Cardano Dips as Airdrop-Fueled Volatility and Market Pressure Weigh on Price

Cardano’s ADA token struggled to maintain footing above the key $0.740 level on Tuesday as a wave of selling and broader market weakness pressured prices lower following heightened volatility tied to the NIGHT token airdrop.

ADA fell roughly 3% over the past 24 hours, recently changing hands at $0.72, underperforming the broader crypto market, which saw a 1.7% drop as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index. Bitcoin also declined by a similar margin.

Trading activity in ADA surged during the session, with the token fluctuating within a 3.47% range — from a high of $0.760 to a low of $0.734, according to CoinDesk Research data. A brief rally from $0.745 to $0.760 was met with stiff resistance, triggering a retreat to $0.735 on volumes exceeding 59 million.

Despite a short-lived rebound back to $0.755, ADA faced renewed selling pressure and eventually settled near $0.739, reflecting ongoing distribution as it fights to hold the $0.740 support zone — a level increasingly seen as a battleground for short-term momentum.

The volatility came amid the launch of the Glacier Drop, an airdrop event by Midnight — a partner chain built on Cardano’s infrastructure aimed at privacy-focused transactions. As part of the rollout, roughly 2.62 billion NIGHT tokens — about 11% of the total supply — were distributed to wallets linked to XRP, with additional allocations set aside for ETH, SOL, BNB, AVAX, BAT, and others.

In a recent interview, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson highlighted growing institutional curiosity around Midnight, saying, “We’ve met with all the big guys,” noting the appeal of privacy-enabled crypto trading.

Meanwhile, Input Output Global (IOG), the primary development entity behind Cardano, received approval this week for a $71 million treasury allocation to fund a year-long slate of network upgrades. However, the on-chain vote has drawn criticism from some community members citing a lack of transparency and clarity on how the funds will be deployed.