game of chess has already begun to be laid out.

Stimulated by this news, the crypto market was "resurrected" overnight. Among them, Cardano's ADA performance was particularly eye-catching. CoinGecko data showed that its highest increase of more than 78.1% in 24 hours, directly dominated the hot search list. However, while the market sentiment is rising, there are also doubts: Cardano's technical strength is slightly inferior to other selected assets compared with other selected assets, so why is it selected as a US reserve asset?

Cardano holders have a high desire to hold for a long time, and more than 60% of them choose to lock the bank to support the network, which also increases their network health. According to data from the staking data website Staking Rewards, Cardano is the fourth largest POS blockchain network, with a pledge amount of US$23.34 billion and a pledge rate of 60.1%.

However, according to DeFillama data, as of March 3, Cardano's TVL was nearly US$508 million, and the on-chain stablecoins market value was US$22.55 million, and the application revenue in the past 24 hours was only US$3,024. During the same period, Solana's TVL reached US$8.38 billion, with daily revenue of approximately US$836,000. Judging from the performance of ecological indicators, Cardano is relatively lagging among a number of selected assets. Although the pledge scale is astonishing, ADA's pledge has not been converted into the actual application of dApp, which means that there are still a large gap in its ecosystem to be filled.

"So does this mean we have to change the name to 'American Digital Asset'"? Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson teased the latest tweet.

In fact, the outside world has always given Cardano a "Japanese public chain", and Cardano is a manufacturing project in the United States, founded by American Charles Hoskinson, one of Ethereum's original eight co-founders, investing a lot of money and energy in blockchain, longevity science, alien exploration and other fields. In 2014, after leaving behind Vitalik Buterin products due to the direction of Ethereum, Hoskinson founded the United States-based Input Output Global and launched Cardano. The reason why Cardano is very popular in the Japanese market and is even called "Japan Ethereum" is largely related to its early financing model. It is reported that nearly 95% of Cardano's public offerings come from Japanese investors, also known as "retirement investment", mainly because this public offering was dominated by Japanese company Emurgo. At that time, Japan's regulatory environment was relatively loose compared to Europe and the United States, which also made Cardano misunderstood as a Japanese project. But as the U.S. crypto policy is gradually opening up, Cardano is gradually fading its impression of Japan.

Regarding Cardano's selection for strategic asset reserves, many people speculated that it was not technology, but a close connection with the US government, especially founder Charles Hoskinson repeatedly hinted. For example, in November 2024, when Charles Hoskinson was rumored that Trump was considering appointing him as a crypto policy adviser, he revealed in a conversation that he had a close relationship with a member of Trump's team. He said he would work with lawmakers and the government to push for the passage of a bipartisan bill. Cardano R&D company Input Output Global will establish a Cryptocurrency Regulatory Policy Office in early 2025 and plans to engage with the U.S. government "leaders in certain key positions" to promote the development of a legislative agenda for securities and commodities related to cryptocurrencies. However, as of now, the specific progress of the plan has not been made public and there is no evidence that he has been officially employed by the U.S. government.

Charles Hoskinson also clarified on March 2 that “No one was appointed to the executive branch as a cryptocurrency-related role tonight, and the meeting does not mean recognition or empowering magical new powers, and the legislative process is that it takes time and effort. I will not comment on this topic again until there is a definite and substantial news about the legislative process, which must be related to the creation of new laws to make the industry survive and thrive in the United States.”

From academic missions to Bitcoin wingman, Cardano has a few more

narrative hot topics

The narrative of flowing water, the iron-clad Cardano.

Recently, Cardano's multiple market trends have made it one of the popular targets of market attention. For example, ADA is the top three assets in the latest holdings of Grayscale Smart Contract Fund, with a proportion of 18.23%. Grayscale’s Cardano spot ETF application has been accepted by the US SEC; Cardano plans to integrate Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to enhance its own DeFi ecosystem and provide RLUSD with a wider use opportunity.

Not long ago, Charles Hoskinson also disclosed that Input Output Global (IOG) will focus on developing the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem in 2025. The team plans to work with multi-party computing protocol developer Fair Gate Labs, with the goal of launching a demo version ahead of the Bitcoin Conference in May 2025. The technology developed by Fair Gate Labs will become the basis of BitcoinOS without issuing additional tokens, and cross-chain transactions only require Bitcoin. The project will also cooperate with community projects and wallet service providers to achieve the goal of "awakening the sleeping giant".

The dividends of the strategic reserve policy this time undoubtedly further brought additional policy support to Cardano, and also provided it with new capital flow and attention in the market.

Looking back at Cardano's development history, in the past few rounds of market baptism, Cardano has always been good at building eye-catching narratives to shape a unique market image, and to increase market attention by using external events.

From starting with the "research-driven third-generation blockchain", to the environmental protection brand of "green Ethereum killer", to the ecological moment when smart contracts are launched, it has now transformed into a new role of "Bitcoin Layer2". These narratives are sometimes not entirely based on the technology itself, but are driven more by external events and public opinion. In particular, bull market cycles often amplify their potential and quickly become the focus of market attention with their strong pull-up capabilities.

However, from the initial academic school to the current Bitcoin "wingman", although Cardano has been quite successful in narrative evolution, the practical application problems behind it are still its biggest weakness. With the increase in "US policy hitchhiking", it remains to be seen whether Cardano can break the inherent impression of the previous bull market limited illusion.

It is accused of being **a piece of paper, and the execution path

becomes a mystery**

However, in addition to questioning the transfer of interests, the implementation method, timetable, specific scale and source of funds have not been clarified, and the market believes that it is more at the intention stage and execution is a mystery.

Udi Wertheimer, founder of Taproot Wizards, believes, “The best view I have seen about strategic reserves so far is that it’s just a typical negotiation strategy for Trump. To really build reserves, Trump has to convince Congress that he can’t decide on his own. Whenever Trump needs to convince other stakeholders, he always makes a ridiculous claim first and can be taken back later. So, in Trump’s chess language, it just means he is telling Congress that if he doesn’t agree with the Bitcoin reserves, I’ll have to put forward more outrageous conditions.”

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes pointed out, “There’s nothing new here, it’s just empty talk. Let me know when they get Congress’ approval to borrow money or raise the price of gold. Without that, they won’t have the money to buy bitcoin and altcoins.”

“Investing in Bitcoin alone is probably the best choice – the easiest, and the logic behind it is clear as well as being the successor of gold; if people want more diverse options, they can build a market-weighted crypto asset index to keep it unbiased,” said Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase.