Cardano (ADA) experienced a significant 11% price surge, reclaiming its position as the 10th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, after its developer team shared a major progress update on the upcoming Ouroboros Leios upgrade. This technical optimism stands in stark contrast to growing frustration among some long-term ADA investors, who have voiced concerns over the project's execution speed and price performance.
The Ouroboros Leios upgrade, a research project that gained momentum in 2022, is designed to be a major scalability solution for the Cardano network. According to an update shared by ecosystem explorer Adastack, the development team has produced 679,138 lines of code and made 3,140 GitHub commits with contributions from over 35 global contributors. The goal of Leios is to boost Cardano's transaction throughput by 30–50x, targeting 100–1,000 transactions per second (TPS) compared to the current 5–15 TPS, enabling near-instant settlement without sacrificing decentralization. A public tracker indicated the upgrade was 67% complete as of January 2026, with a mainnet rollout expected via a hard fork later this year.
This news propelled ADA's price to $0.2946, allowing it to displace Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in the market cap rankings. Technical analysts noted ADA was testing a key descending resistance near $0.30, with a confirmed breakout potentially targeting the $0.32–$0.34 range.
Concurrently, the market observed significant whale accumulation. Data from Santiment revealed that whale addresses bought 819 million ADA, worth approximately $213.9 million, over a six-month period despite ADA's price dropping 71% from $0.90 in October 2025 to $0.26. This suggests strong institutional confidence in Cardano's long-term fundamentals.
However, this optimism is tempered by vocal criticism from parts of the community. Influencer Jake Gagain called Cardano "one of the worst investments" he's made, citing frustration over wasted opportunity and slow execution. His comments reflect a broader tension, as ADA's price has fallen sharply from its all-time high of $3.10 to around $0.29. Critics point to past network slowdowns, concurrency limitations in its EUTXO model that have caused some decentralized exchange transactions to take up to 30 minutes, and a perceived misalignment between Cardano's methodical, peer-reviewed development pace and a market that rewards speed.
Supporters counter by highlighting Cardano's long-term strengths: the energy-efficient Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake protocol, upcoming governance upgrades like the Chang hard fork, institutional partnerships such as with the European Investment Bank, and a capped ADA supply. The project remains one of the most debated in crypto, sitting at a crossroads between narratives of frustrated opportunity cost and fundamental, long-term evolution.
