Cardano dropped near $0.174 after breaking below a rising channel, and it now trades under its 50-day, 100-day and 200-day moving averages. Intersect's two-phase Dijkstra upgrade plan has not offset the bearish chart structure, and CoinGlass data flags a liquidation cluster between $0.183 and $0.187 as the next zone to watch.
Cardano price action today
Cardano (ADA) traded near $0.174, down about 1% over the past 24 hours, and stayed below $0.18 after retreating from an Aug. 7 peak above $0.21. The four-hour chart shows ADA broke below an ascending channel that had guided its recovery from roughly $0.153 in late July, after climbing along that channel toward $0.20 before sellers regained control.
ADA has since formed a series of lower highs and lower lows, leaving the token about 17% below its August high. Four-hour momentum remains weak: the relative strength index stood at 35.06, close to the oversold threshold of 30, with its signal line lower at 33.32. Analysts at AltCryptoGems said in an Aug. 17 X post that ADA's decline followed a bearish break in market structure, pointing also to heavy capital rotation across the altcoin market.
Dijkstra upgrade splits into two phases
Intersect's Dijkstra rollout plan divides Cardano's next major protocol upgrade into two stages. Phase one targets code completion in Q4 2026 and introduces the Dijkstra ledger era through a hard fork to protocol version 12, activating Ouroboros Linear Leios, a scaling design meant to raise transaction throughput while keeping the base protocol's security guarantees. The first phase also adds nested transactions, a PlutusV4 script context, account-address improvements and changes to Cardano's block structure.
Structural support for Ouroboros Peras, a settlement feature that lets stake pool committees vote recent chain tips into faster finality, will ship in phase one but will not activate immediately; Intersect targets code completion for phase two in Q2 2027. Both dates mark code completion rather than confirmed mainnet launches, and each phase must clear the Preview and Pre-production testnets plus an on-chain governance vote by delegated representatives, stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee before reaching mainnet.
Support and liquidation levels to watch
ADA's daily chart sits near the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement at $0.1706, measured from the June low of $0.1385 to the May high of $0.2886, marking the nearest major support. A daily close below that level would expose the liquidity area near $0.166 and could put the June swing low back in focus. Recovering the 50-day average near $0.1843 would ease the pressure, opening the path toward the 100-day average at $0.1892 and the 61.8% Fibonacci level at $0.1958.
CoinGlass' one-week liquidation heatmap tracks clusters of leveraged positions above ADA's price. The brightest cluster sits between $0.186 and $0.187, with another concentration near $0.183 and additional bands at $0.188–$0.193 — a zone that broadly overlaps the 50-day and 100-day moving averages. Near-term direction stays tied to whether ADA holds $0.1706 and can recover the moving averages and liquidation clusters between $0.183 and $0.196.
Source: crypto.news
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