Cardano (ADA) appears to be posting a mild recovery into Thursday after the extremely bearish mood in the wider crypto market through the previous session. At the time of writing, ADA/USD is trading around $1.21.

Despite the overall bearish mood, there are several strong fundamental developments that could support ADA’s price in the coming sessions, most notable of all being the upcoming upgrade to the Cardano network that will give it smart contract capabilities. The Ethereum killer’s parent company IOHK recently announced the start of the Alonzo White stage, which brings with it a significant number of testers and more functionalities as it works towards supporting DeFi apps.

Analysts are optimistic that the upcoming hard fork is likely to drive up the demand and adoption of Cardano’s technology, a development that could send ADA prices soaring. This is possibly one of the key reasons leading investment firm Grayscale recently announced the addition of Cardano to its Digital Large Cap Fund.

But this is not all – institutional investors have poured in over $24 million into this blockchain network so far, even as Cardano continues to remain the most popularly staked chain. According to data by Staking Rewards, Cardano’s blockchain supports over $29 billion of staked ADA tokens, while the next in ranking, Ethereum has only about $12.3 billion of value in staking.

Key Levels to Watch

As we can see on the H4 chart, ADA/USD is facing significant selling pressure as signaled by the moving averages and the MACD indicator. Although, there may be some buying interest building up as well, as shown by the momentum indicator at the moment.

The current price of Cardano’s ADA sits below the immediate support at $1.26 and further bearishness can send it even lower, under the key $1.20 level, to test the next support at $1.18. If, however, more buyers enter the market to take advantage of the low price, we could see ADA make its way higher towards the pivot point at $1.36 and beyond, until encountering resistance at $1.44.