Cardano's ADA token jumped toward $0.235 on a scaling milestone, then slid back near $0.22 as liquidation data showed leveraged longs took the hit. Open interest sits near $506.5 million, and futures liquidated roughly $899,000 in 24 hours, split nine to one against long positions.
A trader watching the CoinGlass terminal at four in the morning UTC would have seen ADA wipe out more long positions in twelve hours than in the previous four days combined, even as the coin stayed up on the week. ADA sat near $0.2199 at writing time, down roughly 3.5% on the day, less than 48 hours after it tagged $0.2350 on a Cardano scaling headline.
What pushed ADA to $0.235
The Cardano Foundation confirmed that the Leios public testnet, built with Input Output Group and Intersect, is now live for stake pool operators to test. Simulation work points toward the 100 to 1,000 transactions per second range once the design ships to mainnet, up from roughly 4.5 kilobytes per second today, at least on paper.
That landed days after a September 15 announcement that the Foundation joined a Mastercard program looking at cross-border settlement, plus a September 7 mainnet deployment of node 11.1.1. Three pieces of good news inside two weeks is unusual for this chain, and price reacted the way a crowded, thin order book usually reacts to a genuine catalyst: it overshot.
The weekly chart still reads bearish
ADA topped near $1.32 in 2025 and has carved a sequence of lower highs since, a structure that stays intact until a prior lower high gets reclaimed with a close. Price remains compressed against the multi-month low near $0.145, a level that keeps getting tested but not fully swept. On the daily range, that low sits below a resistance shelf near $0.305 that has turned price away twice already this year, with ADA now sitting roughly in the middle of that box.
Liquidation data names the crowd that got hurt
Open interest on ADA sits near $506.5 million, and the Binance long-to-short account ratio reads 2.01, meaning retail traders ran roughly two long positions for every short into the top. The rekt numbers confirm who paid for the overshoot: over the past 24 hours, ADA futures liquidated roughly $899,000, split between $811,000 in long positions and just $88,000 in shorts, a nine-to-one imbalance.
In the twelve hours around the drop from $0.235, longs alone absorbed $689,650 of that damage. Traders opened leveraged longs into the spike, got trapped when momentum stalled, and were flushed out on the retrace.
Bitcoin slipped toward the low $80,000s the same session even as exchange reserves climbed, and a broader move saw altcoins reclaim their 200-day averages. ADA's next move likely hinges on whether the $0.2150 to $0.2220 pocket holds through the next few sessions; a clean loss of $0.2130 would hand control back to sellers and put the $0.195 base back on the table.
Source: Live Bitcoin News
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