Cardano Price Drops as Treasury Proposal Suggests Investing in Copper

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• ADA keeps printing lower highs inside a descending channel that began in early October.
• The 200 EMA and a broken Fibonacci level now cap every rebound attempt.
• Toto Finance wants Cardano’s treasury to fund a physical copper reserve tokenized on-chain.
• Early DRep voting leaves the proposal far short of the approval threshold.

Cardano price fell to $0.2039 on Sunday, leaving ADA roughly 28% below its October 6 peak of $0.2823 as a descending channel on the 4-hour chart kept pushing it toward the $0.20 mark. The decline is unfolding alongside a heated governance fight: Toto Finance has asked the Cardano treasury for 22 million ADA, about $5 million, to buy physical copper and tokenize it, under a plan that only breaks even if copper climbs roughly 49% from the proposal’s reference price.

Each Rebound Stops Lower

The pullback has wiped out about 85% of the rally that started at the September 17 low of $0.1903, leaving ADA with almost none of the gains it built in late September. Since October 7, the price has traded inside a descending channel, and every recovery attempt has peaked below the one before it. The October 11 bounce ran out near $0.260, while the October 22 rebound stalled around $0.231, exactly where the channel’s upper line met the 200-period EMA. Sellers defended both in a single move and drove ADA more than 10% lower over the next two days.

On this timeframe the 200 EMA tracks the average price of roughly the last 33 days, and it now sits at $0.2285 with a downward slope. ADA lost it on October 13 and has not closed a 4-hour candle above it since. The 0.618 Fibonacci retracement at $0.2254 sits just below, turning the $0.2254-$0.2285 area into a resistance band that buyers must clear before a trend change can even be argued.

$0.2100 Flips to Resistance

The 0.786 Fibonacci level at $0.2100 held as support for most of last week until sellers broke it on October 23. The following session dragged ADA close to $0.200, and the bounce from that low faded well short of $0.2100, which has become the first ceiling overhead. Buyers have not even tested it over the last two candles.

The RSI stands at 32 against a signal line at 36 and has stayed below the neutral 50 mark since the October 22 rejection, so sellers have controlled most sessions since then. A reading under 30 would put ADA in oversold territory, where selling usually starts to look stretched, yet the indicator has not reached it, and its latest dip formed no higher low against earlier October lows. Without that divergence the chart gives no reversal signal.

ADA/USDT 4-hour key levels, October 25.

A clean 4-hour close below $0.200 would open the way to $0.1903, and the channel’s lower boundary is set to cross that same price around October 27-28. On the upside, ADA first needs to win back $0.2100 and then break the channel’s upper line near $0.22, while only a close above the 200 EMA would bring $0.2363, the midpoint of the Fibonacci range, back into view.

Toto Wants 22M ADA for Copper

Toto Finance, a commodity tokenization platform led by founder and chairman Monty Metzger, filed a treasury withdrawal proposal on October 14 for what it calls the Cardano Strategic Copper Reserve. The plan would buy COMEX Grade 1 copper cathodes, store them in a COMEX-approved warehouse near New Orleans and issue CuTT tokens, each representing one verified pound of metal. The tokens would be minted on Ethereum and later bridged to Cardano. Toto intends to hold the copper for 18-24 months, sell it by month 36 at the latest and send net proceeds plus any unspent budget back to the treasury, which would gain exposure to the reserve without taking any equity in Toto. The company keeps the commercial rights to its separately funded tokenized-copper business.

Why Copper Needs a New Record

Only 14.72 million ADA, about 67% of the request, would actually buy metal. The rest covers operations, assurance, Toto’s technology work and oversight.

Because a third of the money never touches metal, the copper has to appreciate enough to cover that gap. At the proposal’s illustrative purchase price of $6.73 per pound, the treasury breaks even only if copper sells near $10.06, a gain of about 49.4% that would put the metal at a new all-time high. A 30% rise would return roughly 19.14 million ADA-equivalent and leave the treasury 2.86 million ADA short. ADA’s own price matters too, since a rally in the token against the dollar during the holding period raises the dollar profit needed to recover 22 million ADA.

Payments linked to Toto, including technology fees, a 441,732 ADA execution fee and a possible margin on third-party invoices, could reach about 3.36 million ADA, or 15.3% of the withdrawal. Metzger has said the company would not profit from the proposal and that much of the overhead stems from Cardano’s own audit and oversight requirements. He has also pointed to bullish scenarios of around 30% annual copper appreciation, which would clear the hurdle within two years if they materialized.

Treasury Cap Raises the Stakes

Cardano’s budget rules set a 500 million ADA withdrawal cap for the period running to about July 2027. By October 16, 457.4 million ADA of that allowance had been used, so the copper reserve would absorb about 51.6% of the remaining 42.6 million ADA. Returned proceeds would not restore the allowance under current rules, leaving every other proposal competing for funds before mid-2027 with a much smaller pool even if the copper trade ends in profit.

Custody remains unsettled. Toto would hold legal title to the copper, with an independent collateral agent and first-priority security arrangements meant to protect the treasury, yet the agent has not been named. The proposal lists a U.S. PwC member firm as its preferred oversight provider, though that firm has not been engaged, and the smart-contract and bridge security reviews are still ahead.

Delegated representatives, or DReps, who vote with ADA that holders assign to them, have shown little appetite so far. Governance tracker data this weekend showed about 0.2% of DRep voting power in favor against a 67% approval threshold, with two votes for, 57 against and two abstentions, and the Constitutional Committee had not reached the required support either. Voting is widely cited as closing around November 15, while the on-chain record lists the action’s expiry at the end of epoch 668.

Toto CEO Steven Gaertner is scheduled to defend the plan at a Cardano Governance Hour session on October 27 at 16:30 UTC, the same window in which ADA’s channel floor meets the $0.1903 September low. The company says it has issued more than 45,000 physically backed tokenized assets to over 5,000 holders, completed a Hacken token-contract audit in January 2025 and taken part in the Cardano Foundation Accelerator, although none of that experience involved a physical reserve of the size it is now asking the community to fund.