Motley Fool Columnist Dominic Basulto Sees Cardano (ADA) Rising 5x to $1 by 2027

A Fivefold Call From $0.21

Cardano (ADA) has been named the cryptocurrency investment columnist Dominic Basulto of The Motley Fool expects to deliver the highest returns in 2027, a call that implies a gain of roughly five times from current levels. The Cardano (ADA) price sits near $0.21, and a recovery to $1 would represent a return of about 376%, so every $1,000 deployed at today's level would grow to roughly $4,800. Basulto's case rests on market-structure arithmetic rather than a new catalyst. In his reading, Bitcoin and Ethereum will advance in the next bull market, but smaller-cap altcoins that have fallen for years carry far more room to multiply once risk appetite returns. He points to projects that investors largely ignored through 2026 while they kept their technical competitiveness intact, arguing that assets with that profile tend to lead the rebound in the following year. The rebound thesis, as he lays it out, is built on an expanding decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and continued innovation on the network itself. The columnist stops short of forecasting the kind of tenfold move that turnaround assets have produced in past cycles. His marker is the $1 threshold, a level Cardano (ADA) traded at as recently as January 2025, and he judges that a move past $1 would not come as a surprise. A fivefold outcome, he argues, would beat the returns he expects from Bitcoin or Ethereum over the same window. What makes the call demanding is the present market picture: Cardano spent 2026 shedding 40% of its value, its market capitalization has slipped below $8 billion, and the asset no longer sits inside the top ten by that measure. Basulto reads the depth of the decline differently. In his framing, the severity of the drawdown is itself one of the factors that raises the size of the possible recovery, because the starting point is so low.

From $70 Billion to Under $8 Billion

Cardano reached the fourth-largest market capitalization in the industry in 2021, trailing only Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB, at roughly $70 billion. At the time it was widely positioned as a next-generation layer-1 blockchain capable of challenging Ethereum's standing, but performance fell short of those expectations and a long decline set in. The token now trades about 93% below its 2021 all-time high. The slide has continued this year: Cardano (ADA) lost a further 40% in 2026, and earlier this month it slipped below $0.22 after a failed 50-day EMA reclaim. Cardano ecosystem development is the rebound lever Basulto identifies. The developer community published the Cardano 2030 Strategic Framework early this year, setting concrete targets for user growth, expanded trading volume and market share recovery. Charles Hoskinson, who co-founded Ethereum before building Cardano, is developing a new programming language for the network, a tool that in Basulto's view could open applications in artificial intelligence and other fast-growing fields; whether that work converts into users and investment demand is the open question. Engineering on the proof-of-stake network continues in parallel: the Dijkstra testnet was recently opened to stake pool operators ahead of node 11.2, the next step in the upgrade cycle. The precedent Basulto cites is Solana. Solana lost 94% of its value in 2022, then surged 924% the following year as the market repriced oversold conditions. Both are layer-1 smart contract platforms, and both traded at deep discounts to their all-time highs before their respective rebounds. He also acknowledges the risk side of the ledger: Cardano has been in a downtrend since the 2021 peak, and 2026 added heavy losses, which makes it a high-risk asset by any standard.

The column is ultimately a category trade dressed as a single pick. A 93% drawdown is what makes the fivefold arithmetic possible, and the same arithmetic works against anyone who buys before the base actually holds: this month's failed reclaim of the 50-day EMA and the slide under $0.22 show demand has not yet returned. For the 2027 case to move from arithmetic to outcome, the framework targets, the new programming language and the projects tracked among the top Cardano DApps have to convert into measurable users and capital flow. Basulto's column was framed around one selection question, which asset posts the highest return in 2027, and that brief optimizes for optionality rather than probability. The full wording of his outlook was not on the record.