Cardano (ADA-USD) is having a hard time lately. It dropped over 73.4% from $2.97 on Sept. 1, 2021, to a low of 79 cents on March 11. A month later, it hit a recent high of $1.21 on April 3. But now it’s back below $1.00 again, and as of April 13, it was 93.95 cents. That puts it down over 68% from its peak, and over 31.6% year-to-date.

Cardano is now the 8th largest crypto with a $31 billion market value. That has not stopped some recent large investors that are back to acquiring Cardano tokens. The online magazine The Daily Hodl says that a number of large whales, according to a company called Santiment, have been acquiring Cardano tokens.

In other words, they are behaving like traditional value investors — except in this case — it’s in relation to cryptocurrency. Having worked on the buy side, I suspect these are hedge funds, partnerships, or small mutual funds/ETFs (exchange-traded funds). According to the article, Cardano whales are defined as any entity holding at least 10 million ADA crypto in their wallets. That is roughly equal to $9.471 million.

Cardano TVL and NFT Developments

Recently ADA crypto has had some good news in terms of its growing usefulness and popularity. For example, the site  DefiLlama.com shows that the Total Value Locked (TVL) of ADA tokens has been rising. TVL represents the total amount of money tied up in staked crypto assets like smart contracts and deposits with yield and staking apps. It is now at $227 million, up from $2.3 million in mid-January.

Cardano’s increase in TVL is directly related to its launch of smart contracts. This began with the introduction of the Alanzo fork in Sept. 2021.

Now Cardano is moving into NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Recently a new NFT site called Revelar, a game engine built on Cardano, was launched as the first NFT site on the Cardano platform, according to CryptoNinjas magazine. The site allows players to seamlessly transition earned value between their favorite games on Cardano, according to Cardanofeed.

This could become another catalyst as hedge funds continue to acquire Cardano for the long term.

On the date of publication, Mark Hake did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.