Cardano (ADA) Would Trail Midnight’s 250% Gains If Dan Gambardello’s Call Holds

Midnight Up 250% Since the July Low

If Dan Gambardello’s cycle call proves right, the outsized returns of this altcoin cycle go to the Midnight Network (NIGHT), the privacy-focused blockchain founded by Cardano (ADA) creator Charles Hoskinson, rather than to the main chain itself. The Cardano price, in his reading, still sits below the level he requires before calling a bull market, while Midnight has already returned 250% from its July low with, as he put it, the real advance not yet started. The token’s market capitalization, he notes, remains under $1 billion. Gambardello, who hosts the YouTube channel Crypto Capital Venture, posted the video on 2026-10-18, and he frames the market as sitting at the tail end of a five-year altcoin bear market, inside the cycle’s best entry window. Five years of altcoin underperformance, in his telling, end at this point in the cycle. His macro frame runs through Ethereum (ETH): in the last cycle, quantitative tightening ended in late July, a normalization phase followed, and the bull market opened alongside economic expansion. This time, he argues, the largest tightening cycle on record has likewise given way to normalization, with crypto cycle timing, technical indicators, macro data and tariff fear converging at nearly the same point. On Ethereum’s chart he notes the relative strength index has made lower highs since it went overbought in March 2024, and he recalls August 2020, when the market looked finished and was, in hindsight, only beginning. The tailwinds he lists are, in his view, bigger than last cycle’s: a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) friendly to crypto, a government with the same lean, rules taking shape between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), tokenization and institutionalization advancing at scale, and most major traditional finance firms constructive on altcoins. “The risk-to-reward setup is open to value investors,” he said. On Cardano (ADA) he draws a line: a major project that should do well this cycle, but not to the extent Midnight will.

Cardano’s $0.47 Line and the Mindshare Gap

Blockworks’ mindshare ranking places Cardano, the long-running proof-of-stake network, fourth with a 3.11% share, and the weekly chart gives Gambardello little to work with: the relative strength index has sat in bear-market territory near the 50 line for an extended stretch. His condition is explicit: only a move above the 200-day moving average near $0.47, and then $0.50, lets him call Cardano a bull market. On the daily timeframe, price is testing the confluence of that average and a trendline of higher lows, a classic support and resistance cluster; our earlier coverage recorded ADA holding near $0.22 after an 11% weekly decline. If Bitcoin (BTC) is pushed deep into the $70,000s, he says the structure could break, and the next support sits at the $0.17–$0.19 Fibonacci retracement band. Even in that scenario, he keeps the bullish thesis unchanged. Midnight’s daily chart, by his account, has handed back the 20-day moving average, leaving the short term weaker, but a cluster near $0.03 gathers the 50-day and 200-day averages, a trendline and the 0.618 Fibonacci level, with the 0.786 level near $0.025 beneath it. A correction into that band, he argues, would leave the bullish structure intact. He expects Midnight to overtake Zcash (ZEC), reasoning that Hoskinson, freed from the financial constraints that bound him to Cardano (ADA), can now move faster with Google Cloud, MoneyGram and real institutional nodes. Separately, Hoskinson has promoted a new Cardano programming language built to pair intents with Groth. On the Midnight-to-Cardano chart he sees a possible inverse head-and-shoulders pattern, one he stresses is unconfirmed, and he concedes Cardano could outperform over short stretches. His rotation tracking page currently lists Sui, the Bitcoin-based DOG token and Midnight as the top three, a record he describes as correct so far. “I am not bearish on Cardano. I see the asymmetric returns as larger in Midnight,” he said, adding that he could be wrong and that heavy Cardano exposure might have served investors better.

The call is a ratio bet rather than a rejection: a rotation into Midnight requires Cardano to gain less, not to fail. What has to survive either way is the chart, not the ranking. Cardano’s structure depends on holding the rising trendline and reclaiming the $0.47–$0.50 band, with the $0.17–$0.19 Fibonacci band below as the fallback, the same zones a standard Cardano technical analysis read would flag first. Whether Midnight outperforms or the rotation stalls, those thresholds answer for the thesis. An earlier read on the same chart mapped a 73.5% Cardano rally from a $0.278 weekly breakout. The wager is on which blockchain in Hoskinson’s orbit compounds faster; the levels above will settle it.