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Ahmed Barakat
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In the latest Cardano News, Cardano is trading at $0.158, down 1.39% on July 17, while derivatives traders push the long-to-short ratio to 0.58 and open interest climbs 4% to $421 million in the 48 hours before the Van Rossem hard fork activates.
The structural tension is sharp: the same wallets flooding short books are being offset by whale accumulation that has reached its highest level since 2023, creating a setup where the next directional move is likely to be violent in whichever direction it resolves.
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Cardano News: Van Rossem Governance Approval Sets July 18 Activation
The Van Rossem hard fork cleared governance on July 13, ratified by SPOs and DReps, with activation scheduled for July 18 at 21:44:51 UTC at Slot 192,844,800.
Intersect has urged all infrastructure providers to update their software before the network crosses the hard fork boundary, a standard precaution, but one that signals the upgrade is proceeding on schedule without last-minute complications.
According to some news, the upgrade is expected to lower execution costs on Cardano, making transactions and dApp operations materially cheaper to run.
More consequentially for medium-term traders, Van Rossem lays the technical groundwork for Leios, a later scaling upgrade targeting a dramatic increase in transaction throughput before the end of 2026.
That roadmap context matters: this fork is not a standalone event but a dependency in a longer delivery chain, which is part of why whale positioning ahead of it carries more weight than typical upgrade speculation.
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$0.160 and $0.170 Are the Levels That Decide the Next Move
The CoinGlass three-day liquidation heatmap places the nearest dense liquidity pool between $0.160 and $0.165, sitting directly above ADA’s current market price.
A larger concentration appears around $0.167, closely matching the Murrey Math resistance at $0.1709 visible on the daily TradingView chart.
These two clusters define the near-term binary: a drop through $0.160 triggers long liquidations and opens a path toward the $0.1465 Murrey Math support; a break above $0.170 forces short sellers to close positions and hands momentum to the recovery attempt as Van Rossem goes live.
The 4-hour chart shows ADA has crossed above a descending trendline drawn from its early-July peak near $0.195, but the move failed to produce a sustained rally.
The RSI on the 4-hour sits at 46.92, below its moving average of 50.95, bearish-neutral territory, not oversold. That reading matters because it means there is no technical floor from extreme pessimism; price is simply drifting, waiting for a catalyst to define direction.
The predecessor to Van Rossem, the Vasil hard fork in September 2022, improved Cardano’s smart-contract efficiency and block utilization.
Van Rossem’s mandate is different, cost reduction and Leios preparation, but the governance process that delivered it, now running through Intersect with formal DRep and SPO ratification, represents a more mature and transparent upgrade mechanism than Cardano operated in 2022.
Whether that institutional credibility translates into sustained buying pressure post-fork, or whether short sellers use any pop to add to positions, is the question traders need an answer to before the July 18 activation window closes.
The liquidation heatmap at $0.167 is the cleanest signal: a daily close above that level removes the ambiguity. For context on how derivatives positioning and institutional vs. retail behavior interact during catalyst events, the pattern is consistent across major crypto assets; the side that controls spot supply usually wins the futures battle by attrition.
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