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Cardano’s price and the sentiment of investors are demonstrating a divergence that is crucial in the altcoin’s short-term and long-term performance. Despite the waning price action over the past few days, seasoned investors are showing robust interest in ADA as they continue accumulate the altcoin.

Big Brains Are Buying Back Cardano

Even with heightened volatility in the market, major Cardano investors are jumping into the market at a steady pace. Santiment, a leading market intelligence and on-chain data platform, reported that smart money seems to be quietly positioning itself in Cardano, with seasoned investors building up ADA at a steady and encouraging rate.

In the research shared on the X platform, the platform highlighted that the smart money wallet addresses have been accumulating ADA while the token’s price is being suppressed due to the current market state. Interestingly, these individuals are gradually increasing their exposure during times of muted emotion and low volatility rather than chasing short-term price movements.

Typically, such buying activity among smart traders signals conviction in the token’s long-term prospects since smart capital often moves ahead of the general market’s enthusiasm. With the ongoing bullish sentiment from key investors, there is a possibility that the underlying market structure of Cardano is getting stronger.

The cohort appears to have been quietly buying more ADA for several weeks. However, smaller holders, who are also regarded as retail investors, have been offloading their stash during this period. In the last 2 months, wallet addresses holding between 100,000 ADA and 100 million ADA have acquired an additional 454.7 million ADA, which is valued at more than $161.42 million. 

Meanwhile, retail investors, those holding 100 ADA or less, have dumped over 22,000 ADA, worth $7,810 over the past 3 weeks. When cryptocurrency markets start to stabilize, Santiment stated that whales adding and retail dumping have traditionally created the ideal conditions for an eventual resurgence.

A New Landmark In Terms Of Total Transactions

Despite ADA facing steady volatility that has capped its upward attempts, the Cardano network continues to wax strong. The leading network is experiencing significant adoption and interest as transactions carried out on the blockchain have increased exponentially. 

Cexplorer, the most featured OG blockchain, announced that the network recently hit a new record level in total transactions. Data shared by Cexplorer shows that the total transactions conducted on the network since its foray into the cryptocurrency market have surpassed 118,400,000. 

With more value and interactions resting on the network than ever before, the growth indicates a growing appetite for Cardano and its broader ecosystem. Furthermore, rising transaction counts frequently indicate ongoing demand from users, apps, and developers as opposed to transient increases caused by speculation.

At the time of writing, the ADA’s price was trading at $0.35, indicating a 0.77% increase in the last 24 hours. Its price may be slowly turning bullish, but trading volume has sharply declined by more than 28% over the past day.

On-chain sleuth ZachXBT has revealed the identity of a threat actor who stole over $40 million from the U.S. government’s crypto stash. The White House has confirmed that it is looking into the situation but has not yet said whether its Bitcoin holdings were affected by the theft. 

How This Threat Actor Stole Over $40 Million From the U.S. Government Crypto Wallets

In an X post, ZachXBT revealed that threat actor John Daghita, also known as Lick, stole over $40 million from the U.S. government’s seizure addresses, as his dad owns Command Services & Support (CMDSS), which has an active IT government contract. CMDSS was awarded a contract to assist the U.S. Marshals in managing and disposing of seized and forfeited crypto assets. However, the ZachXBT noted that it remains unclear how John obtained access from his dad. 

The CMDSS company X account, website, and LinkedIn were all deactivated following ZachXBT’s revelation. Meanwhile, the crypto investigator had first drawn attention to John in an earlier X post, stating that the threat actor had been caught flexing $23 million in a wallet address. 

He noted that this wallet was directly tied to over $90 million in suspected thefts from the U.S. Government in 2024 and multiple other unidentified victims from November 2025 to December 2025. John revealed this crypto wallet during a heated argument with another threat actor, Dritan Kapplani Jr., in a group chat about who had more funds in their crypto wallets.  

The Source Of The Funds

Following John’s messages, ZachXBT traced the source of the threat actor’s funds to a wallet (0xc7a2) that received $24.9 million from a U.S. Government address in March 2024 related to the Bitfinex hack seizure, which was a theft from the government. John’s wallet (0xd8bc), which he showed off during the heated argument, is also said to be tied to $63 million in inflows from suspected victims and government-seizure addresses in the fourth quarter of last year. 

John quickly removed all of the NFT usernames from his Telegram account and changed his screen name after ZachXBT’s post. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the crypto investigator identified John as John Daghitia after rumors began circulating that the threat actor was the same person previously arrested in September 2025. However, it remains unclear for what John was arrested last year. 

Is The U.S. Government’s BTC At Risk?

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt confirmed in an X post that they are investigating the theft and will provide an update soon. This development is also significant, as U.S. President Donald Trump has already signed an executive order that allocates all U.S. government Bitcoin holdings to the Strategic BTC Reserve. 

Based on the timeline of these thefts from the government’s seizure addresses, John looks to have stolen some of these crypto assets after Trump signed the executive order. Meanwhile, part of the theft occurred under the Biden Administration. There has yet to be confirmation from the government on how much BTC it holds. However, BiTBo data shows that the U.S. government currently holds 198,012 BTC.

В селе Майданское Унцукульского района Дагестана полицейские остановили работу подпольной майнинг‑фермы, которую организовал 52‑летний местный житель.

SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom, who previously led BlackRock’s digital assets strategy, framed the Ethereum-versus-Solana debate as a mismatch between narrative and actual institutional behavior: TradFi firms may praise speed and low fees, but the highest-value financial use cases are gravitating to networks optimized for trust, security, and liquidity.

Why Ethereum Beats Solana

Speaking with CoinDesk’s Jennifer Sanasie on Jan. 26, Chalom said he would avoid positioning his view as opinion and instead point to what he called observable market signals. “Maybe I’ll just share facts,” he said. “The fact is that Ethereum has been around for 10 years. It’s the secure, trusted, and liquid ecosystem. And I talk about both the layer 1 mainnet as well as the long set of layer 2s who help do that rollup strategy.”

That longevity, in his telling, matters because institutions aren’t selecting chains the way consumers pick apps. They’re selecting settlement rails for moving money, tokenizing assets, and representing ownership, workflows where operational failure and security assumptions are existential. Solana, Chalom acknowledged, has carved out a reputation for performance. But he drew a hard line on reliability. “Solana has been fast and cheap but it has not been secure. It has had downtime,” he said, arguing that downtime risk is disqualifying for “high value projects.”

Chalom’s thesis is that when the use case is “tokenizing assets” and “moving money,” the decision criteria compress into three buckets. “The real institutions who care only about three things,” he said, are “trust, security, and liquidity.” On that basis, he argued, “they’re building on Ethereum for high value projects,” adding: “It’s happening on Ethereum.”

He also anchored the comparison in stablecoin and tokenized-asset activity, citing a sharp share gap as evidence of where the market is allocating serious volume. “More than 65% of stablecoins and tokenized assets are happening there,” Chalom said, describing that as “10x what you see on Salana.” He reinforced the directional claim immediately after: “Ethereum leads in high quality assets in DeFi, tokenization, and stable coins by a factor of 10 to one over Salana. And that gap is only getting larger.”

Still, Chalom did not argue for a single-chain world. Instead, he mapped Ethereum and Solana to different product surfaces based on security tolerance. “I do think there’s a role for cheap, fast, less secure chains,” he said, and suggested Solana’s comparative advantage shows up where finality speed and cost trump institutional-grade assurances. “I think Solana will win in the memecoin, maybe the gaming space where actually security matters a lot less and speed matters more.”

The subtext is a segmentation story: Ethereum as the default rail for high-value, regulated, reputation-sensitive flows; Solana as the venue for high-throughput consumer and speculative activity where users accept different risk tradeoffs. Chalom insisted this is not about persuasion so much as migration patterns. “It’s not my perspective,” he said. “People are voting with their feet.”

Notably, SharpLink Gaming (Nasdaq: SBET) has emerged as one of the largest corporate ETH holders, with public trackers putting its holdings at roughly 864,840 ETH (about $2.5B at recent marks).

At press time, ETH traded at $2,921.

Эмитент крупнейшего по капитализации стейблкоина USDT, компания Tether, объявила о выпуске привязанного к доллару США стейблкоина USAT, созданного специально для американского рынка.