Popular cryptocurrency analyst James Mullarney, host of the popular YouTube channel InvestAnswers, has said that Cardano ($ADA) is decoupling from other cryptoasset as its price breaks out ahead of the Vasil hard fork.

In a video, Mullarney noted that the price of ADA “always rallies before hard forks” and as such it’s “pretty obvious that the spike right now is due to the Vasil hard fork, which has supposedly a lot of great stuff coming.”

The Vasil hard fork is a major upgrade that will involve four Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs). These include CIP-31, which introduces a “new kind of input, a reference input, which allows looking at an output without spending it,” as well as CIP-32, which allows for “simpler communication of datum values between users.”

Included in the hard fork is also CIP-33, which proposes reference scripts “be attached to outputs, and to allow reference scripts to be used to satisfy script requirements during validation, rather than requiring the spending transaction to do so.” CIP-33 will “allow transactions using common scripts to be much smaller.”

Finally, the hard fork includes CIP-40, which adds collateral outputs that remove the “need for wallets to explicitly set collateral.”

The hard fork is expected to be implemented on June 29 and according to Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson will deliver a “massive performance improvement,” and has seen the crypto community predict the price of ADA will hit $1 by the end of the month because of it.

Per Mullarney looking back at ADA’s price history, a series of pumps have been seen ahead of major network upgrades. Per his words, ahead of the Shelley hard fork, the cryptocurrency jumped 500%, while ahead of the Mary hard fork it jumped 1,100%.

Ahead of the Alonzo hard fork, he said, the cryptocurrency moved to a new high near the $3 mark. The Alonzo hard fork, it’s worth noting, brought in smart contract functionality to the network, allowing it to compete with Ethereum, BNB Chain, and others.

The analyst further suggested that while ADA may not be breaking its previous highs, it’s decoupling from other cryptoassets. Mullarney said:

We’re currently around $0.65, something like that, so it hasn’t been smashed down but it is deviating and becoming uncorrelated from the other assets. If you look at Cardano/Ethereum pair (ADA/ETH), Cardano/Bitcoin pair (ADA/BTC), etc., it is really breaking out, so we’ll watch this very carefully.

As CryptoGlobe reported, Cardano’s price performance has seen it become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after surpassing $XRP. The price of XRP has been negatively affected by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb, who has sold over 450 million tokens so far this year and still has over 220 million on his wallet, and by a lawsuit brought on by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Ripple.

A panel of cryptocurrency industry experts has predicted that the price of XRP will hit $2.55 by the end of the year, and sees it go as high as $3.61 by the end of 2025, and $4.98 by the end of 2030.

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The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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