As I stated months ago, Cardano is one of my favourite projects and a potential long term hold project.

I think that the rise in price during the last couple of weeks has caught the eye of a lot people in the crypto community. There are many reasons why the price has been going up and the main one being that the Goguen Phase of Cardano's Roadmap is getting closer and closer. This is the phase where DApps  (decentralized Applications) are going to be built on the Cardano network.

What has maybe not caught the eye of the crypto community is the fact that there are some rumors regarding the adoption of ADA from banks. And coming from the mouth of Cardano's CEO:

I already know some banks that can do this, but I’m not allowed to mention their names because they think there may be some regulatory turmoil, I need to agree with them before I disclose them (…) but it can be done today, and there are possibilities for that in the future. As a banker I know which buttons I need to push.

You can watch the 26 min interview of the CEO of Cardano here. 

This is good news, also considering that the head of OCC Brian Brooks stated yesterday, that regulations pro Crypto are going to come in the next 4-6 weeks. And ADA being the number 1 project with most research papers on it and build uppon this research, can gain the trust of institutions easier than many other speculative projects.

A very important point as well, is the fact that Cardano is working on a ERC20 Token converter, which means that existing ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum Network can migrate to Cardano (which is a bigger thing than most people realize).

Conclusion:

Overall Cardano and its native token ADA hold a very promising future, with currently 2 of the 5 Phases of implementation being successfully deployed. A spike in Price was seen in July when the Shelley Phase got implemented. Spikes in price will be a normal effect of each phase in my opinion, and I can say that we are still early in this project for those who want a safer long term investment.