Longing Cardano (ADA) futures has emerged as the fastest growing trade on Bitrue after President Donald Trump announced plans to add the altcoin to a US strategic cryptocurrency reserve, the crypto exchange said on March 3. 

As of March 3, Bitrue traders hold ADA futures worth more than $26 million in notional value, up from a daily average of roughly $15 million in late February, according to data from Bitrue. 

Of those open positions, nearly 92% are long, indicating a bet the price of ADA will rise, Bitrue said. 

“As a result of all this increased interest, ADA/USDT [has] become the fastest growing trading pair in Futures,” the exchange said in an email.

Bitrue is an exchange for trading spot digital assets and crypto futures. Futures are standardized contracts representing an agreement to buy or sell an asset at a future date.

Related: ADA, SOL, XRP rally after Trump’s crypto reserve announcement

In a March 2 post on Truth Social, Trump said he told his administration’s digital assets working group to include XRP (XRP), Solana (SOL) and ADA in a US government crypto stockpile. 

He later added Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) to that list, stating they would be at the “heart of the reserve.” Trump has touted plans for a US strategic crypto reserve since mid-2024 but has never before committed to adding ADA to the stockpile. 

The announcement caused a temporary spike in the price of each of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned in his post but had the most significant impact on ADA, which gained more than 40% in the first 24 hours after Trump’s announcement.

Languishing layer-1

Created by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson in 2015, Cardano was initially thought of as a serious competitor to Ethereum. 

However, performance issues and production delays caused the blockchain to languish, along with the price of its native ADA token. 

The cryptocurrency’s fully diluted valuation is less than $40 billion, compared to more than $260 billion for Ether, according to data from CoinGecko.

The chain has a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $440 million, versus more than $50 billion for the Ethereum network, according to DefiLlama.

Magazine: SCB tips $500K BTC, SEC delays Ether ETF options, and more: Hodler’s Digest, Feb. 23 – March 1